dissertation
Planning for Victory: The Committee on the Present Danger and Mobilising America for the ‘Second’ Cold War, 1976-1980.
Formed in 1976, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) was a group consisting of ‘prominent private citizens’ that argued the Soviet Union was gaining a decisive strategic lead over the United States.
Its members – intellectuals, businessmen, ex-servicemen – maintained that higher defence spending and a return to a more rigorous application of ‘containment policy’ was urgently required in order to prevent defeat in the Cold War.
Members of the Carter Administration have since described the CPD as the ‘most influential’ group that argued against ratification of the SALT II arms control treaty over 1978-9. Ronald Reagan was an early CPD member and after his election victory in 1980, a significant number of CPD executive board members would serve in his administration.
Current studies have generally characterized the CPD as a group of Cold War ‘hawks’. However, this is not particularly useful in understanding how the CPD created an image of expertise and impartiality, which was crucial in gaining widespread acceptance of its arguments of military build up and increased confrontation.
This project seeks to better understand not simply what the CPD argued, but how the group was able to gain respectability for itself and its message in post-Vietnam America. Such an examination will add to our understanding of a number of issues in late-1970s America: how was a small, non-governmental group able to exert such influence? Why did support for detente diminish? What were the domestic pressures behind the emergence of the ‘Second Cold War’?
