The arms race
Both the United States and the Soviet Union inaugurated major arms build-ups—conventional and nuclear—following the outbreak of the Korean War. Between 1950 and 1953, the United States increased its armed forces by over a million troops while also significantly expanding its production of aircraft, naval vessels, armoured vehicles, and other instruments of conventional warfare. Its nuclear build-up was even more impressive. In October 1952, the Americans successfully tested a thermonuclear device, or H-bomb, that was exponentially more powerful than those used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In October 1954, they successfully detonated an even more potent one. Delivery systems kept pace. Up to the end of the 1950s, the American nuclear deterrent depended upon medium-range bombers that could strike Soviet territory in two-way missions only from forward bases in Europe. But by the decade’s close, the United States had enhanced its nuclear striking power with the deployment of some 538 B-52 intercontinental bombers, each capable of striking Soviet targets from bases in the United States. In 1955, Eisenhower also ordered the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would permit nuclear warheads to be launched against the Soviet Union from American soil. By 1960, the United States began deploying its first generation of ICBMs, along with its first batch of submarine-based ballistic missiles.
Those deployments gave the United States the coveted ‘triad’ of bomber-, land-, and submarine-based nuclear weapons, each part of the triad capable of obliterating major Soviet targets. The total US nuclear arsenal had grown from approximately 1,000 warheads in 1953, Eisenhower’s first year in office, to 18,000 in 1960, his last. By then, the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) boasted a total of 1,735 strategic bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons on Soviet targets.
The Soviet Union laboured to keep pace. Between 1950 and 1955, the Red Army expanded by 3 million troops to create an armed force of nearly 5.8 million—before Khrushchev ordered force cuts in the mid-1950s to reduce Moscow’s exorbitant defence budget. But the Soviet Union’s marked edge over the United States and NATO in men under arms was paralleled, and vitiated, by a significant inferiority in virtually every other measure of military strength. That disparity was particularly glaring in the nuclear sphere. The Soviets successfully tested their first thermonuclear device in August 1953, and a more powerful one in November 1955. Their delivery capability remained severely limited, however. Before 1955, the Soviets remained incapable of carrying out a nuclear strike against the United States and, consequently, relied for deterrent purposes on the ability of their bombers to hit Western European targets. By the end of the decade, the Soviet strategic bomber fleet still could only reach the continental United States on one-way bombing missions from Arctic bases, missions that would have been highly vulnerable to US interceptors. Not until the early 1960s did the Soviet Union begin to produce and deploy ICBMs, and, despite the much-ballyhooed launch of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957, the Soviet Union lagged behind the United States in all significant measures of technological prowess as well. It is telling that Eisenhower, following an NSC discussion in 1953 of the comparative nuclear capabilities of the two superpowers, remarked about his Soviet counterparts: ‘They must be scared as hell.’
Yet, paradoxically, in the late 1950s certain quarters within the United States began criticizing Eisenhower for allowing a ‘missile gap’ to open between the Americans and the Soviets. The criticisms derived from the fear that Moscow’s first successful test of an ICBM in August 1957 and the launch of its Sputnik satellite two months later together signified a dramatic assault on America’s vaunted technological superiority. Not only had the Russians seemingly beaten the Americans into space, but Khrushchev’s penchant for boasting and blustering about the number of long-range missiles his nation was developing led even some sober-minded strategic analysts to worry about a Soviet military-technological surge. More than a few fretted that the balance of power might be shifting from West to East, a trend some suspected was abetted by the softness of American society and the declining aptitude for mathematics and science among US schoolchildren. Eisenhower remained unruffled. Aided by secret reconnaissance photographs produced by covert overflights of Soviet territory, he knew that such was not the case; that the United States maintained a formidable lead over its rival in deliverable nuclear weapons. Still, a political frenzy surrounded the supposed missile gap, and the non-existent gap actually emerged as a galvanizing issue in the 1960 presidential election.
Arms races have characterized international rivalries throughout recorded history. What makes that of the Cold War era unique is, of course, the nuclear dimension. Scholars, policy analysts, and governmental strategists have long ruminated about how the availability of weapons capable of wreaking unparalleled destruction shaped the contours and course of the Cold War. The question is as critically important as it is difficult to answer with any degree of precision. On the one hand, nuclear weapons probably lent a degree of stability to the superpower relationship, and almost certainly diminished the likelihood of open hostilities in Europe. NATO’s essential strategy for repelling a Soviet conventional invasion pivoted on the recognition that any European war would be a nuclear war; powerful incentives thus existed on both sides to avoid a conflict that would inevitably cause enormous losses of life for attackers and defenders alike. At an NSC meeting in January 1956, Eisenhower sagely emphasized what he called the ‘transcendent consideration’ in all debates over nuclear strategy—‘namely that nobody can win in a thermonuclear war’.
On the other hand, Eisenhower also accepted as official doctrine during his first year in the White House that ‘in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be as available for us as other munitions’. His administration sanctioned the introduction of the first battlefield nuclear weapons into Germany in November 1953, presided over the enormous nuclear weapons and delivery systems build-up detailed above, promoted ‘massive retaliation’ as a core principle of the US defence posture, and threatened the use of nuclear weapons during the final stage of the Korean War and in an effort to deter Beijing during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1954–5.
Americans exhibited, in short, a somewhat contradictory attitude towards nuclear weapons and their value in achieving national security ends during the first decade and a half of the atomic era. While privately and publicly decrying the folly of nuclear conflict that no side could win, they simultaneously strove mightily to achieve a clear superiority in nuclear arms. The fact of American nuclear superiority almost certainly encouraged US risk-taking in later crises over Taiwan, Berlin, and Cuba, as Chapter 5 will show, and thus helped to exacerbate an already perilous phase of the Cold War.
Chapter 5
From confrontation to détente, 1958–68
In the late 1950s, the Cold War entered perhaps its most dangerous phase, the time in which the danger of general nuclear war was highest. A succession of crises, culminating in 1962 with the epochal confrontation between Washington and Moscow over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, brought the world perilously close to a nuclear conflagration. On both sides of the superpower divide, risk-taking and shrill rhetoric reached levels not witnessed since the late 1940s.
Soviet Premier Khrushchev chilled American observers with his boasts about Soviet economic and technological prowess and his infamous remark that the Soviet Union would soon be turning out missiles like sausages. In January 1961, he vowed to lend Moscow’s active support to wars of national liberation—wars that he said ‘will continue as long as imperialism exists, as long as colonialism exists’. The communist world was destined to bury the West, the Russian ruler was fond of saying.
Not to be outdone, newly elected President John F. Kennedy implored Congress in his first state-of-the-union message that same month to provide sufficient funds for ‘a Free World force so powerful as to make any aggression clearly futile’. Neither the Soviet Union nor China, he said, ‘has yielded its ambit
ions for world domination’. The young chief executive offered a bleak vision of the global situation, noting that he spoke ‘in an hour of national peril’ and declaring it ‘by no means certain’ that the nation would endure. ‘Each day the crises multiply’, Kennedy stressed, ‘Each day their solution grows more difficult. Each day we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger, as weapons spread and hostile forces grow stronger.’
This chapter explores the events and forces that made the late 1950s and early 1960s a period of seemingly perpetual crisis. It also examines the partial rapprochement between Washington and Moscow that began in 1963 and the deepening US involvement in Vietnam which threatened to derail that rapprochement.
Years of ‘maximum danger’, 1958–62
The years from 1958 to 1962 brought an unprecedented string of East–West confrontations, several of which involved nuclear brinkmanship. In 1958 alone, there was covert US intervention in Indonesia, a bloody coup that toppled the pro-Western government of Iraq, the subsequent dispatch of US marines to Lebanon, and a series of high-stakes showdowns between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan and between Washington and Moscow over Berlin.
On 17 July 1958, just two days after US Marines landed in Lebanon, Mao Zedong authorized preparations for a confrontation with the United States in the Taiwan Strait. He aimed to ‘pin down the US imperialists [and] prove China supports the national liberation movements in the Middle East with not only words but also deeds’. Such boldness, the Chinese leader believed, would mock Khrushchev’s contemptible moderation and thus gain for Beijing a leadership role among Third World revolutionary forces, while also helping to mobilize the Chinese people behind his radical domestic policies. On 23 August, Mao’s forces began shelling the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, islands claimed and defended by Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist forces. Eisenhower and Dulles immediately suspected, as they had in the earlier 1954–5 crisis, that the artillery barrage might be a prelude to a full-scale invasion of Taiwan, which the United States was pledged by treaty to defend. In response, Eisenhower put the US military on full alert, rushed a formidable naval armada to the Taiwan Strait, and authorized the dispatch of additional nuclear-equipped forces to the region. He was striving, essentially, to deter Chinese aggression with a show of overwhelming force combined with unmistakable public declarations of resolve.
In early September, Khrushchev sent his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to Beijing in an effort to defuse the crisis. The Russian visitor was ‘flabbergasted’ to hear repeated expressions of Chinese bravado; his hosts informed him at one point that while they recognized their actions would most likely lead to a ‘local war’ with the United States, they were ‘ready to take all the hard blows, including atomic bombs and the destruction of [their] cities’. The United States was, in fact, readying a nuclear response. Eisenhower’s military advisers urged the use of low-yield nuclear bombs against Chinese military installations, action, they acknowledged, that would cause millions of civilian casualties. Khrushchev upped the ante with a menacing letter to the American president on 19 September, in which he emphasized that Moscow, too, ‘has atomic and hydrogen weapons’. Should the United States use such weapons against China, he warned, it ‘would spark off a conflagration of a world war’ and thus ‘doom to certain death sons of the American people’.
The crisis eased when, on 6 October, Mao unilaterally announced that he was ceasing the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu for one week, provided that the United States ended its convoys in the Taiwan Strait. Although it ended with a whimper rather than a big bang, the episode illuminates several important themes about this unusually tense juncture of the Cold War. First, Mao knowingly courted a military confrontation with the United States that could easily have triggered devastating nuclear strikes against the Chinese mainland. His rashness in so doing points to the dangerously unpredictable role of China in Cold War politics. Second, the Taiwan Strait standoff demonstrates the willingness of the United States to again cross the nuclear threshold—even over a decidedly non-vital piece of real estate. The Eisenhower administration saw Mao’s gamble as a serious test of US credibility, and hence one that demanded a firm response; since Taiwan could not be defended with conventional forces alone, nuclear weapons and the threat to use them served as the only means of deterrence. Had Mao not backed off—had he actually called the American bluff—there is no reason to believe that Eisenhower would not have authorized the use of nuclear weapons against China. Finally, the crisis underscores the significance of mounting Sino-Soviet tensions to the larger Cold War dynamic. Mistrust and competition between the two communist giants, each determined to prove its toughness and ideological purity in a bid for leadership of the communist world, formed an increasingly destabilizing factor in international affairs.
Khrushchev initiated the next major Cold War crisis, in part to counter charges that the Soviets had grown weak and vacillating vis-à-vis the West. The Soviet leader, in his own fashion as compulsive a risk-taker as Mao, chose Berlin to make his move. On 10 November 1958, he suddenly announced Moscow’s intention to sign a new treaty with East Germany that would supersede the Second World War agreements that had sanctioned the anomalous, joint occupation of the former German capital that still obtained. In a subsequent declaration, Khrushchev stated that Berlin must be transformed into a demilitarized ‘free city’, and he gave the Western powers just six months, until 27 May 1959, to negotiate directly with the German Democratic Republic if they wanted to maintain their presence within and transit rights to and from Berlin. The Soviet ruler, calculating that Washington would be strongly disinclined to risk war over a city more than a hundred miles from the West German border, believed that he could reassert the vigour and boldness of Soviet foreign policy. He aimed as well to shore up a troubled East German client state that was haemorrhaging population to West Germany via Berlin’s open borders. In characteristically blustering style, Khrushchev had Foreign Minister Gromyko deliver a note to the United States which taunted that only ‘madmen can go the length of unleashing another war over the preservation of privileges of occupiers in West Berlin’.
The Soviet challenge hit the West on its most exposed and vulnerable flank. The United States and its chief NATO partners were agreed that to relinquish their rights in Berlin, or to lend legitimacy to the East German regime by negotiating directly with it, would be to strike a dagger into Adenauer’s West Germany, which continued to exalt the goal of German unification. Yet, as the Soviets also doubtless appreciated, talk of war over an isolated, indefensible Western outpost smack in the middle of the Soviet sphere of influence would inevitably sow dissension within Western ranks. Indeed, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan candidly informed US officials that the British ‘were not prepared to face obliteration for the sake of two million Berlin Germans, their former enemies’. Believing its own credibility as well as the viability of the Western alliance to be on the line, the Eisenhower administration once again chose to hold firm—once again, at the risk of escalation all the way to nuclear war. Eisenhower, Dulles, and the joint chiefs of staff were well aware that West Berlin could not be defended by conventional military means; in view of the city’s weighty symbolic importance, they were prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend Western rights there.
Khrushchev allowed the 27 May deadline to lapse when he recognized America’s unyielding determination to maintain the status quo, even at the risk of hostilities. Shifting course, the Russian strongman proposed a four-power foreign ministers’ meeting to discuss Berlin and other matters separating East and West, with the prospect of a head-of-government summit meeting to follow. It bears emphasizing that the overwhelming superiority of the American nuclear arsenal seems to have emboldened the Americans in both the Berlin and Taiwan Strait crises of the late 1950s and, once push came to shove, compelled the Soviets to back down in the face of US nuclear brinkmanship.
At Eisenhower’s invitation, Khrushchev visited the United States in the autumn
of 1959, ushering in a temporary thaw in Soviet–American relations dubbed by journalists the ‘Spirit of Camp David’. The two leaders could not resolve the Berlin impasse, but they did agree to attend a summit meeting at Paris the following spring. Just prior to the opening of the Paris gathering, however, Soviet–American relations were dealt a severe blow when the Russians shot down a high-flying American U-2 spy plane over the Urals. The U-2 reconnaissance flights, which the United States had been conducting ever since 1956, gave Eisenhower crucial intelligence about the Soviet missile programme—and its limitations. Instead of downplaying the affair, Khrushchev chose to exploit it for maximum propaganda purposes, theatrically producing Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot, to embarrass Eisenhower after the latter had denied publicly that the flight took place. Khrushchev then walked out of the Paris summit before the formal sessions had even begun. As Eisenhower’s tenure in office came to a close, relations between Washington and Moscow were more frigid than they had been at his first inauguration eight years earlier. They would soon grow even worse.
In June 1961, Khrushchev rekindled the flames of the simmering Berlin crisis during a tense meeting with new president John F. Kennedy at Vienna (see Figure 5). The impetuous Soviet leader served notice on Kennedy that he intended to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany within six months if there was no change in Berlin’s status. He blustered that if the United States wanted to go to war over Berlin, ‘there was nothing the USSR could do about it. … History will be the judge of our actions.’ Rattled by Khrushchev’s threatening tone, the untested American leader believed his nation’s and his own personal credibility were under direct challenge. JFK reasoned that a display of toughness constituted the only practicable course of action; to back down would just be to invite aggression elsewhere. ‘We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin,’ he vowed in a 25 July speech, ‘either gradually or by force.’ To add muscle to his defiant public rhetoric, the president asked Congress for a $3.2 billion supplement to the defence budget, authority to call up military reservists, and an additional $207 million to initiate a fallout shelter programme to prepare the American people for a future nuclear attack.
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