Project Solarium

Project Solarium was an American national-level exercise in strategy and foreign policy design convened by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the summer of 1953. It was intended to produce consensus among senior officials in the national security community on the most effective strategy for responding to Soviet expansionism in the wake of World War II. The exercise was the product of a series of conversations between President Eisenhower and senior cabinet-level officials, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and George F. Kennan among them, in the Solarium room on the top floor of the White House. Through these conversations, Eisenhower not only realized that strategic guidance set forth in NSC 68 under the Truman administration was not sufficient to address the breadth of issues with which his administration was presented, but also that his own cabinet was divided enough on the correct course of action vis-a-vis the Soviet Union that United States' policy on dealing with the Soviet Union was at risk of becoming subject to internal political posturing to the detriment of US national security.

Project Solarium is significant in that its findings produced NSC 162/2, a national strategy directive commonly assessed to have guided US strategy from its publication to the end of the Cold War.

On the heels of his 'Cross of Iron' speech in April 1953, President Eisenhower was increasingly concerned about the trajectory of US foreign policy, in as much as it leaned heavily toward militancy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. One component of Eisenhower's campaign platform was harsh criticism of unsustainable military expenditures, given the risk such expenditures posed to the stability and long term growth potential of the US economy. Senior figures in his administration were at odds over the nature of the United States' policy of engagement towards the Soviet Union, with much of the disagreement drawn between two camps in his administration: a group of senior officials who asserted that the only viable means of defending the United States against Soviet expansionism was to actively combat and 'roll back' the sphere of Soviet influence lest it be allowed to threaten United States' sovereignty, and those who supported the 'strategy of containment' as espoused by George F. Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram and director of the Policy Planning staff at the US Department of State.

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