THE SOVIET CHALLENGE BY ALLEN W. DULLES DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70-00058R000100110018-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 16, 1998
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: February 3, 1958
• Content Type: SPEECH

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Conference on
"America's Human Resources to Meet the World Scientific Challenge"
Yale University
February 3, 1958
THE SOVIET CHALLENGE
By Allen W. Dulles
Director of Central Intelligence
It is certainly timely that a group of experts such as is
gathered here should consider America's human resources to meet
the scientific challenge. My share of the task is to discuss the
challenge presented by Soviet scientific and technological advances.
It is not easy to divide this problem into tidy compartments.
Science pervades the Soviet military threat, its industrial and economic
progress. Much of the aid proffered to the newly developing countries
in the free world includes technological assistance. Even on the sub-
versive side of their operations they have shown great sophistication
in the technical and scientific training of their agent personnel.
It is a challenge which calls for united and coordinated action.
Hence right at the outset I wish to emphasize the value of measures
to help pool the scientific assets of the United States with those of
the free world wherever it will advance the common good and mutual
defense. Steps in this direction have already been taken. More can
and should be done.
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I appreciate the security reasons often advanced for moving
slowly and here is a field in which I can speak with some authority.
The security factor deserves consideration but when properly
balanced against the gain from freer scientific exchange, there
will be plenty of leeway to go further than we have.
If legislative bars against certain phases of our cooperation
with other countries in the nuclear field are removed, it will be a
major step forward. Exchanging ideas on weapons development
will certainly be of value in the field of intelligence since it wottid
improve our ability to analyze and understand the nature of the
Soviet nuclear threat.
Other informational exchanges between countries where each
has the capacity to help the other will advance the common cause,
For us and our allies to keep scores of top scientists working
separately and mutually uninformed on the same problems may be
a waste of scarce resources that we can ill afford.
In your earlier meetings today I understand you have been
considering the building up and marshaling of America's human
assets, particularly in the scientific field, to meet the Soviet threat.
In the somewhat circumscribed area of my own work, much of my
time during the last seven years has been directed to a somewhat
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similar end, namely how scientific assets and techniques can be most
effectively used to increase our overall ability to interpret develop-
ments in the Soviet Union.
One result of this study has been to emphasize the need for
current appraisals of our relative position to the Soviet in technical
fields of critical importance to national security. The missile field
is a good example.
Relative positions of course change from time to time as one
side or the other places greater emphasis in a particular field of
endeavor. This calls for constant study and re-study, but with a
proper perspective of where we stand relative to the Soviet Union we
can develop our foreign and defense policies with a better basis
for sound decision.
During the past few months the world has had a spectacular
demonstration of the great technical competence of the Soviet,
notably in the field of earth satellites and ballistic missiles.
To those who have been closely following developments in the
Soviet Union these came as no great surprise.
Contrary to what may be the generally accepted view, these
happenings have not caused us to make any basic changes in our
earlier estimates of the Soviet challenge. It was serious before.
It appears to be slightly more so today.
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Here and there time tables of when various Soviet new weapons
might come into use have been moderately advanced, particularly in the
ballistic missile field. Soviet Sputniks and recent ballistic missile tests
have not altered the overall appraisals of Soviet capabilities and intentions
reached a year or more ago.
We must really thank the Soviet for having dramatized their com-
petence and mightily reduced, in this country at least, the ranks of those
who could not bring themselves to believe in the high technological ca-
pability of the Russians.
Long complacently accustomed to being first, it has been a shock
to the American public to find that that is not the case ina particular
field and an important one. We were first in the development of long
range aviation, inthe dramatic break-through in the atomic field and in
thermonuclear fusion, and then, as evidenced by the atomic submarine,
in the application of atomic power in an important military area. On
analysis one would find that the margin of our lead, here and there, had
been tending to narrow.
Then in a dramatic way the Soviets had their "first" and there
is a tendency to feel that there was some failure to keep. the American
people advised as to Soviet scientific progress which led to this result.
Also, many have instinctively assumed that in the fields of
scientific achievement a free enterprise system would inevitably lead a
state like the Soviet whose economy was controlled by a communist-type
state dictatorship.
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Achievements do not depend so much on the type of government,
so long as the latter is technically competent and has a willing or
subservient people at its beck and call. It depends on the goals and
priorities set, the promptness and the correctness of the decisions
reached, and the energy applied in terms of man hours with the
proper tools and equipment.
Under normal conditions a liberal free enterprise society
concentrates on the development of what the people want to improve
their living standards. In a society controlled by dictatorial leaders,
with the centralization and socialization of production, the leaders
are able, for a time at least, to fix the goals and priorities. What
the mass of the people want comes second. I have said "for a time.
It may be difficult to carry on such a policy indefinitely. Some day
the people may rebel against such programming.
The USSR has a national product of some 40% of our own.
If one includes on our side the segment of the free world allied with
us and adds to the Soviet the questionable assets of the unhappy
European satellites, the margin in favor of the West is much greater.
Yet the Soviet today are producing in the military field,
hardware and assets very nearly equivalent to our own. The fact
that they are able to do this with less than half of our industrial
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potential is due largely to three factors: (1) the different cost basis
for military manpower as contrasted with that for us; (2) the larger
percentage of gross national product devoted to military ends; (3~ the
concentration of scientific competence in military fields.
Under these circumstances is it surprising that from time
to time we will have the shock of finding that the Soviet have
outstripped us in some particular military field where for longer
periods of time they have put in more concentrated effort than we,
as for example, in the missile field.
Granting something like equality of brain power applied on
each side, the answer comes close to being a mathematical one and
there is no reason to seek any mysterious or sinister cause.
The fact is that since shortly after the close of the war in 1945,
when they took over the German missile hardware and a large group
of German scientists with their blueprints and plans in Peenemunde
and elsewhere, they have spent in this field more man hours than we.
They have done it under highly competent Soviet scientific and
technological leadership with the necessary tools, equipment and
priorities. While they profited greatly by German technological
achievement up to 1948, during the last decade it has been largely a
native Soviet achievement.
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History is full of examples where the high standard of living
countries -- placing emphasis upon those things which make the rounded,
developed and cultured human being with leisure for a broadened life --
have failed to comprehend the extent and nature of external threats
from the Spartas which have concentrated on military might. All
you need do is read your history from the Greek and Roman days
right down to England and France before World War II, or even
our own history.
A free people such as ours seem to require at periodic intervals
dramatic developments to alert us to our perils.
Some people seem to think that this shock treatment should be
replaced by a continuous process of indoctrination which could and
should be furnished by government officials. I am somewhat doubtful
as to the efficacy of this.
Most Americans seem to be from Missouri. Seeing is believing.
By and large, the press does a good job in this field. Its sources of
information are wide and varied. Jeremiads from government leaders
are generally regarded as tinged with political or budgetary motives.
It was only by orbiting our own Explorer that an effective answer was
made to the American people as to our own technical competence in
the missile field. No amount of speech making would have done it.
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Recently it has been hinted that if only the Central Intelligence
Agency had been believed, everything would have been well. This
is flattering but a great over-simplification. There never has been
a time in history to my knowledge when intelligence has had as clear
an opportunity to get its views over as it has had in this country in
recent years. The National Security Act of 1947, creating the
Central Intelligence Agency, has given Intelligence a more influential
position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other
government of the world. If in our government, intelligence estimates
have not always had the impact that in the light of hindsight they may
have deserved, responsibility must be shared by the intelligence
producer. We have the chance to sell our wares.
No intelligence appraisal could have had the impact of a Sputnik.
Maybe it was necessary that over the last decade in our
relations with the USSR, we had to have a series of political,
economic and military Sputniks -- costly as some have been -- to
keep us periodically alerted to our dangers, though once a particular
crisis is over, we quickly forget the past.
First came the Soviet threat against Western Europe, Greece
and Turkey after World War II. This led to the Marshall Plan and
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the Truman Doctrine. Then there was the Berlin Blockade in 1948
and the Korean War in 1950. Each of these, plus the tragic loss of
China and Czechoslovakia, has helped to alert us to the elements of
political subversion and war by proxy in the communist menace.
Hungary should have convinced us that the Soviet will not hesitate
to use brute force in what they choose to call their area of influence.
Now with the Sputnik and ballistic missiles, the free world knows
better the nature of the competition we face in the field of science
and military technology.
Knowledge of the nature of this particular Soviet scientific
challenge has been brought home to the American people through
the length and breadth of the land. It is the greatest advertising
job ever done. The Soviet really wrote it in the sky.
For a time at least, it will not be hard to convince anyb ody
that we really are up against a competitor with a highly developed
scientific and technical competence. We can thank the Soviet that
this particular selling job was done effectively in 1957 and not
delayed until 1958 or later.
Under these circumstances we shall be better able than before
to mobilize our assets, human and material.
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What are the immediate issues, the challenges we face?
There is no evidence, as I see it, that the Soviet Union
presently intends to follow a policy which in their view would involve
the serious risk of nuclear war with the United States. They most
certainly have a healthy respect for our present military capabilities
and our great industrial potential. They recognize .the present
limitation on their own. They recognize that nuclear war at this
time would result in devastating damage to them. They probably
question their present capability to deal a knockout blow and
consequently would expect that their own devastation under
retaliatory attack would be very great.
Comparative estimates of military strengths do not lie in my
field of particular competence. This much I can say. I do not know,
of any American experts in the field whose views I respect, who
take the position that today the Soviet Union has an overall military
capability superior to our own.
What rightfully concerns us, however, is the dynamic growth
in Soviet military and industrial power. Their further successes in
the ballistic missile field and in the development of an arsenal of
weapons with nuclear warheads would tend to change the nature of the
threat to our security.
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I am by no means suggesting that our concern is solely in the
missile field or that we take seriously Khrushchev's remark about
treating aircraft as museum pieces. This quip was probably
motivated, in part, by the desire to downgrade our own Strategic
Air Command during a period when the Soviet were in a position to
flaunt their success with the guided missile. After all, we do not
credit the Soviet with the industrial potential of developing and
producing at the same time and with equal priority and on a massive
scale all possible weapons in the modern military armory. They
must make choices just as we.
We do have some evidence, however, that as much as a
decade ago the Soviet turned to the guided missile as a challenging
competitor to the bomber. What we badly needed back in 1945 was
a Billy Mitchell for ballistic missiles.
Today we need wisely to use the time, which intelligence
appraisals indicate we have, to build up our own capabilities and to
see to it that any gap in time, during which they may have any
superiority in the missile field, is reduced to negligible proportions
and counter-balanced by the use of our substantial geographic advantages
and general retaliatory power.
In most of our scientific breakthroughs we have had the
disadvantage of being the front runner; the pioneer. In guided missiles
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we can profit by the experience of others and we have just received a
fine dividend of confidence in our own achievements.
We are alerted to the problem, to the technical competence of
the opposition. We are still moving from a position of strength and
forewarned should be forearmed.
The mobilization of human and other resources to meet the
Soviet challenge in the military field will be an easier task than to
mobilize to meet international communism's programs of subversion
and economic penetration. Yet the latter today are their first lines
of attack, with the military buildup remaining in reserve.
They have given us nothing quite as dramatic as the Sputnik to
advertise what they are doing in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Possibly they learned a lesson from the Marshall Plan and have no
stomach for inciting us into a new competition on any grand scale in
the uncommitted areas of the world.
But if we should ignore these warning signs and go missile-
minded to the exclusion of adequate defense against other dangers,
the Sputnik can become a kind of Trojan horse. We might win the
military race and yet lose great areas of the world that are vital
to our own national security.
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The international communist apparatus with its communist
parties and cells, its economic, technical, and military aid programs
based on Moscow, Prague and Peiping, has a closely orchestrated,
well disguised mechanism for the advancement of its cause. The
economic side of it outwardly looks somewhat like our own -- until
the objective is uncovered.
Communists work in and through the parliaments of many
countries of the world. They try to use the democratic processes
in order to defeat the basic aims of a free form of government. They
had a part in writing many of the constitutions in the free world in the
early post-war days and did so with the very objective of putting strong
authority nowhere and helping to produce chaos everywhere.
The policy of keeping countries divided -- Germany, Korea,
Viet Nam and until recently Austria and Laos -- was an example of
their techniques. This development is beginning to boomerang as the
free peoples in the divided areas are furnishing studies in contrast
between what a people working in freedom can do as contrasted with
people under the domination of Moscow or Peiping.
Soviet progress in the scientific and technological field is used
as a powerful argument in their appeal to the uncommitted areas.
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Well before Sputnik the peoples in these areas were deeply impressed
by the fact that the USSR in less than four decades had come from
being a backward country into the position of the second greatest
power in the world and a leader in the scientific field.
Certainly we should be more effective in bringing home to
these people what has actually transpired in the areas that have been
subject to Soviet colonialism or have been the unwilling objects of
Soviet exploitation and domination.
Unfortunately, distance seems to lend enchantment and we can
hardly expect the people of Java, to take only one instance, to understand
fully the dangers which Soviet communism means for them.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, Africa and in South and Southeast
Asia, the Soviet programs of arms and economic and scientific aid have
helped to fan the flames of nationalism and anti-colonialism. The total
of communist aid, economic, scientific and military, does not approach
ours but they have cleverly concentrated on certain particular countries
where they feel they can make the most impact.
Soviet educational programs are helping to build up a reservoir
of technicians equipped in the lore of foreign- countries. They also
bring to Moscow University and other Soviet and satellite institutions large
numbers of native students for training, particularly in the scientific
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fields. If the Soviet scientific educational program continues at its
present pace, they will have a growing reserve of trained scientists
for export.
t pI trust that one of the results of this, meeting may be to help
us to find in the free world competent technicians willing to journey
to the four corners of the earth to help build up the indigenous
capabilities of the new countries. In any study of our own humart
resources to meet the scientific challenge it is well to remember
that this cannot be done solely on the drawing boards of our own
scientific institutions. It will also have to be done in the steel mills
of India, on the dams of the great rivers of Asia and Africa, and in
the industrial plants of the newly freed countries.
The- contest for the minds and allegiance of millions of people
is just beginning to be engaged. We cannot afford to neglect it.
I have tried to sketch the nature of the military, subversive
and economic challenges of the USSR as we face them today. As one
looks at the longer perspective, it is necessary to take into account
the plans of Communist China to press forward on its own program of
industrialization and militarization.
We have the capacity to meet these present challenges. They
are definite in nature, measurable in amount and have back of them
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far less in the way of assets, human and material, than we and our
allies can muster if we will. But this is not just one confrontation.
The challenge may be one of considerable duration.
The Soviet Union is still programming a rapid increase in
its industrial production. It boasts that it will eventually close the
gap between its own production and ours. If this program is even
partially realized and also assuming some increase in the consumer's
share of the total national production, the Soviet, if they are so minded,
can year after year put ever increasing amounts into their military
establishment and foreign economic programs.
To the extent that the Sino-Soviet peoples are willing, with
Spartan determination, or with unquestioning obedience to arbitrary
authority,to follow such a policy, they can make the going harder and
harder for us. Undoubtedly, no small segment of their future effort,
as in their past, will go into science.
A distinguished Indian editor who visited successively the
USSR and the United States, put this question repeatedly to the
people with whom he talked, "What is the purpose of your system,
of your society?" As well can be imagined, he received a multiplicity
of answers from Americans, but in one form or another, they had
to do with the improvement of the lot of the individual, man and
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woman. In the Soviet Union, he reports, he received one universal
response from people of low and high degree, "The purpose of our
system is the advancement of science . "
For many years I have felt that the greatest hope for the
future in our relations with the Soviet Union lay in their advancement
in education even though in the short run this has been largely harnessed
to their military machine.
Education, particularly in science, was essential to permit
the Soviet effectively to compete in the power struggle in which it
had engaged itself. It has accomplished this initial purpose.
Great scientists are great thinkers and thought has no narrow
military limitations. It would seem incredible if the horizons of
Soviet scientists and educators do not become greatly widened over
the years and their talents devoted more directly to meeting the needs
of the Soviet people for a more satisfying form of life.
It would be pleasant indeed if an enforceable international
agreement could be reached that no more than say 5 or 10 per cent
of the gross national product of a country could be diverted from
the needs of the people to the production of armaments. As this is
hardly practicable we must place our hopes that the future education
in the Soviet Union will produce so many people who will demand this
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result that no government could act otherwise.
While we must be ready for those forms of sacrifice which
are necessary to meet the challenge of the Soviet Union, we must
also seize the opportunities offered to help their education build a
new life for the Soviet people.
Education may then be the key to the solution of problems
which otherwise would seem insoluble.
We have recently been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the
birth of General Robert E. Lee. It is interesting to note a passage
in the book by a German Major of the Royal Prussian Engineers who was in
the United States as a military observer in the Civil War. He was com-
menting on the fact that Lee's philosophy in his role as commander was
to get his forces to the right place at the right time, and then trust
his division and brigade commanders to do the rest. As an instance of
this he writes the following, "During the battle of Chancellorsville,
May 3, 1863, at the height of the combat, I stood beside the General
under pretty heavy fire and an interesting episode of the battle was
taking place before us. In spite of the great excitement in which the
progress of the battle kept the great leader, he spoke to me, to my
great astonishment, about the future education of the people."
Robert E. Lee had the genius for getting at the basic truths.
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