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

By the late 1960’s, considerations such as these revealed that there were considerable areas of common interests among the states of the world covering all three groups of the so-called Free World, the Communist bloc, and the neutrals. The net result was the almost total disappearance of the world as seen by John Foster Dulles only a decade before. The two-power world of Dulles was being replaced by a multi-bloc world in which the two Superpowers, instead of being antithetical on all points, were finding large areas in which their interests were closer to each other than they were to those of some of the other, newer blocs, especially that growing up around Red China. Moreover, as we shall see, in some ways the aims, methods, and structures of the two Superpowers were converging on increasingly parallel courses. Most obviously repugnant to Dulles would have been the rise of neutralism, evident not only in the increasing numbers and independence of the neutral states, but in the disintegration of both the old Superpower blocs as these weakened and dissolved, and former members of these, such as France in the West and Romania in the East, adopted increasingly neutralist policies. As one obvious consequence of this, the paper groupings and barriers Dulles had so painfully constructed in the 1950’s were under liquidation as one of the chief tasks of the 1960’s. This was evident, with increasing obviousness, in NATO, the Organization of American States (OAS), CENTRO, and SEATO. Less obviously, except in the Far East, the same disintegrative process has been going on within the Soviet bloc, at first with Yugoslavia in 1948 and then with Red China (1960), Albania, Romania, and others. This whole process of growing neutralism, diversity, and the disintegration of the Superblocs, followed by the increasing emphasis of all groups on the problems of poverty, social disorganization, and spiritual nihilism, was possible only because of the growth of nuclear stalemate, and must, throughout, be recognized as occurring under the umbrella of thermonuclear terror and the danger from new, equally horrible biological weapons.

THE DENOUEMENT OF THE COLD WAR, 1957-1963

Two revealing events in the late summer of 1957 offer conflicting evidence on the nature of the Soviet system. On August 26th the Kremlin claimed its first successful test of an ICBM. A month later it announced that the sixth Five-Year Plan had been scrapped and would be replaced by a new Seven-Year Plan for 1959-1965.

The meaning of this second announcement was difficult to evaluate, but it showed the regime’s increasing difficulty in carrying out its grandiose economic projects, a difficulty that arose from the failures of the Soviet agricultural system. The state and collective farms used such quantities of equipment and manpower, and gave such limited production in return, that they became the chief limiting factor in the Soviet efforts to raise standards of living, to maintain the size and power of the defense forces, to win over third states by economic and technical assistance, and to lead the United States in the conquest of outer space. The output of food from the small private plots of the Soviet peasantry, which were presumably worked only in their owners’ spare time, produced four or five times the output per acre of the state and collective farms. This was, of course, an indication of the success of private enterprise as a spur in the productive process, a fact which was specifically recognized by Khrushchev in a series of speeches early in 1964.

But in 1957-1959 this meaning of the change in the Soviet economic plan was unrecognized, or at least disputable, and the world’s attention became riveted instead on the Soviet success with its rocket boosters. From October 1957, over a period of five years, the Russians showed the way in outer space to the United States. In the newspapers and consequent world opinion, the margin of the Soviet superiority seemed much greater than it was in fact. On October 4th Sputnik I, weighing 184 pounds, was shot into an orbit around our earth; a month later, Sputnik II, weighing 1,120 pounds and containing a living dog, also went into successful orbit. But on December 6th a much publicized effort by the United States, in Project Vanguard, failed in its attempt to place a small sphere of 3 1/4 pounds into orbit. On the last day of January 1958, the first American spacecraft, Explorer I, weighing 31 pounds, successfully was shot into orbit around our earth, but it was followed by another failure of Vanguard and a failure of Explorer II in the next two months.

In the spring of 1958, our success with Explorer III (31 pounds) and another failure with Vanguard were followed by the successful Sputnik III (2,925 pounds). The two years 1958 and 1959 saw many American failures in space (20 in all) mingled with 16 successful efforts (mostly in 1959). In January 1959, the Soviet government put Lunik I (3,245 pounds) in orbit around the sun five months after our first lunar probe had failed. In September 1959, Lunik II hit the surface of the moon, and a month later Lunik III passed around the moon, photographing its hidden side. In 1960 and 1961 the United States launched numerous successful space vehicles that gathered valuable scientific information. One of these, in January 1959, made the first broadcast from space, relaying messages from American ground stations, but in April and August 1961 Soviet vehicles successfully sent the first human beings into space: Vostok I was recovered after a single orbit, and Vostok II, after 18 successful trips around the globe, was recovered the next day. These first space travelers, Major Yuri Gagarin and Major Gherman S. Titov, returned safely to Soviet soil, descending to earth in remarkable demonstrations of the Soviet success in controlling their space vehicles. The first American astronauts, Captain Alan B. Shepard, Jr., who made a suborbital flight of 117 miles in May 1961, and Colonel John H. Glenn, who orbited the earth three times in February 1962, were recovered by landing in the ocean. In October, United States Navy Commander Walter M. Schirra made a similar landing after a smooth countdown and blast-off at Cape Canaveral (now called Cape Kennedy) and six orbits around the earth. These American achievements were seen on television by millions of viewers and roused considerable praise throughout the world at the courage of the American government in permitting live broadcasts of what could have turned into humiliating fiascos.

The Soviet fiascos in space developments, if any occurred, were well concealed, while their successes continued to astound the world at the end of 1962. In August of that year, the Russians in less than twenty-four hours blasted off Vostok III and Vostok IV, each with a human passenger, brought them within four miles of each other in space, and landed them together, six minutes and 124 miles apart, after several days in space, most of it in a weightless condition. This achievement was remarkable for its exhibition of control of the whole process, since the two vehicles were in almost identical orbits, almost came together in space, and broke all previous records for time and distance in space. Major A. G. Nikolayev circled the earth 64 times, covered 1,625,000 miles, and was weightless for almost four days, during which he worked, ate, slept, and moved about in his capsule. His companion cosmonaut, Lieutenant Colonel P. R. Popovich, made 48 orbits around the earth and was weightless for almost three days. These achievements in the Soviet space program were repeated in June 1963 by similar dual flights of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, who made 48 orbits, and Lieutenant Colonel Valery Bykovsky, who completed 81 orbits.

The impact of these Soviet “space spectaculars” on world opinion was tremendous. To many neutrals, and even to some in the Western nations, their exploits seemed to indicate that the Soviet Union had moved to first place in ability to apply science to technological development. Only gradually, and never completely, did realization spread that the Soviet Union, by announcing only its successes and concealing its failures, gave a misleading appearance of success. In time, it also began to appear that, while the Soviet Union unquestionably had tremendous boosters and an almost unbelievable accuracy in firing them, the United States space effort included a greater number of attempts, in much greater variety and size, and yielded immensely larger amounts of scientific information. By 1963-1964, when the space rivalry had entered upon a race to place men on the moon, and both sides were beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of this (or at least the wisdom of racing to it), it became clearer that the American space effort was larger, sounder, and more fruitful to science than the amazing and earlier exploits of the Soviet Union. But no such process of revaluation could change the fact that the first men in space were Russians, Yuri Gagarin and Gherman S. Titov, in 1961.