New Look

The New Look was the Eisenhower administration’s national-security strategy, emphasizing nuclear deterrence and reduced conventional military costs through greater reliance on air power and the threat of massive retaliation.

Massive retaliation: A strategy of threatening overwhelming nuclear retaliation against aggression. It supplied the New Look’s central threat for deterring Soviet expansion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: The 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. As president, he directed the adoption of the New Look.
New Look (fashion): A postwar fashion style introduced by Christian Dior in 1947, marked by fitted waists and full skirts. The shared name can be mistaken for the Eisenhower-era defense strategy.
Eisenhower doctrine: A 1957 U.S. policy offering economic or military assistance to Middle Eastern countries resisting communist aggression. It applied the administration’s containment strategy to the Middle East.
Strategic Air Command: The U.S. Air Force command responsible for long-range strategic bombers and, later, land-based intercontinental missiles. It provided the forces needed to make nuclear retaliation credible.
John Foster Dulles: U.S. secretary of state from 1953 to 1959 and a leading architect of Eisenhower-era foreign policy. He publicly articulated the threat of massive retaliation in 1954.
Flexible response: A military strategy that maintains options to answer aggression with proportionate conventional or nuclear force. It replaced massive retaliation as the guiding U.S. strategy under John F. Kennedy.
Mutual Security Act of 1954: A U.S. law authorizing foreign assistance, including military aid, to strengthen allied security. The New Look paired reliance on nuclear forces with support for allied capabilities.
Nuclear deterrence: The prevention of attack through the threat of nuclear retaliation. The New Look was one national strategy built around this broader principle.
Charles Erwin Wilson: U.S. secretary of defense from 1953 to 1957 and former president of General Motors. His defense-cost concerns helped shape the administration’s force-planning choices.

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