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However bad things were, an explanation alleging treason in high places seemed beyond the realm of plausibility—until, on June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea.
What made the difference, it appears, was Stalin’s conviction that a “second front” was now feasible in East Asia, that it could be created by proxies, thus minimizing the risk to the U.S.S.R., and that the Americans would not respond.
VICTORY IN World War II brought no sense of security, therefore, to the victors.
Interests had turned out not to be compatible; ideologies remained at least as polarizing as they had been before the
Well before the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Clausewitz’s warnings about the dangers of total war had been amply confirmed.
It is likely, indeed, that during the first few years of the postwar era, Soviet intelligence knew more about American atomic bombs than the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff did.
For by denying the military control over atomic weapons, he reasserted civilian authority over how wars were to be fought.
the president revived that strategist’s great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around.
He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used.
Truman himself acknowledged in 1949 that had it not been for the bomb, “the Russians would have taken over Europe a long time ago.”
Only after Stalin’s death did his successors approve a cease-fire, which took place in July, 1953.
And so there was, after all, a shooting war between the United States and the Soviet Union: it was the only time this happened during the Cold War. Both sides, however, kept it quiet.
The two superpowers had found it necessary but also dangerous to be in combat with one another. They tacitly agreed, therefore, on a cover-up.
failed to see how such an apocalyptic device could ever meet the Clausewitzian standard that military operations must not destroy what they were meant to defend.
In the end, as the president saw it, if the United States could build what was now coming to be called a “hydrogen” bomb, then it must build one. To be behind in any category of weaponry—or even to appear to be—would risk disaster.
the United States could not allow itself to get into any more Korea-like limited wars. To do so would relinquish the initiative to adversaries, who would then choose the most advantageous times, places, and methods of military confrontation.
the United States would henceforth respond to aggression at times, in places, and by means it would choose.
the detonation of just a hundred hydrogen bombs could “create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.”
EISENHOWER did so exquisitely but terrifyingly: he was at once the most subtle and brutal strategist of the nuclear age.
Henry Kissinger made the case for what would come to be called “flexible response” in an influential book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
Because no one could be sure that emotions, frictions, and fears would not cause even limited wars to escalate, it was necessary to make such wars difficult to fight: that meant not preparing to fight them. That is why Eisenhower—the ultimate Clausewitzian—insisted
insisted on planning only for total war. His purpose was to make sure that no war at all would take place.
They immediately did so, but not in response to Khrushchev’s warning. Eisenhower, furious at not having been consulted, had ordered them to evacuate Suez or face severe economic sanctions. Because Khrushchev’s threats were public and Eisenhower’s were not, however, the new Kremlin leader concluded that his own huffing and puffing had produced the withdrawal—and that this practice could become a strategy.
the new goal was to be “peaceful coexistence.”
By the end of 1959 his engineers had only six long-range missile launch sites operational. Because each missile took almost twenty hours to fuel, leaving them vulnerable to attack by American bombers, this meant that the total number Khrushchev could count on launching was precisely that: six.
He had made much, during the 1960 campaign, of the alleged “missile gap” that Eisenhower had allowed to develop. To acknowledge its absence too soon after taking office would be embarrassing.
56 It is clear now, though, that this was not Khrushchev’s principal reason for acting as he did, which suggests how easily historians can jump to premature conclusions. More significantly, the Cuban missile crisis also shows how badly great powers can miscalculate when tensions are high and the stakes are great. The consequences, as they did in this instance, can surprise everyone.
But Kennedy and his advisers knew nothing of Khrushchev’s reasoning, and those who survived were surprised to learn of it a quarter century later when the opening of Soviet archives began to reveal it.
Just what Khrushchev intended to do with his Cuban missiles is, even now, unclear: it was characteristic of him not to think things through.
The best explanation, in the end, is that Khrushchev allowed his ideological romanticism to overrun whatever capacity he had for strategic analysis. He was so emotionally committed to the Castro revolution that he risked his own revolution, his country, and possibly the world on its behalf.
the weapons each side had developed during the Cold War posed a greater threat to both sides than the United States and the Soviet Union did to one another. This improbable series of events, universally regarded now as the closest the world came, during the second half of the 20th century, to a third world war, provided a glimpse of a future no one wanted: of a conflict projected beyond restraint, reason, and the likelihood of survival.
What kept war from breaking out, in the fall of 1962, was the irrationality, on both sides, of sheer terror. That is what Churchill had foreseen when he saw hope in an “equality of annihilation.”
He now repudiated his earlier idea of targeting only military facilities: instead each side should target the other’s cities, with a view to causing the maximum number of casualties possible.
The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one.
Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all.
By the end of the Cold War, there was little left to hope for from communism, and nothing left to fear.
they set out to preserve capitalism by mitigating its harshness. The result was the social welfare state, the basic structure of which was in place throughout much of the industrialized world by the time several of its most prominent representatives went to war with one another in August, 1914.
Wilson’s Fourteen
Points speech of January, 1918, the single most influential statement of an American ideology in the 20th century, was a direct response to the ideological challenge Lenin had posed.
the Russians were particularly harsh in their looting, physical assaults, and mass rapes.
A culture of brutality within the Soviet Union, it appeared, had spawned one beyond its borders.
the Germans had been even more brutal in occupying the U.S.S.R. during the war.
By one estimate, a million East European communists were purged in some way between 1949 and 1953.27
misfortune. It was no accident that Orwell’s Big Brother had a Stalin-like mustache.
when the choice is between starvation and repression it is not always easy to make.
So the Americans came up with a third alternative. They would revive the German and Japanese economies, thereby securing the future of capitalism in those and surrounding regions. But they would also transform the Germans and the Japanese into democrats.
while Germany and Japan had indeed had parliamentary systems before succumbing to dictatorships in the 1930s, the culture of democracy had never taken root in those countries: that was one reason they had succumbed so easily.
The function of government, as they saw it, was to facilitate freedom. That might require regulating the economy, but never, as in the Soviet Union, commanding it in all respects.
Results were more important than ideological consistency.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the first peacetime military alliance the United States had entered into since the termination, in 1800, of the one with France that had secured American independence.
