William Smith Culbertson - Liberation, The Threat and The Challenge of Power, 1953

Liberation, The Threat and The Challenge of Power, 1953

Later in his life, Culbertson became a Colonel in the United States Army, with a role of influencing the Eisenhower Administration's global politics. In 1953, he published Liberation, The Threat and the Challenge of Power, in which he contrasts policies of liberation and containment of the Soviet Union. Culbertson supports liberation as a method of avoiding preemptive war and argues that containment would do nothing to stem Soviet development of "super-weapons," but that American policies have considerable bearing on the practicality of liberation. Stefan T. Possony in a review of this work writes:

"Colonel Culbertson views liberation as just such a practical though complex working philosophy -- the danger, as he sees it, is in failing to recognize that we no longer can espouse the moral foundations of our way of life without also embracing liberation. We cannot turn our backs on a world that is half slave and hope to retain our own freedom. Such an attitude does not necessarily entail global war. Colonel Culbertson would keep his powder dry first and foremost, but he also visualizes a step-by-step use of all our vast strengths -- moral, economic, political, spiritual and legal -- in a gradual and controlled manner. Nor is he wanting for means to employ these strengths: trade, dollar power, education, cultural intercourse, technology, nuclear energy -- all these and many more would be used to improve the lot of underdeveloped peoples, to promote industrial expansion and to counter the threat of communism at home and abroad. In this respect, Colonel Culbertson must qualify as one of that small but distinguished group who anticipated President Dwight D. Eisenhower's atomic peacefare program."