A few weeks later Eisenhower approved a new National Security Council (NSC) paper that, in effect, assumed nuclear weapons would be used in limited-war situations—as they had not been used in Korea. Humphrey seemed to speak for Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism at an October 30, 1953, NSC meeting: “There would be no defense,” he said, but only “disaster in a military program that scorned the resources and the problems of our economy—erecting majestic defenses and battlements for the protection of a country that was bankrupt.”
