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

These developments left the Soviet Union with a much smaller number of giant rockets able to carry 20-megaton (20,000,000 tons of TNT) warheads, but so large that their locations were soon spied out by American high-flying U-2 photographic planes. To remedy this overemphasis on size, the Soviet Union, in October 1961, broke the moratorium on nuclear explosive testing which had existed since October 1958, and exploded a great variety of small bombs from 1 to 5 megatons, as well as a gigantic one of 25 megatons and a colossal one of 58 megatons; the latter, the largest bomb ever exploded, was equal to one-third the total of all previous nuclear explosions from 1945 to the end of previous testing in December 1958.

Even before these final tests, in 1960 elaborate calculations on the giant electronic computers in the Pentagon were estimating the consequences of a hypothetical total nuclear war in June 1963. Two answers were: (1) If the Soviet Union struck first and the United States retaliated, the war would be over in a single day with a Russian victory in which they lost 40 million of their 220 million population dead and 40 percent of their industrial capacity, while America would have 150 million of its 195 million people dead and 60 percent of its industry destroyed. (2) If the United States struck first with a nuclear attack, in reply to a Soviet advance of ground troops into Germany, 75 million Russians and 110 million Americans would be killed, half the industry of both would be destroyed, and neither could win. On this basis, some relaxation of tension became imperative, as soon as the Soviets could be satisfied they had achieved stalemate by their 1961-1962 nuclear tests.

Closely related to this four-stage sequence of nuclear capability is the quite different four-stage sequence of strategic planning. This is concerned with what we plan to do as distinct from what we are able to do. From the American side it has four stages, as follows:

1. “Great Power Cooperation” within the United Nations Organization, 1945-1946.

2. “Containment of” Soviet expansion by all means available, including

economic aid to others (the Marshall Plan), conventional forces (as

in NATO), and nuclear weapons, 1946-1953.

3. “Liberation,” “Massive Retaliation,” and the “New Look,” 1953-1960.This period, associated with the influence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, sought to deal with foreign crisis by the use of slogans and quite unrealistic policies which could never have been used. Our allies, the neutrals, and even the Russians were ignored and often despised, while the State Department engaged in what Dulles himself called, in January 1956, “going to the brink” of war. This policy sought to reduce government spending and balance the budget by reducing expenditures for all local or conventional wars and to base our strategy and our foreign policy on the threat that any Soviet advance of any kind anywhere of which we disapproved would be stopped by our “massive retaliation” with all-out nuclear attack anywhere we judged appropriate, on a unilateral (without consultation with our allies) and on a “first-strike” basis (that is, we would do this even if the Soviet Union had not attacked us and had not used nuclear weapons). This policy was hopelessly irresponsible and not only alienated allies (such as France) and neutrals (such as India), but could not be used, since we would never adopt such suicidal and ineffective tactics to reply to a Communist local advance in Korea, southeast Asia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Yugoslavia, or most other places on the periphery of the Soviet bloc. This policy abandoned NATO, in fact if not in theory, and meant that we had publicly adopted a policy we would never carry out; because even if we were willing to accept the full consequences of the Soviet nuclear counterblow to our “massive retaliation” we could not ever win in such a war, since Soviet ground forces, with their 125 divisions in Europe, could easily overrun NATO’s 25 divisions and would occupy all Europe except Britain and Spain. The Kremlin leaders, moving to Paris or Rome (perhaps in the Vatican) would be beyond our reach and could hold London under nuclear threat, while both the United States and the Soviet Union were devastated. The Dulles doctrine was not a doctrine of action but solely a doctrine of threats, since it expected that the threat alone would stop Soviet advances and that it would never be necessary to carry out the threat. The policy worked, in the sense that the world and the United States lived through it, only because the Soviet Union, at the same time, was in the “interregnum” between the death of Stalin (March 5, 1952) and the accession to full power of Khrushchev (July 4, 1957 to March 27, 1958).The last two years were occupied by the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to get back to a more workable defense policy based on a variety of responses to Soviet actions and to do so without either repudiating Dulles or excessively unbalancing the budget.

4. “Graduated deterrence,” from 1960 onward, was really an effort to get back to the polices of 1950 as advocated by the National Security Council paper NSC 58 of March 1950, and generally to the advice given by Robert Oppenheimer before his public career had been destroyed by the “massive retaliation” advocates in 1953. This revived doctrine called for a graduated and varied strategic response to Soviet aggression combined with cooperation with our allies, recognition of the rights of neutrals to be neutral, increased economic and cultural aid to both groups, and relaxation of tension with the Soviet Union by cultural and scientific cooperation. This broad and varied program had at its core development of at least four levels of possible war: (1) war with conventional weapons; (2) addition of tactical nuclear weapons; (3) strategic nuclear attack on a “no cities” basis (with attacks aimed only at Soviet military bases and installations); and (4) the “total-devastation response.” Each of these had subgradations and gave rise to unsolved problems such as “escalation,” that is, the possibility that one level would develop gradually into a more intense level in the heat of combat. Moreover, such complex responses required immense outlays of money, even if the achievement of the whole was spread over many years. But this cost, it was felt, would be worthwhile, since nuclear warfare on a “no cities” basis would save about 100 million American lives in the first week of war in comparison with war on the “total-devastation” level. One element in this whole strategic shift was the shift of the emphasis of our response from Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear bombing to conventional army forces and to the navy’s nuclear submarines with Polaris missiles. The former would reduce the temptation to the Soviet Union to instigate local “brush-fire” wars, while the latter would be even more successful in preventing any Soviet nuclear “first strike,” since such an attack would be much less able to find and destroy Polaris submarines than it would be to wipe out fixed SAC bases.

The next great aspect of postwar history was the partisan political struggles within the United States, centering on the rise and decline of unilateralism and neo-isolationism. As we shall see in a later chapter, the party struggle in the United States took the form of a struggle between the party of the middle classes, the Republicans, and the party of the fringes, the Democrats. This lineup, with its multitude of exceptional cases, found the intellectuals (including the scientists), the internationalists, the minorities, and the cosmopolitans in the Democratic Party, with the businessmen, bankers, and clerks in the Republican Party. The isolationism of the latter, combined with their inability to cope with the world depression or with the international crisis arising from Hitler, kept the Democrats in the White House for twenty years (1933-1953). The defeat of Dewey by Truman in 1948 was a particularly bitter pill, and the Republican partisans after that event were ready to adopt any weapon which could be used to discredit the Democratic administration. They found such a weapon ready at hand in the neo-isolationist forces within the Republican Party which were entrenched in the Congress by the seniority system of committee controls which operated there. Since either party in the United States wins a presidential election on a national (and not on a local) basis and by appealing to the moderate middle-group people who are willing to shift their vote and to consider the issues presented, a party which is long out of the White House will be reduced to the control of its local, narrow, ignorant, and extremist core which is unwilling to consider issues or the national welfare, or to shift their party stand and votes. For these reasons, the Republican Party had fallen into congressional control (represented by Senate figures such as Senators Robert Taft, Kenneth Wherry, Styles Bridges, and William Jenner) of those who were most ignorant of the real issues and were most remote from any conceptions of national political responsibility.