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

The reality of the situation apparently was not recognized in Moscow until 1961, when it penetrated with a cold shock of fear through the deceptive festivities of self-congratulations that had begun with the success of Sputnik I (October 1957) and the successful moon shot, Lunik II (of September 1959)-

In this pleasant period of self-deception, intensified by the American presidential campaign’s unrealistic discussion of the missile gap in 1960, the Kremlin entered upon an unofficial international suspension of nuclear-bomb testing (the Test Moratorium) from October 31, 1958 to October 23, 1961. Suddenly, in 1961, the Soviet authorities recognized that they had fallen far behind the United States, both in number and in variety of nuclear weapons, because their existing nuclear bombs were too large for many purposes, especially for accurate and numerous long-range ICBM’s. Accordingly, in October 1961, the Soviet Union broke the test moratorium of three years by resuming nuclear testing, but, to conceal the purpose of the tests in seeking smaller bombs, they aimed their publicity on the tests at the fact that they exploded the largest bomb ever used, a 58-megaton fusion thermonuclear monstrosity.

After these tests, it soon became clear to the Soviet Union that the American lead in ICBM’s could not be overcome by the Soviet Union, in view of its limited industrial capacity and the other urgent demands on that capacity, in any period of time that had strategic meaning. Accordingly, Moscow, probably at the instigation of the Red Army itself, decided to remedy its weakness in ICBM’s by seeking to move some of its numerous IRBM’s within range of the United States by secretly installing them in Castro’s Cuba.

This decision, if we have analyzed it correctly, showed once again the way in which the Soviet defense strategy moved in a direction opposite to that which was influencing American defense decisions. Just at the time (summer 1962) that the Soviet Union was deciding to remedy its weakness in ICBM’s by trying to install IRBM’s in a third Power close to the United States, the latter was deciding that its supply of ICBM’s was increasing so rapidly that it would close down its IRBM bases in third countries close to the Soviet Union (such as Turkey). This American decision was already beginning to be carried out when the Cuban missile crisis broke in October 1962.

The Cuban missile crisis was a turning point in Soviet-American relations, similar in some ways to the Fashoda crisis of 1898 between France and England. It showed both sides that neither wanted a war and that their interests were not antithetical on all points. Thus it signaled the suspension of the Cold War and of the all-out insane armaments race between them. It showed that the United States had missile superiority sufficient to veto any major Soviet aggression, while the Soviet Union had sufficient missile power, in combination with the generally non-aggressive American attitude, to discourage the United States from using its missile superiority to make any aggression on the Soviet Union. Thus was established a nuclear or power stalemate of nuclear vetoes between the United States and the Soviet Union that secured each against the other.

This American-Soviet stalemate, by inhibiting the use of the power of each, permitted third Powers to escape, to a considerable extent, from the need to have power sufficient to back up their actions. This meant that third states could undertake actions which their own power could not in itself justify or enforce. That is to say that the Superpower stalemate allowed third states a freedom of action beyond their own intrinsic powers. Thus Indonesia could attack Malaya; China could attack India; Pakistan, although allied to the United States, could be cozy with Red China; Cyprus could defy Turkey; Egypt could attack Yemen; France could defy the United States; Romania could flirt with Peking; and Britain or Spain could trade with Castro’s Cuba, without the Superpowers feeling free to use their own real strengths to obtain what they wanted, since most of these strengths were neutralized opposing each other.

One significant consequence of this situation was the almost total collapse of the system of international law that had been formulated in the seventeenth century by the work of writers like Grotius. That system of international law had regarded the state as the embodiment of sovereignty, an organization of political power on a territorial basis. The criteria for the existence of such a sovereign state had been its ability to defend its boundaries against external aggression and to maintain law and public order among its inhabitants inside those boundaries. By 1964, as a consequence of the power stalemate of the Cold War, dozens of “states” (such as the Congo) which could perform neither of these actions were recognized as states by the Superpowers and their allies, and achieved this recognition in international law by being admitted to the United Nations. This development culminated over fifty years of destruction of the old established distinctions of international law such as the distinctions between war and peace (destroyed by the Cold War, which was neither), between belligerents and neutrals (destroyed by British economic warfare in World War I), or between civilians and combatants (destroyed by submarine warfare and city bombing). Nuclear stalemate in the Cold War context made it possible for political organizations with almost none of the traditional characteristics of a state not only to be recognized as states but to act in irresponsible ways and to survive on economic subsidies won from one bloc by threatening to join (or merely to accept subsidies from) the other bloc.

As a consequence of this situation, all the realities of international affairs by 1964 had become covered with thick layers of law, theories, practices, and agreements that had no relationship to reality at all. Today, the pressure of the realities beneath that layer to break through it and emerge into the daylight where they can be generally recognized has reached a critical point. As part of that process of increasing sanity (which the recognition of reality always is), the future of disarmament became more hopeful than it had been in decades, although the chances of reaching any substantial disarmament agreements remain slight. This means that disarmament is more likely to appear in the form of nuclear disengagement and tacit adoption of parallel actions than in the form of explicit agreements or signed documents.

The amount of myth and false theories that must be pushed aside to permit even the highest peaks of reality to emerge is very large. In the United Nations alone, it involves such points as the recognition of the Congo as a “state,” the belief that Taiwan is a Great Power worthy of one of the four permanent, veto-wielding seats on the Security Council, or the pretense that Red China, in spite of its possession of all the traditional attributes of statehood, does not exist.

Part of this return to reality is embodied in the growing recognition that there are more situations in which the United States and the Soviet Union have parallel interests than there are in which their interests are antithetical. Certainly they have a common interest in avoiding nuclear war, in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states, in not poisoning the atmosphere with radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, in slowing up weapons development, technological rivalry, and the space race in order to direct more resources to domestic problems of poverty, social disorganization, and education; or in refraining from outbidding each other in grants of arms and aid to unreliable, ungrateful, unstable, and inefficient neutralist regimes.

One first clear evidence of recognition of this common interest was the peaceful settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, but the first formal agreement based on it was the official Test Ban Treaty of August 1963. This treaty not only aimed to maintain the stalemate between the two Superpowers to the degree that it might be jeopardized by their future testing; it also sought to hamper the spread of nuclear weapons to additional powers by this restriction. Both Superpowers and many neutrals feared that nuclear explosives would get into the control of Red China or other irresponsible hands.