Germans still were slipping into West Berlin, and the Russians had had enough. On a summer night in 1961 they hastily built a barbed wire fence along West Berlin’s boundary. Later they replaced it with a closely guarded concrete barricade that few would ever flee across. This “Berlin Wall” became a symbol of the Cold War.
Underneath the East/West conflicts lay the nuclear or atom bomb. As we saw, during World War II America had made atomic bombs and then dropped two of them on cities in Japan. For several years the fact of being sole possessor of this weapon made the United States militarily supreme, though Russia’s giant armies made it too a superpower. With its wealth and weapons, the United States could influence events around the world.
The United States and the western powers were well aware that Russia too would one day have the bomb. But not, they hoped, too soon. Their advisers told them that the Russians would require from five to fifteen years to build atomic bombs. So imagine their surprise when Russia tested one in 1949. A mere four years had passed from when America had leveled Hiroshima. Battered, backward Russia (helped a little by its theft of British/U.S. weapon secrets) had worked an engineering wonder. No longer did the United States have the A-bomb to itself.
Three years later, though, the United States took the weapons lead again. On an atoll in the mid-Pacific it tried and proved a new, immensely potent “hydrogen bomb.” But the U.S. lead did not last long. Within a year the Russians too had made an “H-bomb.” (Great Britain, France, and China followed later.)
Hydrogen bombs explode when nuclei of atoms fuse, not when they split. The newer bombs were hundreds, even thousands of times as strong as the atom bomb that flattened Hiroshima. Their strength was measured not in thousands but in millions of tons of TNT. (In weapon-speak each of these was a “megaton.”) Albert Einstein glumly told the world, “Annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.”
To make a superbomb was one thing; to “deliver” it to a target far away at several times the speed of sound was quite another. What the superpowers needed now were intercontinental missiles. By 1958, the Russians had the lead in making them, but the United States followed soon. If it chose to, either superpower could launch its warheads from its homeland, or from planes or submarines, and slaughter far-off victims by the millions. (In weapon-speak a million deaths were a “megadeath.”) Any humans whom a blast might spare would later die from radiation. As time went on, each side made bombs enough to eradicate the other several times over.
By now the statesmen of the superpowers knew better than to threaten, as they had before, “massive retaliation.” They knew that if one side launched its missiles, the other side would promptly do the same. The consequence could be the end of human life on earth. In weapon-speak one called this “Mutually Assured Destruction” — for which the acronym was MAD. One could only hope the possibility of MAD would cause what military theorists called a “balance of terror” in which both sides were too scared to push their BOMB NOW! buttons.
In 1962, however, the world again came near the brink of the abyss. This time the crisis happened not in Europe but on little Cuba, an island only ninety miles from U.S. soil. In 1958 Fidel Castro won a revolution, driving out a brutal despot, a friend of the United States. Many Cubans fled to America. When Castro seized the properties of U.S. firms, the United States outlawed imports (chiefly sugar) from the island. Castro then moved closer to the Russians, now declaring that he was a communist. In April 1961, 1,500 Cuban exiles, whom Americans had equipped and poorly trained, invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. They wanted to inspire their fellow Cubans to throw out Castro, but the raid was ill prepared and badly carried out. (Some of the invaders couldn’t fire a rifle.) As the rebels landed they stumbled into Castro’s hands.
It was those events that nearly led the world to Mutual Assured Destruction. Khrushchev recklessly declared that he would save the Cubans from a second U.S. invasion (plans for which existed), and in 1961 he secretly sent missiles to the island. As U.S. airplanes filmed them, Russians in Cuba built the sites from which to launch offensive nuclear weapons.
Since Cuba lay in what they saw as their front yard, Americans were shocked. At the least, if Russia put its missiles there, this alone would be a grave humiliation to a superpower. Much worse than that, most of the United States would be in easy range of megadeath-dealing missiles. And looking at the matter from a global point of view, if America merely became exposed to nuclear threats, its vulnerability might change the terror balance that had so far saved the world.
Since Kennedy had authorized the Cuban invasion fiasco, he faced a danger that was partly of his own making.
This was Kennedy’s dilemma during thirteen scary days in October 1962. He had to keep the missiles out of Cuba, but if he acted rashly he could bring about an all-out nuclear war. He considered bombing the Cuban missile sites, but then he chose a safer course. To prevent more Russian arms deliveries he ordered a blockade of Cuba, and he kept his well-armed airplanes flying. Khrushchev protested the American blockade, calling it illegal. But then he ordered Russian ships that were bringing yet more missiles to turn around.
After thirteen days of confrontation, Khrushchev wavered. He wrote a note to Kennedy agreeing to take out his missiles if America would promise not to invade Cuba again. A day later Khrushchev wrote a second note, this one more demanding. He now insisted, tit for tat, that the United States also pull its short-range missiles out of Turkey. (Since the Turkish sites were as close to Russia as the Cuban ones were to America, one can see his point of view.) Cannily, theU.S. leader answered Khrushchev’s first message, agreeing to it, but ignored the second. Privately, however, he let the premier know that the United States eventually would take its missiles out of Turkey.
Terror — fear of MAD — had saved the world. Never again would the superpowers come so close to all-out war. They learned instead to walk around each other on their toes, stiff-legged, sometimes snarling, never biting. They strung a “hot line” from the Kremlin to the White House to prevent a war from breaking out if some event were misconstrued and guided missiles were launched. (The leaders would have twenty minutes for discussion while the missiles flew; after that, discussion wouldn’t help.) Despite such hopeful signs, both sides made more nuclear weapons, and Israel, India, and Pakistan later joined the ranks of those who had the bomb.
While the superpowers did not attack each other, they might make war on one another’s friends. Such a war had happened in Korea, and another now broke out in Vietnam. This slender land of rice farms, hills, and jungles curves along the southeast coast of Asia. France had ruled it for a century, but after World War II the Vietnamese had fought the French for seven years and won their independence. Vietnam was then divided (“temporarily,” like Korea) at its slender waist.
The “nationalists” who governed “South Vietnam” were people of the towns and cities and defenders of the rich. With the backing of America they declared the south an independent nation. The communists, whose longtime leader was the dogged Ho Chi Minh, took power in the north. They were nationalists as well as communists, and wanted one united nation.
The “Vietnam War” (as Americans would call it) started when communist guerrillas attacked the government of South Vietnam. The war soon widened as North Vietnam sent armies south to fight beside the partisans. Russia gave its fellow communists in North Vietnam ample aid. China also helped the North but less, being pleased to have Vietnam, a trying neighbor, stay divided.
Americans had never heard of far-off Vietnam. (Several years later, just before he died of wounds in Vietnam, a U.S. “grunt” would say, “My mother thinks [it’s] somewhere near Panama.”) But the United States, under Kennedy, helped the South, convinced that this was not a little country’s civil war but a major battle in the global war for freedom. If South Vietnam should fall to communism, politicians warned, other nations too would fall like rows of dominoes, each one knocking down the next. At
first the United States sent military “advisers” to help the South, but these were not enough. The rulers of the South soon proved incompetent to fight a war and they were unpopular among their own people. America began to send in ground troops, joined by token forces from the Philippines, New Zealand, Thailand, and Australia.
The United States found itself in jungle muck that reached its ankles, then its waist, then its neck. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, called the North a “little fourth-rate country,” but by 1965 he knew he couldn’t beat it if he didn’t make a bigger effort. He told his wife, “Vietnam is getting worse every day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace.” In he went. He sharply raised the U.S. forces till by 1968 they totaled over half a million. Just as he had feared, many Americans (and many times as many Vietnamese) lost their lives. Americans bombed the North repeatedly in “Operation Rolling Thunder,” burned villages (turning farmers into refugees), and defoliated hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Although Johnson couldn’t win the war, he promised U.S. Army cadets at West Point, “Whatever happens in Vietnam, I can conceive of nothing except military victory.”
Opposition to the war arose in other democratic countries, then America. Protest marchers shouted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Even several politicians dared to voice their doubts. People asked, Can we win? Can America police the world? Is the South Vietnam regime worth saving? Is there any reason for the war that justifies the loss of life? Is it true (as Johnson said) that if we lose this war the enemy will be “in Hawaii and next they will be in San Francisco”?
By 1968 Johnson had had enough. He halted bombing in the North so that peace talks could begin. And so they did, but the fighting didn’t stop. Only after five more years had passed, in 1973, did the last American leave South Vietnam. And even that was not the end, since North and South Vietnam kept on fighting until 1975. Finally the war ended in a total victory for the North.
Like every other war, this one had an awful cost. At least a million, maybe three million Vietnamese — soldiers and civilians on both sides — had fallen in the war.
The richest country in the world had fought for about a decade to save the world (it thought) from communism. It had sacrificed the lives of 54,000 Americans. It used the newest weapons, and it dropped more tons of bombs, on both the North and South, than the winning side had used in World War II. But it lost the war to gritty men who lived in caves and fed on rancid rice.
IN THE 1970S Russia lost its way. Flaws in Russian socialism — perhaps in any socialism — began to hurt the country. One defect was the party’s autocratic way of choosing leaders. Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev, dealt with many problems by ignoring them and jailing dissidents in psychiatric hospitals. While the country slid, Brezhnev too declined in mind and body till he dribbled on himself while making speeches. To make things worse, both the men who followed him as general secretary were ill. Each tried to run the country from his sickbed and survived about a year.
Among the problems these men failed to solve, the chief one was the economy. The state-owned, state-run system simply didn’t work. Yes, it could produce technology the party bosses badly wanted: space machines and missiles. Apart from that, management from Moscow stifled everyone’s initiative and pride in work well done. Factories used the methods of the 1930s and were slow to automate and use computers. Steel mills built by Stalin breathed out poison smoke. Collective farms were ill equipped and badly run, so output dropped and Russia stopped releasing grain production figures. A country that had countless miles of fertile plains had to purchase grain from other countries, notably from capitalist America. Russia’s economic growth rate slowed, then dropped to zero.
A paradox: Russians now lived better than they ever had. But that’s not saying much. As Russia headed into bankruptcy, workers often went unpaid. Many dwelt in crowded, crumbling housing, and a Russian could purchase less than half the goods and services that an average American or European could afford. One in five lived below the poverty line, and life expectancy declined.
Russians knew their system wasn’t working, and they were losing faith. “What’s the difference between communism and capitalism?” went a Russian joke. “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the reverse.” Western TV programs gave them glimpses of prosperity in other countries, and they saw well-dressed foreign tourists on the Moscow streets. No one now believed a communist utopia was just beyond the horizon unless, another joke explained, “you understand that a horizon is an imaginary line that recedes as you approach it.”
Of all the things it didn’t need, Russia now began a war it couldn’t win. On what was then its southern edge was bleak Afghanistan, a land of poor and quarreling peoples. Afghanistan’s government was friendly to the Russians, but it faced a civil war. To support its comrades, Russia moved in troops in 1979 and began to fight the country’s Muslim “holy warriors.” America gave weapons to these rebels, and the Russians found they couldn’t drive them from their mountain strongholds. The war went on nine years, cost a lot, and took the lives of 14,000 Russians (as well as 1.3 million Afghans).
In the meantime, the United States worsened Russia’s problems when it set a challenge that the Russians couldn’t meet. In the 1980s the U.S. president was Ronald Reagan, a sunny former movie star and former governor of California. Russia, Reagan told the world, was an “evil empire” whose purposes were “dark.” He believed — despite the evidence — that the Russians had begun to win the arms race, but he assumed America could win a “protracted” nuclear war with Russia. (A high U.S. military official declared that Americans could survive in such a war if they would “dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw three feet of dirt on top.”) So Reagan doubled U.S. spending for defense, forcing Russia to use its all-but-vanished funds to try to match the U.S. buildup.
When things were at their worst, the Russians finally began to face their problems. Apparently the Politburo (the policy-making body) had decided that three decrepit leaders in a row had been enough. In 1985 they chose as general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who, at fifty-four, was their youngest member and the most dynamic. Did they know that Gorbachev was planning basic changes? This remains a mystery.
Under Gorbachev, from 1985 to 1991, Russians witnessed these astounding changes: The ending of the Party’s monopoly of power. Freedom of the press. A president and legislature. Elections with several candidates instead of one. Reduction of central planning and collective farms. Open discussion of poverty, and of air and water pollution. People starting businesses of their own. A declaration that the union of Russian republics was voluntary. And Russian soldiers leaving Afghanistan, which was Russia’s Vietnam.
Many of his friends and foes declared that Gorbachev was terminating communism, ending a vast experiment testing whether the abolition of private property would produce a better life. Gorbachev denied that he was doing this and claimed that he was saving communism by reforming it. In fact, however, he was bringing democracy and capitalism to a people who had never known them. They feared these innovations, and in the short term they were right. The first results of Gorbachev’s reforms were greater poverty and widespread crime.
In 1989 and ’90, as the world looked on amazed, all of Russia’s European satellites freed themselves from Russia’s rule. With tacit help from Gorbachev, who told his generals not to interfere, they drove their party bosses out and brought in democratic rule and open markets. In East Germany, for example, riots during 1989 forced the communists to fire their longtime leader. But merely driving out the despot didn’t satisfy the huge and angry crowds. Astoundingly they smashed a hole right through the Berlin Wall, whereupon the communist regime gave in and knocked it down. The communist regime collapsed as well, and East and West Germany joined to form a single democratic nation.
But what about the fifteen republics of Russia itself, that union that now was “voluntary
”? Would they want to leave it? Quite a number did. Several on both the European side, for example Ukraine, and on the Asian underside converted into independent nations. After they had left it, Russia still was huge, but much diminished, like a fat man who has dieted with some success.
In the meantime, both Gorbachev and Reagan reassessed the arms race. Both of them knew very well the most important point: their nations’ rivalry could bring about a nuclear disaster. Gorbachev also knew that Russia lacked the funds to make more arms. He therefore made it known that Russia planned to drop its forceful stance throughout the world. For his part, Reagan stopped attacking Russia as an “evil empire” and claiming that America could “prevail” in a “protracted” nuclear war. He said that America now had arms enough so that it could safely cut them back if Russia did the same.
The two men held discussions, and in 1987 they signed an astounding pact. They both agreed to destroy their intermediate-range nuclear missiles within three years. And that was just the start. Four years later, Russia and America agreed to further major weapons cuts. Apparently the world no longer faced the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, although the number of nations that had nuclear weapons was rising.
The weapons cuts were cheering news for all the world. They happened as the Wall came down, and tyrannies collapsed in many places. Readers will remember that at this time India and China, like Russia, were abandoning state socialism. That change might benefit at least a billion hungry people. China, to some degree, was moving toward democracy, and so was Latin America. Because of all these things, in 1989 and ’90 euphoria was everywhere. Surely peace, democracy, and jobs for all were on the way.
The Human Story Page 44
