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

these developments led to major changes in the political and ideological structures of all areas of the world, changes that are still going on.

THE SHIFTING POWER BALANCE

As we have seen, the whole period of 1953 to 1960, in the area of defense, was dominated by the so-called “New Look,” the Republican effort to reduce the cost of the American defense effort by shifting from “containment” to massive retaliation. This involved a reduction in the American defense budget from an average of $43 billion a year over the last four Truman budgets (1940-1953) to an average of $37.4 a year over the six Eisenhower budgets of 1954-1960. In this process American military manpower was reduced from 3.7 million men to 2.5 million over the six years January, 1953-January, 1959. Foreign economic aid was de-creasingly emphasized.

In this fashion, the effort to deter Soviet aggression was based more completely on the threat of American nuclear attack by SAC bombers on the Soviet homeland and less on American readiness to meet Soviet forces on the ground or to win third Powers to our side by economic or other aid. Dulles, who saw the world in black-and-white terms, refused to recognize the right of anyone to be neutral, and tried to force all states to join the American side in the Cold War or be condemned to exterior darkness.

Having thus divided the world into two blocs, he sought to set up between them a continuous circuit of paper barriers along the land frontiers of the Soviet bloc from the Baltic Sea, across Europe and Asia, to the Far East. The chief portions in the barrier were the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe (1949), the Central Treaty Organization (1955) in the Near and Middle East (CENTO), and the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in the Far East (1954). In theory, the paper barrier was made continuous by the presence of Turkey in both NATO and CENTO and of Pakistan in both CENTO and SEATO.

Dulles cared little about the military strength, economic prosperity, or political democracy of the states forming this paper ring around the Soviet bloc, since their chief function was to form a paper barrier so that any movement outward by Russia or its satellites, by breaking the paper, would trigger the trip-wire circuit that hurled America’s nuclear retaliatory power on the Soviet homeland. In theory this strategic policy meant that any outward movement by the Soviet Union, or by one of its satellite states, in some remote jungle or on some barren mountaintop of central Asia, might lead to all-out nuclear war, initiated by the United States, which would totally destroy European civilization as we know it. For, until 1960, the ability of either of the Superpowers to strike directly at the other from its own soil was very limited, and, accordingly, the two Superpowers had to strike from or strike at bases in Europe or the Far East.

This change, which took place over the period 1956-1962, is of major significance, since it meant that the Soviet Union and the United States became capable of striking directly at each other and did not have to involve third Powers in their disputes immediately. From the weapons point of view, it represented, on the American side, three changes: (1) the shift in manned bombing planes from the long-range B-47’s to the intercontinental-range B-52’s and B-58’s; (2) the shift in missiles from the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM’s), such as Thor or Jupiter, which had to be based in Turkey, Italy, or Britain in order to reach the Soviet Union, to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM’s), such as the Minuteman or Atlas, which could hit the Soviet Union from launching sites in the United States; and (3) the advent, about 1960, of the nuclear-propelled Polaris submarines, whose sixteen nuclear-armed missiles could strike the Soviet Union from submerged positions in the seas bordering the Eurasian land mass.

This American capability to strike the Soviet homeland from North America was not achieved so quickly or so completely on the Russian side, even by the time the nuclear stalemate had been reached in 1963. As a result, the Soviet Union could strike at the United States only by striking at its bases or its allies in NATO or in the Far East. At first, in the 1950’s, such a Soviet counterstrike would have been largely by the Soviet ground forces invading westward across central Europe, but by the late 1950’s, as the Soviet strategic striking forces were strengthened by its acquisition of strategic bombing planes like the TU-16 and of IRBM’s, this Soviet counterstrike to America’s massive retaliation would have resulted in the nuclear destruction and radioactive pollution of much of Europe. The gradual shift of American retaliatory power from intermediate range to intercontinental range (in 1962) reduced the Soviet pressure on Europe by reducing the importance of America’s European bases. This had many significant implications for all the nations of Europe, both Communist and Western.

The key to the missile race rested on the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union took opposite routes in their efforts to obtain nuclear-armed rockets. One basic problem was how to combine the American A-bomb of 1945 with the German V-2 rocket. Since the A-bomb was an egg-shaped object 5 feet wide and 10 feet long, which weighed 9,000 pounds, and the V-2 could carry a warhead of only 1,700 pounds 200 miles, the problem was not easy. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the American scientists, 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 Union in 1957-1962 had very large boosters which gave it a lead in the race to propel objects into space or into ballistic orbits around the earth, but these were very expensive, could not be made in large numbers, and were very awkward to install or to move. The United States, on the other hand, soon found it had bombs in all sizes down to small ones capable of being used as tactical weapons by troops in ground combat and able to be moved about on jeeps.

As a consequence of the American decision to reduce the size of the bomb (a decision for which the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer was largely responsible), by the early 1960’s the United States was producing large numbers of warheads in a great variety of sizes, capable of being delivered by all kinds of vehicles from tactical rockets and cannons, up through Polaris missiles, airplanes of all sizes, and rockets of all ranges, up to city-destroying bombs carried by gigantic SAC bombers or ICBM’s.

Apparently the Soviet success in obtaining the A-bomb in 1949, in dropping an H-bomb in 1953, and in startling the world with its powerful rocket boosters in 1957 not only alarmed the United States but also lulled the Kremlin itself into the mistaken idea that it was ahead of the United States in the development of missile nuclear weapons. This so-called “missile gap” was a mistaken idea, for the vast expansion of American production of nuclear materials begun in 1950, combined with the simultaneous reduction in the sizes of nuclear warheads, by 1959 was bringing the United States into a condition of “nuclear plenty” and of “overkill capacity” that posed a grim problem for the Soviet Union. It was, strangely enough, just at that time (end of 1957) that two American studies (the Gaither Report and the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) suggested the existence of a missile gap or inferiority in missile capacity of the United States compared to the Soviet Union. This judgment, apparently based on overemphasis on the size of Soviet rocket boosters, played a chief role in the American presidential campaign of 1960 and in the ebullient self-confidence of Khrushchev and his associates in 195 7-1961.