Today, concerns about direct conflict between the two nuclear superpowers go almost entirely unmentioned, or are even explicitly waved away. In 1956, worries about military, and potentially nuclear, escalation were central.
By 1956, the Cold War was in full swing, and Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain. NATO and its allies stood ready in the West to defend against any future Soviet incursion into their sphere, while the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact did the same in the east. Under Eisenhower, a former general who had led the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, U.S. policy aimed at “keeping the pot boiling” in Eastern Europe—by covertly encouraging unrest and even underground resistance—but not to let it “boil over” into outright war.
But the temperature was raised when two of the Soviet Union’s satellites rebelled. First, Poland saw a mass worker uprising from June onward that year over political and economic conditions, which, after a standoff that nearly resulted in Soviet military intervention, ultimately ended in compromise and concessions.
Come October 23, thousands of protesters poured into the streets of Hungary, demanding democratic freedoms and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from their country. Days of fierce fighting brought reformist communist Imre Nagy to power. He secured the removal of Soviet forces, freed political prisoners, and pledged the establishment of free elections and political freedoms. When Nagy acceded to popular sentiment and announced Hungary’s exit from the Warsaw Pact as well, Soviet leadership, after days of dithering, this time redeployed its military on November 4 and crushed the revolution.
We now know, thanks to a 2012 draft study prepared for the historical office of the secretary of defense, that the decision-making of U.S. and other Western officials throughout these crises was driven by the desire to avoid another world war. Eisenhower, thinking of Adolf Hitler’s actions in the face of defeat in an earlier era, feared that Soviet leadership, “in view of the serious deterioration of their position in the satellites, might … resort to very serious measures and even to precipitate global war.”
Other officials were similarly cautious. The Joint Chiefs discussed the risk that “serious defeat by the Soviets could conceivably result in precipitous action on their part.” Defense Secretary Charles Wilson similarly ruled out military intervention to the press, expressing the hope that things would be solved, as “many times they are, by men of good will … work[ing] something out that is just and fair.”
It’s a far cry from the rhetoric of today’s political columnists, who call for the total defeat of and “humiliation” of Russia in Ukraine, while warning that “a face-saving compromise will only enable future aggression.”