Presidential Biographies | Eisenhower Administrations - Foreign Issues

Foreign Issues

Americans felt a strange mixture of confidence and fear in the Eisenhower years of the 1950s. Their war victories in World War II (1939–45) and the Korea War (1950–53), their ability to avoid a new Great Depression, and their sense of greater wealth and power than ever before made them proud and self-assured in their dealings with other countries. But the knowledge that the Soviet Union regarded them as destined for extinction, and had the nuclear weapons to back up its threats, created an undercurrent of alarm and dread. It seemed reasonable to U.S. civil authorities to hold regular air raid drills for schoolchildren, and even for entire cities. Concerned communities began building antinuclear air raid shelters and stocking them with food—even do-it-yourself shelters came on the market, and magazine articles discussed the grim necessity of shooting neighbors who had neglected to build their own shelters, rather...