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

East Germany, like the rest of Moscow’s European satellites, is organized into a unified system of industrial specialization and economic exploitation, the Comecon (Council of Mutual Economic Assistance), the Soviet’s version of a common market, set up in opposition to the Marshall Plan in 1949. As a consequence, 80 percent of East Germany’s exports go to Communist countries, and it became the Soviet Union’s largest customer, supplying 20 percent of its total imports. Generally, this exchange took the form of Russian raw materials exchanged for German industrial goods, especially machinery, chemicals, optical products, and scientific instruments. But the failure of the whole system may be seen in the fact that East Germany, whose prewar industrial capacity was about as large as West Germany’s, by 1960 was producing only one-fourth the industrial output of West Germany.

The Communist solution to these difficulties was to increase the tyranny, but this simply forced more East Germans to flee westward. To prevent this, and to prevent, if possible, Communist knowledge of the great successes of the capitalist system to the west of them, the East German authorities on August 13, 1961, clamped down a rigid “death strip” along the East German-West German frontier, and hastily built a wall along the line dividing East Berlin from West Berlin. For months this wall was strengthened and heightened, surrounded and surmounted by barbed wire and watchtowers, with the buildings and concealing places along its length cleared away. Nevertheless, 20,000 persons risked death, injury, and prison and successfully escaped over the wall in its first twelve months. Since then the figure has fallen to 10,000 to 13,000 a year with about 8 to 10 percent made up of those who were supposed to be guarding it.

In contrast with this, the West German economic miracle that made that country the third largest importer and the second largest exporter in the world, with freedom and prosperity, was more than Khrushchev could stand. West Berlin, which shared in the freedom and prosperity of the West, in spite of the fact that it was surrounded by the grim penury of East Germany, was even more objectionable to Khrushchev, because it was a glaring exhibition of the success of the West and the failure of the East. As Khrushchev himself said, West Berlin was “a bone stuck in my throat.”

There can be little doubt that Khrushchev’s talk about “peaceful coexistence” and “the inevitable triumph of Socialism by competition without war” was sincere. He was convinced that the Soviet Union, as the sole earthly representative of a Communist regime, must be preserved at any cost. He, with his associates, since the testing of the first successful Soviet thermonuclear explosion in August, 1953, have recognized that a thermonuclear war would destroy all civilized living, including the victor’s. The Red Army at times, and Red China always, objected to this, with the argument that enough would survive to permit reconstruction of a socialistic way of life, but Khrushchev was not persuaded. On this basis, he sincerely wished to divert the Communist-capitalist struggle into nonviolent areas. Thus he was sincere in his disarmament suggestions and negotiations, but since he distrusted the Western Powers just as thoroughly as they distrusted him, any advance along the road to disarmament was almost hopeless. The Soviet position sought limitation of nuclear arms and long-range vehicles, and was much less willing to accept limits on conventional arms or ground forces. This is equivalent to saying that he wished to limit the United States and was reluctant to limit the Soviet Union. Only after 1959, with the increased strain on the Soviet Union’s economic manpower, was there any readiness to curtail infantry forces. At the same time, the almost insane secrecy of the Russian system made the Kremlin reluctant to accept any effective kind of inspection of disarmament, which was almost automatically regarded by them as espionage. The United States was even less eager than the Kremlin to reach any effective disarmament agreement, since, unlike the Soviet Union, most of the pressures from American economic and business circles were in favor of the continuation of large defense spending, the source of a major segment of America’s employment opportunities and industrial profits. Only at the beginning of 1964, when President Johnson astutely sought to combine reduced military expenditures with reduced taxes and a large-scale attack on American domestic poverty to expand demands in the consumers’ markets, did it become possible to dissipate some of the opposition to reduced arms expenditures from the military-industrial complex.

Accordingly, the Soviet disarmament proposals of April 30, 1957 were discussed month after month, and year after year, with minimal progress. By 1959 it was quite clear that the Kremlin’s chief aim was to prevent Germany and Red China from getting nuclear weapons. Accordingly, they concentrated on efforts to direct the disarmament discussions toward restrictions on nuclear testing and on nuclear-free zones in central Europe and in Asia. The nuclear-free zone in central Europe, which fitted in well with a British-favored policy of “disengagement” in that area, was known as the Repacki Plan, after its nominal proponent, but reappeared, in various versions, for many years.

There can be little doubt that a central role in Soviet foreign policy was played by the Kremlin’s not unjustified fear of Germany, and its almost neurotic opposition to a unification of Germany that was not under Soviet control, or to the acquisition by West Germany of nuclear weapons. A stalemate on this subject was ensured by America’s refusal to accept the status quo of a divided Germany because of our devotion to the Adenauer regime, and our fear that West Germany, rebuffed by us on the issue of reunification, might prefer reunity to prosperity or democracy and make a deal with the Soviet Union to achieve such unity. This we could not accept because of our conviction that German infantry forces were necessary to the West European defense system if there was to be any hope of defending Europe against Soviet ground forces on any level of combat below all-out thermonuclear warfare.

For these reasons, the United States committed itself repeatedly to the Adenauer regime to work for the unification of Germany on democratic lines. Moreover, in 1957, an Eisenhower commitment to Adenauer, subsequently expanded into a formal Declaration of Berlin by the three Western Powers (July 29, 1957), stated that any comprehensive disarmament agreement with the Soviet Union “must necessarily presuppose a prior solution of the problem of German re-unification.”

A series of bitter disappointments during the four years 1958-1962 led the Kremlin to the desperate decision to move part of its IRBM’s to Cuba. Three factors may have played significant roles in this reckless decision. In the first place, the inability of the Soviet Union in 1961 to overtake the American lead in ICBM’s made it seem necessary for the Kremlin to seek to remedy some of its deficiency in these long-range weapons by deployment closer to the United States of some of its larger supply of IRBM’s. Moreover, increasing evidence that the Soviet Union could not compete successfully with the United States in such nonviolent areas as agricultural production, raising standards of living, or aid and technical assistance to neutral nations made it seem necessary that the Soviet Union seek some method of increasing its military and political pressure on the United States that would, at the same time, give a boost to its prestige throughout the world among neutral or sympathetic states. Finally, the growing recognition that the Soviet chances were dwindling for reaching the kind of settlement it wanted in West Germany or West Berlin undoubtedly led many in the Kremlin to conclude that a successful emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, even if there were no real intention of using them, could lead to a compromise settlement under which these missiles would be removed from Cuba in return for a Berlin settlement more favorable to the Soviet desires.