Talk:Gaither Report

Relocating unreferenced material from article page - --Bob Burton 19:15, 2 Feb 2005 (EST)

- In the fall of 1957 a report called "Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age" landed on the desks of President Eisenhower and members of his National Security Council.

The report, commonly called "The Gaither Report" after Ford Foundation head H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., was produced by the Security Resources Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee, at the behest of the NSC.

The subject of the report was the USSR's unexpectedly rapid military and technological progress during the 1950s. It described the various ways in which Moscow was hoping to overtake the United States militarily as well as diplomatically. It was intended to inflame the capitalist sensibilities of its audience, and so it did; the report, along with NSC Memorandum 68, became a classic document of the Cold War, despite the fact that it relied for its thesis chiefly on the fantasy of a Soviet Union capable of indefinitely maintaining a 6% rise in GDP per annum.

The Gaither Report was stamped Top Secret until 1973, but by then it was very old news. Towards the end of 1957, The New York Times lent Eisenhower a helping hand by publishing an editorial summary of the now-familiar right-wing nightmare; among other things, it introduced several useful hypno-terms into the American lexicon, including "early-warning capabilities" and the ever-popular "missile gap".