Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In the history of the period 1945-1963 there are six chief factors: (1) the Cold War and the nuclear balance; (2) demobilization and remobilization, with special emphasis on interservice rivalries and the pressures from industrial complexes; (3) partisan political struggles in the United States, centering on the rise and decline of unilateralism; (4) personal political struggles in the Soviet Union, centering on the succession to Stalin; (5) intrabloc discords, centering on the relations between the United States and its allies on one side and the relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites on the other side; and (6) the role of neutralism, revolving around backward nationalisms and anticolonialism. The history of the period can be understood only in terms of the interplay of these six factors, in all their complexities, treated simultaneously, but before we attempt to do this we must make a brief examination of each factor separately in order to define our terms and to establish secondary chronological sequences.

The Cold War, as we shall see in the next chapter, was an inevitable consequence of the defeats of Germany, Japan, France, and Italy, and the collapse of Nationalist China, but it was raised to an acute and sustained crisis by the existence of nuclear weapons and the development of rocket missiles. The combination threatened the survival of man as a civilized being, although it probably did not threaten his continued existence, after a nuclear holocaust, on a degraded social level as a distinct species of living being. The fear of human extermination was spread by many well-intentioned, mistaken, or mercenary people, and reached its peak, perhaps, in the commercial success of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, both as novel and as motion picture. The annihilation of man, as shown in such works, is technically possible, but will certainly not result from the weapons which would be used in total thermonuclear war. However, there is always a remote possibility that a madman such as Hitler might decide to destroy the human race as revenge for the frustration of his insane ambitions. This could be done in a number of ways, of which the simplest would be to encase a large number of thermonuclear bombs in thick layers of cobalt; the ensuing fallout of radioactive cobalt 60 could extinguish all animal life on earth (excluding most plants, insects, and other invertebrates). No sane policy would use such a bomb, since cobalt 60 is 320 times as radioactive as radium, and it would require at least four hundred such bombs, each at least one ton in weight, to release enough radioactivity to extinguish all animal life on earth.

However, even without a cobalt bomb, any extensive nuclear war would kill hundreds of millions of human beings and would release sufficient radioactivity to inflict such extensive genetic damage that subsequent generations of human beings would produce a substantial percentage of monsters; this fact, added to the genetic damage to birdlife, might create a situation where men would be unable to compete successfully with insects (who are much more immune to genetic damage from radioactivity).

The balance of nuclear weapons is a central factor in the Cold War, since no agreement on cessation of nuclear testing, nuclear disarmament, conventional disarmament, or relaxation of tension can occur until both sides recognize that a nuclear balance of equilibrium (the so-called “nuclear stalemate”) has been achieved. This came close to achievement early in 1950, when both sides had atomic weapons, but was destroyed at that time by President Truman’s order to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb. It was not achieved again until the end of 1962, because when both sides had achieved the H-bomb by 1956, that balance was disturbed by the missile race, which reached its widest disequilibrium with the Soviet success with “Sputnik” in October 1957. This led to the subsequent race to obtain an intercontinental ballistic missile with nuclear warhead (ICBM) in 1957-1962.

By 1963, when both sides had these weapons, the balance of terror was established and negotiation was possible. As a matter of fact, the balance was not equal, since the American total capability in nuclear war was far superior to that of the Soviet Union in 1963, but weapons development had reached approximately the same point; the United States was more vulnerable to Russia’s fewer weapons because a larger part of its population was industrial and urban, and the Soviet Union had growing problems in other areas, notably its alienation from Communist China. At the same time, gross fissures began to appear in the Western bloc from De Gaulle’s efforts to turn Europe out of the American camp and into a Third (“neutralist”) Force. About the same time, the Cuban Crisis of October 1962, somewhat like the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, by bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the edge of a war that neither wanted, revealed to both the mutual balance of terror and the need to do something about it. All this marked the end of the historical period which began in 1945.

The chief subdivisions of the history of nuclear balance over the period 1945-1963 are as follows:

1. The American Atomic Monopoly from Alamogordo in June 1945 to the first Soviet atom bomb (“Joe I”) in August 1949.

2. A brief nuclear balance from 1949 to 1950.

3. The Race for the Hydrogen Bomb from January 1950 through the first American hydrogen fusion at Eniwetok in November 1952 and the first Soviet H-bomb explosion of August 1953 to the American achievement of a practical thermonuclear weapon in March 1954. This contest continued for two more years as each side tried to perfect the new weapon as an aerial bomb. The United States made its first successful air drop of a fusion bomb on May 21, 1956—almost certainly later than the comparable Soviet test.

4. The Race for the ICBM from 1956 to 1962 has been widely misunderstood because propaganda falsehoods from both sides sought to conceal the true situation and often confused even themselves. Basically the problem was, at the beginning, how to combine the American Nagasaki bomb, which weighed 9,000 pounds, with the German V-2 rocket, which carried a warhead of 1,700 pounds only 200 miles. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the Americans, over the opposition of the air force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet government acquired a series of very powerful rocket boosters ranging in thrust from 800,000 pounds to 1.5 million pounds, and capable of hurling capsules from one to over seven tons in weight. These were demonstrated to an astonished world from October, 1957 onward.

These Soviet successes in space made the American effort in rocket boosters look very second-rate, but this impression was rather misleading. It was perfectly true that the United States in 1957-1960 had no powerful rocket boosters capable of hurling large space vehicles into orbit or past the moon (as was done with the 3,245-pound Soviet Lunik I in January 1959), but the United States in this period had a large number of fission and fusion warheads in a great variety of sizes, and was rapidly developing moderately powerful rockets able to carry these great distances.In fact, the first American ICBM was fired from Cape Canaveral in December 1957, two months after Sputnik I, and went full range in November 1958.

By 1961 the United States had a varied assortment of missiles, both solid- and liquid-fueled, some able to be fired in minutes, and capable of carrying nuclear warheads, whose explosive power was equivalent to as little as 750,000 tons of TNT (thus forty-three times the force of the Hiroshima A-bomb) to 5,000,000 or more tons of TNT. These could be delivered distances from 1,000 to over 6,000 miles and with such accuracy that at least half could be landed in a circle within 3 miles of a target.