Eisenhower and the Cold War Arms Race: “Open Skies” and the Military-Industrial Complex

Some people have all the luck. The late President Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of them. His running mate and vice president, Richard M. Nixon, ended up tarred with the Vietnam War and accused of suborning democracy with Watergate. Plenty of similar things happened on Eisenhower's watch. He almost got the country into the same Vietnam War at the time of Dien Bien Phu. He undertook to overthrow legitimate governments through covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across the globe. Eisenhower engaged in so many crises that his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, coined the term “brinkmanship” to denote the art of getting into a crisis but then out of it. Eisenhower pre-delegated authority to military commanders to use nuclear weapons. On his watch the United States innovated the thermonuclear bomb and began a nuclear buildup that ended with thousands of delivery vehicles and tens of thousands...