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“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Stalin’s goal, therefore, was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but rather to dominate that continent as thoroughly as Hitler had sought to do.
that the United States could not continue to serve as a model for the rest of the world while remaining apart from the rest of the world.
Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse “for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.”
“The foreign policy of the United States,” Novikov claimed, “reflects the imperialistic tendencies of American monopolistic capitalism, [and] is characterized . . . by a striving for world supremacy.”
The Marshall Plan, as it instantly came to be known, did not at that point distinguish between those parts of the continent that were under Soviet control and those that were not—but the thinking that lay behind it certainly did.
American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.
The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.
“a means to an end other than warfare, . . . an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself.” Atomic and hydrogen bombs, however, did not have this quality:
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.
The Soviet Union never publicized its involvement in these air battles, and the United States, which was well aware of it, chose not to do so either.27 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.
whatever advantages Stalin might have obtained from his atomic bomb would be canceled, and the United States would remain ahead in the nuclear arms race. And what if both sides developed “supers”? That would be better, Truman concluded, than for the Soviet Union to have a “super” monopoly.
The problem now was not so much how to defeat an adversary as how to convince him not to go to war in the first place. Paradoxically, that seemed to require the development of weapons so powerful that no one on the American side knew what their military uses might be, while simultaneously persuading everyone on the Soviet side that if the war did come those weapons would without doubt be employed.
But Truman left office in January, 1953, and Stalin left life two months later.
conduct of nuclear war. Shocked to discover that the only war plan Eisenhower had left behind would have required the simultaneous use of well over 3,000 nuclear weapons against all communist countries, Kennedy instructed his strategists to expand the options.
Bitches be CRAZY.
with a view to causing the maximum number of casualties possible.70 The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD. The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one.
realists!
The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place.
Whether Martel intended it as one hardly matters, for the sign of a good novel is what it can cause its readers to see, even if this lies beyond the author’s own vision.
“The capitalist flourishes,” one character complained, he amasses immense wealth; we sink, lower and lower, lower than the beasts of burthen; for they are fed better than we are, cared for more. And it is just, for according to the present system they are more precious. And yet they tell us that the interests of Capital and of Labour are identical.5
Marxism brought hope to the poor, fear to the rich, and left governments somewhere in between.
Not only had capitalism generated social inequality, as Marx had predicted it would. By this line of reasoning, it had also produced two world wars.
“I can’t take communism nor can you,” he told a friend, “but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.”
The underlying basis of government would be hope, not fear.
“NON-ALIGNMENT”provided a way in which the leaders of “third world” states could tilt without toppling: the idea was to commit to neither side in the Cold War, but to leave open the possibility of such commitment. That way, if pressure from one superpower became too great, a smaller power could defend itself by threatening to align with the other superpower.
Youths throughout history had often wished to question their elders’ values, but now with university educations their elders had handed them the training to do so.
The expanding scale and audacity of covert operations led Kennan to admit, years later, that recommending them had been “the greatest mistake I ever made.”
But he and subsequent presidents through Nixon retained the view, most clearly articulated in NSC-68, that the legal and moral restraints limiting government action at home need not do so in the world at large: within that wider sphere, the United States had to be free to operate as its adversaries did.
“The worse you do,” he concluded, “the better they like you.”34
He was, it has been said, “a Lennonist rather than a Leninist.”86
President Bush, who represented the United States at Chernenko’s funeral, reported back that Gorbachev “has a disarming smile, warm eyes, and an engaging way of making an unpleasant point and then bouncing back to establish real communication with his interlocutors.”
The man who ran the program that built the bomb had the logic right, but the Cold War inverted it: what happened instead was that because nuclear weapons could be used in any new great power war, no such war took place.
