Stalin and the Bomb

by David Holloway

Alexander George and Richard Smoke have argued plausibly that the Berlin blockade was a “classical example of a low-risk, potentially high-gain strategy,” because it could be controlled and reversed. “Soviet leaders were not committed to persisting in the blockade,” they have written. “They could at any time find a solution to the ‘technical difficulties’ and open up ground access to West Berlin. Nor need the Soviets persist in the blockade if the Western powers threatened to overreact to it in ways that raised the danger of war.”48 Andrei Gromyko, who was Deputy Foreign Minister at the time, later commented that “I believe that Stalin – of course nobody actually asked him directly – embarked on that affair in the certain knowledge that the conflict would not lead to nuclear war.