the nuclear age and the cold war essay

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Grade 9 - Term 2: The Nuclear Age and the Cold War

Starting with major scientific breakthroughs during the 1930’s, countries have developed weapons that are based on nuclear energy. The use of nuclear weapons reached its height with the outbreak of World War 1 and 2, as well as the Cold War. Tin this case, two of the world’s major superpowers, the USA and Soviet Union, threatened each other with the use of nuclear weapons, which was referred to as the Cold War. This lesson will focus on the change in the balance of power after World War II and rivalry between the new superpowers during the Cold War by exploring the Increasing tension between the Allies after the end of World War II in Europe , End of World War II in the Pacific; Atomic bombs and the beginning of the Nuclear Age, the definition of the superpowers and the meaning of ‘Cold War’, the Areas of conflict and competition between the Superpowers in the Cold War and The end of the Cold War in 1989. 

Increasing tension between the Allies after the end of World War II in Europe

Although relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had been strained in the years before World War II, the U.S.-Soviet alliance of 1941–1945 was marked by a great degree of cooperation and was essential to securing the defeat of Nazi Germany. As late as 1939, it seemed highly improbable that the United States and the Soviet Union would forge an alliance. U.S.-Soviet relations had soured significantly following Stalin’s decision to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August of 1939.  In spite of intense pressure to sever relations with the Soviet Union, Roosevelt never lost sight of the fact that Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, posed the greatest threat to world peace. In order to defeat that threat, Roosevelt confided that he “would hold hands with the devil” if necessary. 

Finally, two devastating atomic bomb attacks against Japan by the United States, coupled with the Soviets’ decision to break their neutrality pact with Japan by invading Manchuria, finally led to the end of the war in the Pacific. Soon after the war, the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union began to unravel as the two nations faced complex post- war decisions.

USSR (communism) vs. USA and West (capitalism) 

No rivalry between different nations had greater implications for the entire world than that between the United States and the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century. Separated by vastly different political, economic, and social philosophies, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, a period historians term the Cold War, had the potential to lead to the end of the world as we know it. 

At various conferences, the most important of which were at Yalta and Potsdam, the three powers split Germany and its capital Berlin in two, with the eastern portion controlled by the Soviet Union and the western portion controlled jointly by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Additionally, the Soviet Union was given influence over the governments of several Eastern European states, where they promptly set up loyal, communist puppet regimes.

The United States and the West feared the creation of this Eastern Bloc, as Western journalists and government termed it, and the further spread of communism and/or totalitarian states in the rest of the world. U.S. foreign policy became one of containment - essentially, stopping the spread of communism wherever it could. This was in direct opposition to the Soviet Union's policy of fostering the spread of communism, especially in its Asian neighbours. The Americans then feared that the USSR/ Communist influence that already spread over Eastern Europe, would influence the democracies of western Europe.

End of World War II in the Pacific: Atomic bombs and the beginning of the Nuclear Age 

When, where, why and how did World War II come to an end? 

By 1943 the Allies were winning. One reason was that Allied factories were building thousands of tanks, ships and planes. In 1944, a huge Allied army crossed from Britain to liberate (free) France. Then Allied armies invaded Germany. By May 1945 the war in Europe was over.

The Pacific war went on until August 1945. There was fierce fighting on Pacific islands and big naval battles at sea. Finally, the Allies dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The damage was so terrible that Japan surrendered.

 Britain and Commonwealth forces (Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, and New Zealand) had been opposing the Axis in North Africa since Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France on June 10, 1940. Once the Battle of Britain was over and the threat of an immediate German invasion of the UK removed, Britain reinforced its North Africa contingent, to protect its colonies there and particularly to protect the Suez Canal and shipping in the Mediterranean. 

Allied preparations began for the invasion of Europe through Italy. The first target was the island of Sicily. Combat there included the first large-scale use of gliders and parachute troops by the Allies. Though not particularly well handled, these airborne operations provided important lessons that would be applied later on. British forces under Montgomery and U.S. troops under Patton raced to capture the city of Messina; Patton won the race, but his men arrived just hours after the last German troops had been evacuated to the Italian mainland. A new Italian government signed a secret armistice with the Allies on September 3. 

Isolationist sentiment was widespread in America during the 1930’s; a reaction to the high casualties the U.S. took in the First World War while gaining little of significance for America. That sentiment died in the flames of American battleships burning at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The U.S., Britain and the Netherlands imposed a total embargo on Japan. Among the most critical results of the embargo was the loss of oil. Unless Japan could import the oil it needed, its navy would be drydocked within a year and its factories would shut down in about 18 months. The Imperial military leaders saw as their only hope capturing Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and other counties they termed "the Southern Resource Area." This course of action meant war with the United States. 

World War 2 in Europe ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945, but the exact date varies depending on which of the victorious allies you’re referring to. The German surrender was given to the Western Allies (including Britain and the U.S.) on May 8th when Adolf Hitler had committed suicide. News quickly spread about the death of Adolf Hitler and the guns fell silent. Winston Churchill the then prime minister announced Victory in Europe. In Russia, World War II ended on May 9th. In the East, the war ended when Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14th, signing their surrender on September 2nd.

Why did the USA drop the bombs? 

The United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. By the time that the USA tested the first successful atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 to originally use on Germany, they have already been defeated, but Japan was still fighting in the war. This atomic testing marked the advent of the nuclear age.  

After spring 1945, with Japan in an extremely weak position, the United States was considering the following ways of bringing the long war to an end: invade the Japanese mainland in November 1945, ask the Soviet Union to join the war against Japan, assure continuation of the emperor system, or use the atomic bomb; the U.S. believed that the atomic bomb could end the war for good. Japan, did not give up so easily and the fact that Germany had surrendered did not deter Japan in anyway. Japan had two Atomic bombs dropped on the country, Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945. The Atomic bomb was a turning point in World War 2, just when everyone had thought things couldn’t get any worse; a single bomb could do more damage and kill more people than a thousand bombs could achieve. Soon after this catastrophic event Japans Imperial government consulted with Emperor to try and convince him to surrender, the emperor Hirohito agreed with the Imperial government. Hirohito then made a personal radio address announcing the decision.

On the 10th of August 1945 – Hirohito agreed in principle to surrender and it wasn’t until the 15th August 1945, Hirohito and Japan formally surrenders, ending World War 2 for the entire world.

Was it justified?

The idea that a certain action is justified or not, is subjective due to people having different backgrounds and perspectives due to different upbringings. This resulted in debates lasting decades, and depending on your own perspective on the issue, you will agree or disagree with the justification of the dropping of the bombs on Japan.

The historical context and military realities of 1945 are often forgotten in judging whether it was “necessary” for the United States to use nuclear weapons.  The Japanese had been the aggressors, launching the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 and subsequently systematically and flagrantly violating various international agreements and norms by employing biological and chemical warfare, torturing and murdering prisoners of war, and brutalizing civilians and forcing them to perform slave labour and prostitution.

Some professionals said yes, while others said no. Authors that say yes argue that the atomic bomb was necessary to end the war with Japan at the earliest possible moment. By the early summer of 1945, Japanese leaders knew they could not win. But they fought on in hopes of securing better surrender terms. When the atomic bomb became available in July 1945, it appeared to be the most promising way to end the war as soon as possible and without the drawbacks of the alternatives. The bomb was necessary to accomplish Truman's primary objectives of forcing a prompt Japanese surrender and saving American lives, perhaps thousands of them.

However the above idea above can be seen as justified, others say no. Before the bomb was used, U.S. intelligence officials believed the war would likely end when two things happened: When the U.S. let Japan know their Emperor could stay on as a figurehead, and when the Soviet army attacked. The U.S. did tell Japan the Emperor could remain, and the Soviets declared war, as agreed, on August 8. But U.S. officials chose not to test whether this intelligence was correct. Instead, Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, and Nagasaki on August 9. Because of logistics, an invasion of Japan could not begin for another three months, so the U.S. could have waited to see if Japan would surrender before dropping the atomic bombs.

Definition of the superpowers and the meaning of ‘Cold War’

The concept of a superpower was a product of the Cold War and the nuclear age. Its common usage only dates from the time when the adversarial relationship of the United States and the Soviet Union became defined by their possession of nuclear arsenals that were so formidable that the two nations were set apart from any others in the world. Superpower diplomacy is thus closely related to nuclear weapons. A superpower is defined as a state that has a leading position in the international system, capable of projecting significant military power anywhere in the world. In 1944, when the term was coined, there were three superpowers: the United States, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union. Throughout the time known as the Cold War, the rivalry between the superpowers the US and the USSR, set the tenor for world politics after Great Britain fell from its place as a superpower due to the stresses of the war and numerous independence movements among its colonies. Today the USA is seen as the only remaining superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

The Cold War refers to the nonviolent conflict between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. after 1945. a In other words, it was the conflict or dispute between two groups (USA and USSR) that does not involve actual physical fighting.

Areas of conflict and competition between the Superpowers in the Cold War  

An arms race denotes a rapid increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military power by rival states in peacetime; in this case, the rivalry between the USA and USSR after the Second World War. The build- up of arms is one of the most profound characteristics of the Cold war. The Arms race started with the creation of ‘Trinity’- the first bomb tested in New Mexico by the USA in 1945. The use of nuclear bombs was aimed at the end of the Second World War, but Germany had already surrendered. Japan was still fighting in the war, and the USA decided to use the bomb on Japan to end the war. On August 29th, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. This event ends America's monopoly of atomic weaponry and launches the Cold War. In the 1950's, The Arms Race became the focus of the Cold War. America tested the first Hydrogen (or thermo-nuclear) bomb in 1952, beating the Russians in the creation of the "Super Bomb". 

The political climate of the Cold war became more defined in January, 1954, when U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the policy that came to be known as "massive retaliation" -- any major Soviet attack would be met with a massive nuclear response. As a result to the challenge of "massive retaliation" came the most significant by-product of the Cold War, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), which were supported with the thermo-nuclear bomb (with a much greater destructive power than the original atomic bomb), inertial guidance systems (defines the difference between weight, the influence of gravity and the impact of inertia), and powerful booster engines for multistage rockets. For more than thirty years, the ICBM has been the symbol of the United States' strategic nuclear arsenal.

In October 1961, The Soviet Union detonates a nuclear device, estimated at 58 megatons, the equivalent of more than 50 million tons of TNT, or more than all the explosives used during World War II. It is the largest nuclear weapon the world had ever seen at that time. The Tsar Bomba (King of the Bombs) is detonated after US and USSR agrees to limit nuclear testing. It is the largest nuclear device ever exploded. Having no strategic military value, Tsar is viewed as an act of intimidation by the Soviets.

The Space Race was exacerbated by events such as the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the outbreak of war n Southeast Asia. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveler”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit, which came as a surprise to Americans. They had seen space exploration as the next frontier; a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration. 

In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon. In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1. For the U.S. effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok, and on May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit). The USA stated that they would be able to launch the first man in space. 

By landing on the moon, the United States effectively “won” the space race that had begun with Sputnik’s launch in 1957. The American public’s attention was captivated by the space race, and the various developments by the Soviet and U.S. space programs were heavily covered in the national media. While American astronauts were depicted as heroes, Soviets were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

As they had agreed at Yalta and Potsdam, Germany was pided into four zones of occupation. At first relations between the forces were good as all were united in the belief that Nazism should be crushed. However, the USA, Britain and France saw quickly that Germany would have to be supported economically if communism was to be prevented. The allies wanted a strong, democratic country to become their ally, who acted as a buffer against the communist states of Eastern Europe. In contrast, Stalin wanted to weaken Germany as a punishment for the war, to help rebuild the USSR by stealing German industrial technology and to make communism seem more attractive to the Germans. The West depended upon Soviet goodwill to keep open routes to the British, French and American zones of the city.

During 1961, in an effort to stem the tide of refugees attempting to leave East Berlin, the communist government of East Germany begins building the Berlin Wall to pide East and West Berlin. Construction of the wall caused a short-term crisis in U.S.-Soviet bloc relations, and the wall itself came to symbolize the Cold War.

Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, thousands of people from East Berlin crossed over into West Berlin to reunite with families and escape communist repression. To put an end to this outflow of people, all entry points in to West Berlin were blocked and the wall successfully pided the two parts of Berlin.

The end of the Cold War 1989 

The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989

The Berlin Wall came to be the symbol of the Cold War pision in Europe. This wall symbolised the difference between the western democrats and the eastern communists and the way they thought Germany should be lead. It also symbolised the inner conflict of Germany and the pision between ‘free’ or democratic. On 9 November 1989, the communist authorities of the German Democratic Republic had announced the removal of travel restrictions to democratic West Berlin. Thousands of East Germans streamed into the West, and in the course of the night, celebrants on both sides of the wall began to tear it down. 

For two generations, the Wall was the physical representation of the Iron Curtain, and East German border guards had standing shoot-to-kill orders against those who tried to escape. But just as the Wall had come to represent the pision of Europe, its fall came to represent the end of the Cold War. Throughout the Soviet bloc, reformers assumed power and ended more than 40 years of dictatorial communist rule. The reform movement that ended communism in east central Europe began in Poland. Two years later, the 15 communist satellite states that formed art of the USSR separated and collapsed like dominoes. By 1990, former communist leaders were ousted from their positions and free elections were held. 

Mikhail Gorbachev played a pivotal role in the events leading up to the wall's demise and beyond. His policies of “perestroika” - economic restructuring - and “glasnost,” or openness, which eliminated traces of Stalinist repression, like the banning of books and the omnipresent secret police, and gave new freedoms to Soviet citizens, paved the way for the dissolution of communist power in Eastern Europe and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The fall of the Soviet Union (very briefly) 1991

The Soviet state was born in 1917. That year, the revolutionary Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar and established a socialist state in the territory that had once belonged to the Russian empire. In 1922, Russia proper joined its far-flung republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin was the first leader of this Soviet state. After 1924, when the dictator Joseph Stalin came to power, the state exercised totalitarian control over the economy, administering all industrial activity and establishing collective farms. It also controlled every aspect of political and social life. People who argued against Stalin’s policies were arrested and sent to labour camps or executed. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders denounced his brutal policies but maintained the Community Party’s power, with a focus on the Cold War.

The first revolution of 1989 took place in Poland, where the non-Communist trade unionists in the Solidarity movement bargained with the Communist government for freer elections in which they enjoyed great success. This, in turn, sparked peaceful revolutions across Eastern Europe. Later that year, the Berlin Wall fell which symbolized the end of the Cold War. Frustration with the bad economy combined with Gorbachev’s hands-off approach to Soviet satellites to inspire a series of independence movements in the republics on the USSR’s fringes. One by one, the Baltic States (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) declared their independence from Moscow. Then, in early December, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine broke away from the USSR and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Weeks later, they were followed by eight of the nine remaining republics. (Georgia joined two years later.) At last, the mighty Soviet Union had fallen.

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Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945-1962

“Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945-1962,” in Odd Arne Westad and Melvin Leffler, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) 376-397.

Nuclear weapons are so central to the history of the Cold War that it can be dificult to disentangle the two. Did nuclear weapons cause the Cold War? Did they contribute to its escalation? Did they help to keep the Cold War “cold”? We should also ask how the Cold War shaped the development of atomic energy. Was the nuclear-arms race a product of Cold War tension rather than its cause?

The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War

The nuclear age began before the Cold War. During World War II, three countries decided to build the atomic bomb: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Britain put its own work aside and joined the Manhattan Project as a junior partner in 1943. The Soviet effort was small before August 1945. The British and American projects were driven by the fear of a German atomic bomb, but Germany decided in 1942 not to make a serious effort to build the bomb. In an extraordinary display of scientific and industrial might, the United States made two bombs ready for use by August 1945. Germany was defeated by then, but President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb against Japan.

The decision to use the atomic bomb has been a matter of intense controversy. Did Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order, as he claimed, to end the war with Japan without further loss of American lives? Or did he drop the bombs in order to intimidate the Soviet Union, without really needing them to bring the war to an end? His primary purpose was surely to force Japan to surrender, but he also believed that the bomb would help him in his dealings with Iosif V. Stalin. That latter consideration was secondary, but it confirmed his decision. Whatever Truman’s motives, Stalin regarded the use of the bomb as an anti-Soviet move, designed to deprive the Soviet Union of strategic gains in the Far East and more generally to give the United States the upper hand in defining the postwar settlement. On August 20, 1945, two weeks to the day after Hiroshima, Stalin signed a decree setting up a Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, under the chairmanship of Lavrentii P. Beriia. The Soviet project was now a crash program.

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Cold War History

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 26, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension marked by competition and confrontation between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and Western democracies including the United States. During World War II , the United States and the Soviets fought together as allies against Nazi Germany . However, U.S./Soviet relations were never truly friendly: Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and Russian leader Joseph Stalin ’s tyrannical rule. The Soviets resented Americans’ refusal to give them a leading role in the international community, as well as America’s delayed entry into World War II, in which millions of Russians died.

These grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity that never developed into open warfare (thus the term “cold war”). Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as U.S. officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and strident approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.

Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” In his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree].” As a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

“It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly “ arms race .” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.

HISTORY Vault: Nuclear Terror

Now more than ever, terrorist groups are obtaining nuclear weapons. With increasing cases of theft and re-sale at dozens of Russian sites, it's becoming more and more likely for terrorists to succeed.

The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans.

In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission , became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. 

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood , HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these “blacklisted” writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government. 

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and “loyalty oaths” became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact , a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World.” 

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam , where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict .

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

At the same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”—”relaxation”—toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine .

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s relationship to the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and “ perestroika ,” or economic reform. 

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall –the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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3 The First Nuclear Age

• Published: January 2009
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The Cold War, nuclear overkill, and mutual assured destruction defined the first nuclear age. Nuclear negotiations naturally became a field of superpower rivalry. The existential facts of nuclear overkill and national vulnerability did not preclude offending risk taking during the Cold War. Nuclear deterrence during the first nuclear age became established on annihilation threats. An essential precaution against a well-armed adversary became the limited nuclear options, but they were hardly reassuring. During the first nuclear age, the leisurely pace of proliferation was essential due to the major powers, neighbors, and international institutions it allowed to adapt to unwelcome change. The nuclear arms race attained unanticipated heights during this age. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev won the battle of exposing the back of the nuclear arms race. Until the end of the first nuclear age, technological developments in support of deterrence surpassed arms control when Reagan and Gorbachev reversed the nuclear arms race.

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Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War: Power and Proliferation

Throughout the Cold War, nuclear weapons became immensely powerful and far more widespread.

It is well-known that the Cold War was an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. What is not well-known is the sheer scale of the arsenals of nuclear weapons involved and the absolute power they were able to deliver.

At the height of the Cold War, a single nuclear warhead could deliver a blast hundreds, even thousands of times more powerful than the bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The order of magnitude was almost inconceivable. And the two superpowers had tens of thousands of these devices.

How the Power of Nuclear Weapons is Measured

Nuclear weapons are measured in terms of their blast yield. The term kiloton describes the blast equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had a blast yield of 15 kilotons and created a fireball 370 meters (395 yards) in diameter. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a similar yield. The blasts produced not only the fireball but immensely powerful shockwaves that flattened structures many miles beyond ground zero. In addition to the shockwaves were also the heat waves, electromagnetic pulse, ionizing radiation, and the radioactive fallout that would claim tens of thousands of lives in the days, weeks, and months after the explosion.

While these bombs were immensely powerful, their power pales in comparison to the hydrogen bombs, also known as thermonuclear weapons, that would be invented just a few years later. The yield of these new weapons would be measured not in kilotons, but in megatons, which is to say, the blast power of a million tons of TNT.

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After the United States developed and used the first atomic weapons and a post-World War II rift emerged between the Soviet Union and the United States, it became very apparent to Joseph Stalin that the Soviet Union needed to develop these weapons too.

They had already developed a nuclear weapons program during World War II, but it consisted of only around 20 scientists and was minuscule compared with the American Manhattan Project . After the real power of the bomb was demonstrated, the Soviets ramped up work on their project.

In 1949, their work paid off, and the first Soviet Atomic bomb, RDS-1, was detonated with a yield of 21 kilotons. Atomic weapons, however, weren’t enough. The United States immediately began working on creating the vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb.

On November 1, 1952, the Americans detonated their first hydrogen bomb. Codenamed “Ivy Mike,” the bomb had a yield of 10.4 megatons. It was detonated on the now-nonexistent island of Elugelab in the Marshall Islands . For the sake of comparison, it was 700 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

On August 12, 1953, the Soviets followed suit by detonating their own hydrogen bomb, although at a much lesser yield. The Soviets would follow up this success by building the most powerful thermonuclear weapons on the planet.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, the United States invested heavily in building up its stockpile of thermonuclear bombs while the Soviets increased their arsenal at a much slower pace. The early 1960s, however, would bring about vastly new dynamics.

By the 1960s, France and Britain had also acquired nuclear weapons and were building their own stockpiles. By this time, the Soviet Union put in the effort to catch up to the United States and signaled their intention without any subtlety.

On October 31, 1961, the Soviets detonated the Tsar Bomba over the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. The bomb was capable of producing a blast yield of 100 megatons, but since it was a bomb delivered by an aircraft, they decided to reduce the yield to 50 megatons in order to give the pilot a chance to survive. The Tsar Bomba exploded with a yield of between 50 and 58 megatons (3300 to 3900 times more powerful than the bomb at Hiroshima), and despite being hit by the electromagnetic pulse and the shockwave, the pilot managed to regain control of his Tu-95 bomber aircraft and survived the landing.

The blast was so powerful that the shockwave went around the world three times. Glass windows shattered 780 kilometers (480 miles) away on Dikson Island. The blast flash was seen more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) away and was visible from Greenland, Norway, and Alaska; the mushroom cloud reached 67 kilometers (42 miles) into the atmosphere.

Twelve months later, the Cuban Missile Crisis took the world to the absolute brink of nuclear disaster and was very narrowly avoided. Despite the brush with annihilation, both the United States and the Soviet Union expanded their nuclear arsenals at a rapid pace. It was clear, however, that treaties would be needed to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1967, all of Latin America agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons, and in 1968, the Non-Proliferation Treaty saw countries without nuclear weapons agree not to acquire them.

In addition to these significant treaties, agreements were also made to ban atmospheric testing and to ban nuclear weapons in space.

In 1964, China successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, and in 1966, Israel became the sixth nation to independently develop its own nuclear weapons.

Until the 1960s, the vast majority of nuclear weapons were in the form of bombs that were designed to be dropped on targets from high-altitude bombers. Advances in rocketry and guidance systems meant that bombs, in the form of warheads, could now be attached to missiles. The first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched on August 21, 1957. The Soviet R-7 flew for a distance of 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). The Americans experienced their first successful test launch with the Atlas A on November 28, 1958. During the 1960s, the Americans would replace their Atlas delivery systems with the Titan and the Minuteman for ICBMs, the Polaris for submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and the Skybolt for air-launched ballistic missiles (ALBMs).

During the 1970s, technological developments made nuclear weapons even more dangerous and effective. Many missiles were now capable of carrying Multiple Independently-Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). This meant a ballistic missile could carry more than one warhead, and each warhead could be deployed to take out a different target.

Despite the ban on nuclear weapons in outer space, the Soviet Union also employed the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), which allowed the missile to remain in low-Earth orbit and later be brought out of orbit to hit any location on Earth. This allowed the Soviet Union to bypass all of the United States’ defenses covering its northern border.

In May 1974, India joined the nuclear club by testing its first nuclear weapon, and on September 22, 1979, the Vela Incident occurred. A nuclear explosion was detected in the South Indian Ocean, and although there is no concrete proof of who was responsible, it is widely accepted that this test marked South Africa as pursuing nuclear weapons with the assistance of Israel.

In terms of limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, of great significance was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks/Treaty (SALT) of 1972, which limited the production of new weapons. In effect for five years, this was a serious agreement followed by both participants. SALT II was signed in 1979 but did not go into effect as the United States refused to abide by its conditions due to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

The last decade of the cold war saw the peak of nuclear weapon stockpiles. With over 70,000 nuclear weapons on the planet, the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was a real and ever-present threat.

Reagan and Gorbachev discussed the reduction and even abolition of nuclear weapons against the backdrop of huge worldwide protests calling for nuclear disarmament.

In 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which sought to ban land-based missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,400 miles. It is widely believed that this treaty helped to avoid a nuclear exchange in Europe. The United States withdrew from this treaty in 2019 under the leadership of Donald Trump.

Efforts to limit and reduce nuclear weapons were extremely successful, and stockpiles were dramatically reduced. In 1991, months before the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, South Africa became the first country to voluntarily become non-nuclear by having its arsenal dismantled.

On July 31, 1991, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, in which the United States and the Soviet Union agreed upon limits for the number of nuclear weapons each country could have. Weapons and silos in excess of these limits would be destroyed. The Soviet Union collapsed later that year, and the Cold War officially ended.

The world’s stockpile has been reduced greatly since the mid-1980s. From a total of over 70,000 warheads, there are now 12,500 warheads shared between nine countries. The vast majority of these weapons are owned by Russia and the United States. Despite the success in reducing the number of weapons, new technology has been integrated into systems, and new weapons have been designed and built, making modern nuclear weapons even more deadly than their predecessors. With the withdrawal from treaties and the expiration dates looming on agreements, the world has entered a new Cold War where the same dynamics exist in which the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. In that episode, the world was saved from a nuclear apocalypse by one man, Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov, who prevented a Soviet nuclear torpedo launch that would have started World War III.

The Cold War: Sociocultural Effects in the United States

By Greg Beyer BA History & Linguistics, Journalism Diploma Greg specializes in African History. He holds a BA in History & Linguistics and a Journalism Diploma from the University of Cape Town. A former English teacher, he now excels in academic writing and pursues his passion for art through drawing and painting in his free time.

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History of the Nuclear Age

• First Online: 30 March 2016

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This initial chapter summarizes the historical events of the nuclear age from Rutherford’s 1909 discovery that the nucleus is very small to our era in 2016. Nuclear weapons have had a major impact on global thinking, beyond that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next dozen pages are similar to drinking water from a fire hose. I apologize for the density of information, but it is necessary to put the rest of the book into perspective. This text is not a history book, one can easily spend the entire term on following the events, from Hiroshima to 9/11. Our goal describes the proliferation and terrorism technologies that threaten us, and the attempts to control these technologies. Today’s students didn’t grow up with this information, it is my task to summarize it, while not sinking you in details. Why study this history? I believe it is necessary for our survival, it is as simple as that.

Those who do not study history will relive it . Talk softly please. I have been engaged in experiments, which suggest that the atom can be artificially disintegrated. If it is true, it is of far greater importance than a war . [Ernest Rutherford, 1919].

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PRESIDENCY IN THE NUCLEAR AGE: THE COLD WAR AND THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE

CAROLINE KENNEDY:  Good afternoon. On behalf of the John F. Kennedy Library, the Kennedy Library Foundation, and members of my family -- I'm Caroline, by the way -- I want to thank all of you for coming today. [applause] For scholars and students, Presidential Libraries hold the memory of our nation. They are unique repositories of our country’s history. In helping to plan this institution, my mother described her hopes that it would be “a vital center of education and exchange and thought which will grow and change with the times.” So it’s an honor for the Kennedy Library to partner with the 12 other Presidential Libraries and the National Archives to host this timely symposium on the Presidency in the Nuclear Age.

The last time we did one of these on Vietnam, there were eerie parallels to current events, and I think the same is true today, which makes this conference all the more important and interesting, because we can’t help but notice the parallels with past conflicts when we read the news of recent months. Just a week ago, there were two satellite photos on the front page of the New York Times which showed the development of a hidden nuclear site in Iran. The first depicts a building under construction. That was from January. And the second was photographed last month, which reveals a fully built structure fortified to withstand potential attack. And obviously those of you who were here this morning and others who remember 1962 can't help but be reminded of the photographs of the U2 satellite planes that were presented to President Kennedy as proof of the construction of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba.

The question then, as it is now, is not whether nuclear weapons and the materials needed to build them are being developed, it's really how through the use of diplomacy and international law and all of our efforts, we can prevent these materials and weapons from getting into the wrong hands and ever being used against innocent civilians.

Throughout his career, my father believed in the power of history to guide us in finding the answers to challenges such as these. He encouraged members of his Cabinet to read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to prevent the kind of misjudgment that lead to World War I in his day. He wrote Profiles in Courage to share the inspiring stories of eight U.S. senators who acted on principle and in the national interest and encouraged modern day citizens to take the same kinds of risks.  And in his speeches he often alluded to lessons from the past. “History tells us,” he reminded a German audience on the eve of his speech in Berlin, “that disunity and relaxation are the great internal dangers of any alliance. Thucydides reported that the Peloponnesians and their allies were mighty in battle, but handicapped by their policymaking body in which each presses its own ends, which generally results in no action at all.”  President Kennedy believed in taking action. He warned against complacency and encouraged the free world to confront the threats posed by our adversaries through the art of statecraft. “We must be united not only by danger and necessity, but by hope and purpose as well,” he said. 

Our purpose as we gather here today is to assemble historians and presidential advisors, scholars and diplomats, to analyze past presidential efforts to limit the spread and use of nuclear weapons and consider what lessons they offer to the perils of our current challenges. I know how much my father relied on the advice and counsel of Ted Sorensen on these matters, and we are so fortunate to have him, along with one of President Kennedy's most trusted national security advisors, Carl Kaysen, both here with us today. [applause] And I know I speak on behalf of everyone in this audience in expressing my appreciation to them, and all our speakers, for their willingness to participate in these proceedings.

I also want to thank Sharon Fawcett, the Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries, the Foundation for the National Archives, and all of the Presidential Libraries for their support of this conference. I think these Libraries spread across our country are incredible resources for citizens to really learn about and take part in history in their communities and across our country. And so I'd love to support all of our Presidential Libraries and thank them all for being our partner here today.

Clifton Truman Daniel is here representing his grandfather’s Library, and it's always a pleasure for us to be associated with him and the Truman Institute. We are especially grateful to President George Herbert Walker Bush for officially convening us this morning, and President Bill Clinton, whose remarks will precede the last panel.

As it was described in the previous discussion, President Kennedy's experience during the Cuban Missile Crisis inspired him to move beyond the political and military structures he inherited and developed what he called a new strategy for peace. In the last year of his presidency, he made concerted efforts to strengthen international alliances and promote nuclear disarmament. Perhaps his proudest achievement was the first nuclear test ban treaty, a ceremonial copy of which is on display right outside this room.

Before the next panel begins, we will watch excerpts from a conversation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Harvard University professor, Graham Allison. I want to thank Graham Allison for traveling to New York to conduct this special interview so it could be part of our conference proceedings. And again, I want to thank all of you for coming and participating and I hope you'll come back many times in the future. Thank you. [applause] 

[VIA VIDEO]

GRAHAM ALLISON:   I'm Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard. It’s my great honor to introduce and interview a long-time professor, friend, colleague, former Secretary of State, former National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. So thank you, Henry, for taking the time.

HENRY KISSINGER:   Great pleasure to be here with you and a great pleasure to do this for the Kennedy Library since an important part of my life was associated with the family.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   Thank you. So what I'm going to do is ask three or four questions about nuclear weapons and presidents and their advisors’ attempts to grapple with them. And basically just put them out and let you talk, because I think the opportunity is to hear from you. In the White House years, you tell a story, which I think is fascinating; it’s the beginning of the Nixon Administration, and you say amidst all the rest that's going on, “My staff and I with the President’s strong support undertook a reexamination of military doctrine. The first problem was to redefine the strategy for general nuclear war. According to the doctrine of assured destruction, which had guided the previous administration, we deterred the Soviet attack by maintaining offensive forces capable of achieving a particular level of civilian deaths and industrial damage.  It was all very well to threaten mutual suicide for the purpose of deterrence, particularly in the case of a direct threat to national survival. But no president could make such a threat credible, except by conducting a diplomacy that suggested a high irrationality.”

 How could the U.S. hold its allies together as the credibility of that strategy eroded? And how would we deal with this issue if it came time, as you say, if deterrence failed and the President was finally faced with the decision to retaliate, who would take the moral responsibility for recommending a strategy based on mass extermination of civilians? And I know this is the one you've wrestled with all your life. But in thinking about it now in retrospect, what would you recommend and how would it make sense?

HENRY KISSINGER:   I have no answer. I have found no answer to it, because there is no answer to it. The question that tormented me most when I was in government and was one of those who would truly be asked, was what I would say if the two presidents I served were to tell me they’d come to the end of their diplomacy and they had no other weapons except nuclear weapons to resist. And I never gave myself an explicit answer, but I would have been, at a minimum, almost totally reluctant and almost … I cannot visualize that I would have said, “Let us implement the plan that might kill tens of millions of people in days.” 

On the other hand, in crisis, we had to maneuver as if we were, and mean it, increasing readiness in order to maintain the credibility of the threat. And there were two occasions when we went on alert, but a very limited alert, and the description of it by so-called investigative journalists are ridiculous. But there was a heightened readiness of conventional forces and that implied a certain limited readiness of nuclear forces.  But our adversary was in the same position. And so both sides stopped well short of nuclear war. But in the contemporary period, when they are not highly technologically advanced countries capable of developing nuclear weapons, they may be technologically advanced enough to produce nuclear weapons but not all the control systems, nor the warning systems. Nor do they necessarily have, or probably certainly do not have, the same moral restraints. The further spread of nuclear weapons, in my view, produces a situation where nuclear weapons will be used some time, and then the world will live in a different situation all together.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   Let me pick up from that one because when you had been the preeminent student of international order -- and my question really is to do with how fragile may the global nuclear order be today -- if you remember back in ’63, Kennedy warned that on the current trajectory, he said maybe by the mid ‘70s, you would have 20 nuclear weapon states. And he said that would be catastrophic because it’s just as you say, nuclear weapons would be used. That led to a diplomatic surge of activity that eventually produced the nonproliferation treaty and where we now have 9 ½ or 8 ½ nuclear weapon states rather than the 20 or 25 he was talking about.

In April, in Newsweek you wrote a very interesting piece in which you talk about the connection between nuclear weapons and world order. And you say, “Proliferation is the most immediate illustration of the relationship between world order and diplomacy. If North Korea and Iran succeed in establishing nuclear arsenals in the face of the stated opposition of all major powers in the U.N. Security Council and outside of it, the prospects for international order will be severely damaged. In a world of multiplying nuclear weapon states, it would be unreasonable to expect that those arsenals will never be used or will never fall into the hands of rogue organizations.” So you say the next couple of years are really the time where this global nuclear order will stand or fall?

HENRY KISSINGER:   Let’s take the two candidates for nuclear weapons:  first, North Korea. Here is a country that has next to no foreign trade, no resources that anyone wants, no really great industrial capacity. Its powerful neighbors, Japan, Russia, the United States, and South Korea, well we're not neighbors … 

GRAHAM ALLISON:   And China.

HENRY KISSINGER:   And China, we oppose their program. If in the face of all of this they can emerge with a nuclear capability, as they seem to be doing, and if they can violate previous agreements with impunity and get new negotiations out of it, then the prospects of world order are very limited. Because why should not other countries follow the same road? And we have seen in Syria, the North Koreans actually were building a plant on their own model. 

Now, Iran it’s even more complicated because North Korea does not directly threaten any other country with its capacity. Potentially it does, but Iran is in the middle of the world in which it directly, explicitly threatens Israel. But also the Sunni states in the region are not likely to sit passively while Iran, a Shiite, traditional ideological enemy, acquires a nuclear arsenal. And when you have the motivations of the Middle East added to nuclear weapons, restraint is an improbable result. So if Iran and North Korea sustain their nuclear ambitions, it will prove first that the international order and the multilateral system of negotiations is not working and cannot work.

Secondly, so that, therefore, there's no restraint on other states developing nuclear weapons. And furthermore, the use of nuclear weapons somewhere along the line becomes much more probable, and that, even if it is not on our territory -- of course, if it’s in our territory it will create a catastrophic reversal of perception. But even if we observe, say 100,000 people being killed in hours, which is one bomb, I think the impact of population will be that they will not want to be exposed to this. So you get tremendous new pressures for preemptive actions, some kind of imposed denuclearization of the world and an extremely substantially new approach to international order.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   One of the questions somebody was asking me the other day is could Kim Jong-il, having this history of defying everybody and getting paid and blackmailing and extorting, could he imagine he could just sell one of these ten bombs to Osama bin-Laden and get away with it. And even when you think of that, you think, “Of course he couldn't think that.” And then you say, “Could he imagine he could sell to Syria a Yongbyon-style plutonium producing reactor that's 10,000 times bigger than this one little bomb and get away with it?

HENRY KISSINGER:   Well, he did that.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   And he seemed to do it. So I would have told you he would never imagine he could do the Syrian thing.

HENRY KISSINGER:   Well, the North Korean regime is a strange regime and they are probably more out of tune with what is happening elsewhere than almost any country in the world. And their need for foreign currency is so great that you could imagine that they’d do something just to sustain themselves. But certainly as the number of nuclear weapons states increases either through their country’s decisions or through what the Pakistanis present was a private enterprise, or genuinely through private enterprise of some kind, of unauthorized activities, the further spread of nuclear weapons seems to me inevitable, or steps where some country owns the delivery system and buys the warheads, so all kinds of … 

GRAHAM ALLISON:   Maybe the Saudis, yes.

HENRY KISSINGER:   Whatever country.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   Could be, yeah. The final question:  I mean, here you look back on many, many years of wrestling with the nuclear issue. And now if you look forward, your proposition that: one, on the current trajectory things are going quite badly. So unless there's some bending of those trim lines, it’s quite plausible.

HENRY KISSINGER:   The negotiations for Iran haven't started. But it's very hard for me to believe that the Iranians will be less subtle than the Koreans, probably more so.

And the international environment on the whole is more favorable to them than it is to North Korea. So unless there is a sudden reversal of attitudes in Iran, I would expect the negotiations to be protracted and at best delayed proliferation by a very short period. And then we have the problem that we've been discussing.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   That you've been discussing. So for the people at the Kennedy Library Symposium, you can’t stop on so pessimistic a note.

HENRY KISSINGER:   No, you need to come up with some great ideas.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   What could you say that would be more optimistic about the prospects for a president and nuclear weapons?

HENRY KISSINGER:   Look, I got started on this, which will pain some of my Democratic friends, through Arthur Schlesinger, who handed me a communication he had received from Tom Finland (?) about nuclear strategy. And I wrote him a letter expressing my views, which he then sent to Foreign Affairs , not I, and which got me into writing about nuclear matters at all.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   So that's in the mid ‘50s?

HENRY KISSINGER:   That was the mid ‘50s. It was 50 years ago. So I would appeal to this group of a new generation. We have left you this problem. I know what the problem is. I know it requires a determined policy to deal with, but I'm not saying that I have it all worked out. And maybe you can come to conclusions or start research or start thinking that will lead us toward a direction where nuclear weapons do not dominate our thinking about foreign policy. That is a key requirement.

GRAHAM ALLISON:   Thank you very much, Dr. Kissinger.

HENRY KISSINGER:   All the best. 

[END OF VIDEO]

MARVIN KALB:   Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Marvin Kalb. I used to be a reporter and I want to say just at the very beginning that it’s my pleasure to have been asked by the Kennedy Library to return here once again. I've spent a lot of time here always to my benefit. I've learned a great deal. And this time, this panel is going to pick up where the other two left off. But our responsibility is to discuss this issue between the Nixon Administration and the Reagan Administration. In other words, between SALT I, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty 1972 Moscow, until Reykjavik 1986, and at Reykjavik, both Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev were actually discussing something that Kissinger has just finished with: the idea that we ought to come to a time, if possible, when we can do away with nuclear weapons. And Kissinger was saying as a tool in diplomacy that you could think about diplomacy in other ways.

Graham Allison in the earlier panel made the point, and I just wanted to pick up on that, that as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis and then the American University speech, ’62, ’63, I got the impression that he was saying that both sides were moving towards a more sensible control, the effort toward a more sensible control of nuclear weapons. Now, we have to remember that in 1964, October, Khrushchev was kicked out of power because there were people in the Politburo -- Eisenhower might have called them the Soviet version of the military industrial complex -- who did not like the idea of any movement in this direction and were offended as Soviet Union, in their eyes the great Soviet Union, had lost during the Cuban Missile Crisis. No question about that.  And it’s interesting that if you begin to check on defense spending in both the Soviet Union and in the United States through the ‘60s, you'll find Russia pumping a great deal of money into strategic weapons; the United States towards the end of the ‘60s not putting as much money in because President Johnson wanted to have both his Great Society and the continuation of the war in Vietnam, and Vietnam was beginning to cost a great deal of money. So we get to 1972, and we have what SALT I called strategic parity between the two sides.

Now, I'm here with to my immediate left, Tom Graham, Special Representative for the President on Arms Control during the Clinton Administration; to my immediate right, Ken Adelman, Director of U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament during the Reagan Administration; Nick Thompson, the author of this new and quite wonderful book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War; and you have already met Dick Rhodes over here, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, he knows everything about this subject.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Can I say one thing?

MARVIN KALB:   Tom?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   I would like the record to show that also I was Ken Adelman’s lawyer when he was in the … 

MARVIN KALB:   You know, and Ken needed a lawyer. [laughter] Okay, Tom, let us start with you. Tell us what it was like. Was the decision to go for SALT I the direct result of the idea of strategic parity, or was it that one side or the other saw an advantage that the other was getting and through a treaty could try to control that spread?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   I once asked, in 1972, a prominent Soviet official, what would have happened to the Soviet ICBM program if there had been no interim agreement. And he said that we would have continued building ICBMs until our generals said we had enough.  I think the United States was very much interested in stopping the Soviet increase in the number of their ICBMs and ICBM launchers. We did want an agreement that would halt the continuing, and very considerable, buildup in Soviet offense because if it wasn't stopped, we’d have to respond to it.  And so certainly on the U.S. side there was an interest. And the Soviets traditionally are always interested in a deal with the United States, at least in principle, because it puts them on the same level as us.

MARVIN KALB:   Now Nick Thompson, do you have a feeling that there was altruism on both sides? Both sides were seeking ways to control the spread of these dreadful weapons so we could all live in peace and harmony?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   There were definitely some people on both sides who believed that we should stop the spread of these dreadful weapons and live in peace and harmony. And actually, on the inside I think most people were trying to gain maximum advantage for their own side. My grandfather, Paul Nitze, liked to argue that what you really need to measure is you need to measure throw weight and you need to reduce to equal levels of throw weight. Now, it just so happened that throw weight is the metric by which the Soviet Union had the largest advantage. So it's like an apple farmer and a watermelon farmer and the apple farmer says, “Well, let’s tax on weight.” It’s the way to arrange the arms talks in order to help your side the most.

Now, that's a good negotiating position and it’s a good place to start. But he wasn’t doing it entirely out of altruism. He wanted to find a situation that would be stable, and to him stability meant one where the United States has the maximum advantage, the maximal rational position that you can get to because that will be most stable. Where we have more weapons, where we're the least threatened by them, that's the position that is best for us and that is also best for the world. And I think that was the starting point of the U.S. negotiating team and they would maintain that position throughout the talks at Reykjavik. 

MARVIN KALB:   Ken, explain to us what was the position of leading Republican thinkers in the ‘70s leading up to the Reagan Administration where you were. What was the thinking among these people as to the advantages for the United States of actually entering into these agreements which would restrict our ability to build up against a perceived Soviet threat?

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Let me just say that I thought the two panels this morning were just superb and this has been just a terrific conference, one of the best I've ever been to. And the subject is an important and engrossing subject.

I guess I'm a conservative Republican, and I believe that arms control should, like all public policy, should be kind of honest about it. And there's a big difference between intention and results, okay? And it’s wonderful to have wonderful intentions in the world, but it is awfully nice to recognize concrete results when they come about. And in the ‘70s when you were looking at the SALT I and the SALT II, the intentions were wonderful. Let’s do something about nuclear weapons. Just like President John F. Kennedy wanted to do something about nuclear weapons, and that something that President Kennedy wanted to do something about was to have a comprehensive test ban treaty. It ended up as an atmospheric test ban treaty that really wasn't so much of a nuclear issue, it was an environmental issue. Why? Because you got to put all tests underground and it increased the number of tests that both sides did afterwards. So you can say, well, it was a wonderful treaty, it was wonderful for the environment. I don't think it did much for the nuclear buildup. 

My objection to SALT I and SALT II were that there were limits on nuclear weapons that were far above what the Soviet Union and the United States were building at the time. So if you were restricting me from high jumping 6’2”, I could live with that because I don’t high jump 6’2”, I don't even do 5’2”. And so it was no sweat off my back. It gave people in the West who lived in free societies the illusion that there was something that was going on that was going to be helpful to them where the limits were so high that they really weren't any limit at all.

Let me end by saying, and your very good question, Marvin, on this, end by saying that it is important to concentrate on what are results in arms control. And to tell you the truth, that wonderful exhibit on the history of the presidency and nuclear weapons, the subject of our conference right here, has all kinds of great exhibits. It includes papers of Jimmy Carter, what he said on SALT II. There is no mention there of the only treaty that has eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, which was the INF Treaty. There is no picture of Ronald Reagan signing the INF Treaty. There is no mention in the thing of what date it was or that it was at all. And so we have the only single treaty in arms control that has accomplished something real besides the nonproliferation treaty, which I think was wonderful. And it is not in the history of nuclear arms and the presidency, it’s not even mentioned. Now, that's not fair.

MARVIN KALB:   We have two people who’d like to comment. Hang on just one second. Tom, please?

KENNETH ADELMAN:   It’s wonderful intentions, and no results.

MARVIN KALB:   Hang on a second. Tom?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Ken, you have to start somewhere. You can’t just, in these negotiations, you can’t just start with where you want it to come out. The purpose of SALT I and SALT II was to try to stop the momentum. Admittedly, the limits were high, that's where they started, and then in the SALT I and SALT II. And then when we moved on to START, we were gradually able to ratchet it down. But I think the SALT had to come first.

MARVIN KALB:   Dick, Ken used the word “illusion.” And I'm wondering right now, I'd like to hear from you a philosophical point of view. You've been at this for a long time. Is there an element of illusion in the pursuit of the control of nuclear weapons when we look around and people are still trying to get them.

RICHARD RHODES:   Let me just mention a couple of things in the context of this period of time.

MARVIN KALB:   Please.

RICHARD RHODES:   You all recall, I'm sure, the famous line of the Soviet negotiator after the Cuban Missile Crisis who said to our negotiator, it may have been Nitze as a matter of fact, “We will make sure you will never be able to do this to us again.” He meant, of course, stand them down over this conflict between the two sides at that time. The result of that was that the Soviet Union began building up its arsenal. That's why that growth followed afterwards until by the end of Jimmy Carter’s era, there really was parity, whatever that means. 

But I want to emphasize through all of this discussion in terms of illusion and reality something Robert Oppenheimer said very early on. He said something like this, “Our 20,000 th warhead isn’t going to matter much compared to their 5,000 th in the larger scheme of things.” So when you're talking about buildups and we're ahead, and so forth, that's the illusion. The illusion is that once you have a certain number of nuclear weapons, more will somehow give you an advantage -- of course, provided that they're secure, that there's a way to prevent them from being taken out, and so forth.  But the rest was a kind of, in my reading, a kind of high Mandarin mathematical game of angels dancing on the head of pins about who has more in throw weights, and so forth. If you have a few, as our military said to our presidents more than once, you have more than enough. And after that, it's politics. And in the case of the Cold War, it was very much domestic politics in this country as much as international politics in the world that led to these issues back and forth about what we should build and what we shouldn’t build.

MARVIN KALB:   And two points we've already seen earlier today, that it was the use of two atomic bombs that introduced the atomic age and introduced this whole problem that we're discussing right now, how do you control these … 

RICHARD RHODES:   Two miniscule atomic bombs, two tactical nuclear weapons by modern terms.

MARVIN KALB:   By modern standards, exactly. Tom?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   And the United States during the Cold War built 72,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union 55,000 nuclear weapons. That's probably more than we needed.

MARVIN KALB:   Is that right?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Well, you know, there's an interesting measure that's come up as a result of the work first on the atmospheric effects of nuclear weapons and more recently in the general look at global warming. The same computer models that have made it possible to look at global warming have made it possible to go back and look at the question of nuclear winter. And the results are that it would be even worse than was predicted. In one particular study that I find terrifying the scientists look at what would happen if India and Pakistan exchanged 50 Hiroshima-scale atomic bombs each. Now, that's about 1 ½ megatons total yield. But because they would inevitably be used on cities, which have lots of kindling, the effect would have spread around the world from even such a small regional nuclear war and lowered the Earth’s average temperature by one to two degrees, which sounds like nothing, but it represents something like what happened during the global meltdown during the Middle Ages when crops failed in the summertime and millions of people starved. So even a small regional nuclear war is more than enough to bring about this baleful change in our environment.

MARVIN KALB:   You know, it's interesting, too, that we ought not to forget that in the Soviet Union there were similar debates and similar arguments that were taking place. There was a group in the Kremlin that believed in what is called proletarian internationalism. And there was another group, peaceful coexistence. Both believed that communism would prevail in the end, but both were thinking about different tactics, which led to different strategies. And the first group was much more adventuresome in the ‘70s at projecting Soviet power in Africa and trying to do it when the United States collapsed in Vietnam in 1975. They regarded that as proof that communism was going to succeed all over the world.  So you have that kind of conflict on both sides dealing with something, the idea of the Mandarin Chinese, the number of weapons always seemed to me sort of crazy. There was an unreality about it all.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   One point to follow up. We also know from recently opened Soviet archives that the military industrial complex in the Soviet Union was even more powerful than in the United States. So even if the United States had stopped, even if the United States had said, “We're not going to do this,” it’s not clear the Soviet Union could have stopped.

MARVIN KALB:   Exactly.

RICHARD RHODES:   Well, then it’s clear that, in fact, their factories were working on the principle of what they called over-fulfillment of the quota where you're supposed to have 110 percent next year and that they were doing that in terms of building up their nuclear arsenals. So they were just cranking them out as rapidly as possible.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Also, we were well into the area of having far more weapons than we had conceivable targets.

MARVIN KALB:   Ken?

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Yeah, two points. One is you mentioned the dawn of the nuclear age. I was very lucky in 1963 while at Grinnell College to spend an hour with Harry Truman talking about dropping the bomb and his involvement in that. I took a morning constitutional, or what he called his morning walk, with him at 7:00.

MARVIN KALB:   Did you keep up with him?

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Yeah, it was wonderful, a hundred paces a minute I remember. And so we were talking about that and he was of the view that, number one, George Marshall had enormous influence on his thinking, and Marshall wanted to proceed and win the war in the Pacific. And number two, that he had gotten memos from the Joint Chiefs saying that 500,000 Americans would die in the invasion of Japan, and he as President of the United States was not going to be responsible for 500,000 American deaths that he could prevent.  And I said, “Oh my God, it must have been a hard decision for you?” And I can't remember exactly what he said, but the impression was it wasn't a hard decision; it was pretty clear, and that he slept very well that night. I'm sure he wasn’t revealing anything to me as a college kid at that time, but it really was fascinating to get a view into the dawn of the nuclear age on that. 

Point number two, I would say, and Richard you've done wonderful work, we loved your books, I love your books, on the nuclear issue. A lot of these scenarios that you paint on the nuclear winter and the whole Herman Kahn exchange and everything, it got very theological very quickly and really lost any kind of touch of what would happen in the real world. No, it really did and it was kind of goofy, to tell you the truth. And for many years, I would go out to Omaha for the SAC briefing on strategic arms and what we would do in a nuclear exchange, and there would be just hundreds and thousands of exchanges back and forth. And I kept asking the SAC commander, and they kept changing, what about one or two options for a president? And the idea was that there was no one or two options for the president that they could conceive of, which seemed to me kind of ridiculous.  Which also seemed to me to lead into what Ronald Reagan really was hot about, which was the Strategic Defense Initiative. In other words, to give a president another option besides the option of A, doing nothing, or B, going after a bunch of civilians in the Soviet Union that did no harm to the United States at all and wiping out some cities, a third option of protecting the country against an incoming ballistic missile, and I thought it was a wonderful idea.

MARVIN KALB:   And we're going to talk about the SDI very soon. But we're jumping a president and we cannot be disrespectful to President Carter. Because among the many things that he did, the point, I think, is that he was a one term President and he's gotten a bad rap from historians and I think an awful lot of reporters as well. But in his one term in office, he did do a number of very remarkable things in foreign policy. One of them was to come up with the SALT II agreement. Never ratified, but the SALT II agreement was signed, and it was in Vienna with President Brezhnev and we’ll get a look at that right now, if somebody would roll down the curtain. 

MARVIN KALB:   I've always been enormously impressed by the number of times Presidents in similar situations to President Carter say things that are so obvious. These agreements can, in fact, help and they can do wonderful things. And yet, with SALT II it was never passed. It was never approved by the U.S. Senate. And so the Presidents can strike their deals but they have to be mindful of the political support that they have back at home. Nick, were there other issues involved in why Carter could not get that through the Senate?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   Well, as Paul Nitze’s grandson, I have a familiar responsibility for the failure of SALT II. He was probably more responsible than any other civilian for stopping that treaty. His argument was SALT II will freeze into place a situation where the Soviets are stronger than the Americans. If we freeze into place that situation, they'll be tempted either to attack us or to use their advantage for leverage in, say, Berlin or Angola. That was the argument, and there have been lots of debates, including people here, about whether that was true or not.

So he goes, testifies in front of the Senate 12 times. He forms a committee for the present danger; he writes all these books. And then he also does something interesting at the very end. In August of ’79, he sort of helps to authorize the CIA to leak some slightly bogus information about a brigade of Soviet soldiers in Cuba, which according to one of the lead negotiators in SALT II, is the banana peel on which the Senate negotiations tripped.

MARVIN KALB:   Did your grandfather leak that?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   He didn't leak it, but the CIA official came to him and said, “I have this information. People sort of know about it.” My grandfather is at a breakfast table in his house, he said, “Ah, that's old. It's not really true.” And then paused for a second and said, “You know what? Maybe we should tell people about that again.” And a couple of days later, it appears in a senator from Florida … 

RICHARD RHODES:   Jones.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   Right. Brings it up and everything breaks out. Getting to one of Tom’s points from earlier, I interviewed a man named General Ditinov (?), who was the equivalent of the Deputy Secretary of Defense in Moscow. And we're sitting down at a table in Moscow and he said, “You know, if SALT II had passed, we wouldn't have gone into Afghanistan.” He said, “Maybe arms treaties are somewhat superficial. You're blocking in limits that are irrational. Who cares?  You have enough weapons to destroy the world. But actually they do do something; there is something to be said for signing these agreements and shaking hands.” And his argument was now there's evidence that no one in the Soviet Union actually ever officially authorized the invasion of Afghanistan, so you can’t really be sure that this man is correct, but let’s assume he’s correct. There's a pretty strong indicator there in his argument that these treaties do matter. 

Now, whether it’s good or bad, looking in five years, SALT II is defeated. Five years later, that looks sort of like a bad thing. The Soviets went into Afghanistan. Five years later, that looks sort of like a bad thing. Fifteen years later where it looked like that had brought down the Soviet Union, that kind of looked like a good thing. Twenty-five years later where Afghanistan has turned into what it is and some of the people we funded have turned into our major enemies, maybe that wasn't such a good thing. So it just shows how these agreements, when you play them out into the future, they have very, very complicated chains of effects.

MARVIN KALB:   And, Tom, please go ahead?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   I was on the, if you'll forgive me, Nick, I was on the opposite side of your grandfather on that one.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   More than one person was there.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   And I thought that the SALT II treaty did do some significant things and that it stopped things where they were and then brought them down about 10 percent. That it could have been improved, of course, but it was a step which led us eventually to start an INF and start I and II, and so forth. I firmly believe that what defeated the SALT II treaty was the Carter Administration's, in my opinion, mishandling of the Cuban issue whereas somehow the 1,700 Russian troops in Cuba were converted into a central threat to American national security and the President goes on national television and says, “Don’t worry, at least not too much.” And just things started to go downhill after that. Then you had the Iranian crisis where we didn't look so good either. But many Soviets did tell us, rightly or wrongly, mainly it was just a fabrication, but that high ranking Soviets said that, “We concluded in Moscow after your less than effective handling of the Cuban issue that you were no longer interested in SALT II. And, therefore, why not go into Afghanistan? We had nothing to lose.”

MARVIN KALB:   You think there was a connection between Afghanistan and SALT II?

RICHARD RHODES:   You know, that's something I really haven’t looked at. Afghanistan was such a curious event, so seemingly inappropriate, anomalous. Carter was convinced that they were on their way to the Mediterranean and issued a strong statement that if they got out of Afghanistan, “We’d nuke you.” I mean, he really went that far.

MARVIN KALB:   Get them to the Persian Gulf before they get to the Mediterranean.

RICHARD RHODES:   Oh, there you are.

MARVIN KALB:   There was that feeling, certainly, among any number of people, and not just Republicans, Ken, who felt that the Russians were, in the late ‘70s, emboldened to move aggressively in different parts of the world.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   That wasn't an impression, that was right.

MARVIN KALB:   And they were. And as I said before, they had been moving into Africa and they were very happy with the result of the Vietnam War and they felt that Afghanistan was there. But if you talk to Russians, they don't talk to you about SALT II on this issue, they talk to you about something closer to home. For them, it was that their leader, Brezhnev, had a doctrine. That once a government was socialist, it would remain socialist with the help of the Soviet Union. And the government in Afghanistan at that time, by the way, imposed by the Russians, was socialist. And so they felt that they had to go in to protect them. I'm only making the point that it was not really nuclear weapons that propelled the Russians into Afghanistan, but something closer to home; namely ideological fidelity, really. But you've been itching, and I don't want to hold you back any longer. [laughter]  

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I've been itching over several things. Number one is I don't like the moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union, and we're all in this together. I certainly don’t like the whole attitude that the Carter Administration or President Carter had in Vienna that basically where he said after the pardon, and I thought we were going to get to it in the television, that “President Brezhnev and I dream the same dreams and have the same aspirations for the world,” which is absolutely false. 

MARVIN KALB:   I mean, Presidents do look into souls and see all sorts of things. [laughter] 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Well, they should, they should. It's a very silly approach to foreign policy.

RICHARD RHODES:   I don’t think Brezhnev’s dreams had anything to do with the policy.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Yeah, it may not have anything to do. I am saying one of the, I think, contributions of the Reagan Administration, and I think it was a contribution of the John F. Kennedy Administration, too, to tell you the truth, was that they saw the Soviet Union in realistic terms. Not that they dreamed the same dreams and had the same aspirations of the world, but they had a different basic philosophy of whether the state predominates over the individual or the individual determines the fate of the state and elects his and her own leaders and that we the people preside in a political system. And I think that the two realistic presidents, among others, of the post-war era were John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. 

And I think that was awfully important, especially in the ‘80s when Reagan by and large de-legitimized the Soviet Union, which was a tremendous difference between what President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger had done where they said, “There are two super powers. We have to work out all these things because both of us have a lot of power and we have to deal with them.” Reagan always wanted negotiations, and I was grateful for it because I was there in a very minor role trying to help him do that negotiation.  But he always saw it not as these moral equivalents in any sense. He saw it as a legitimate, freely elected government by the West, and an illegitimate totalitarian dictatorship on the Soviet side. And he started to say as early as 1982 that communists and the Soviet Union would end up in the ash heap of history. That was de-legitimizing. I think that with SDI and the evil empire were enormously important on really ending the Soviet Union and the threat we say we have today. And I think that contribution is a contribution many times what any kind of contribution in arms control, except for the INF treaty and the nonproliferation treaty, those were two real marks in the arms control.  But otherwise, it was all kind of talk, it was all good intentions, it was all that you were really going to show how much you really, really did care. And I am all for caring, and, you know … 

MARVIN KALB:   I'm glad to hear that, that's good. 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I reached out in my sensitive cares, my sensitive inside. But the fact is that as leaders of countries with a lot of responsibility, we should do more than just care, we should have real results. And the real results I'm thinking of, time now is stop the spread of nuclear weapons right now, not going to show how much we care by talking about a zero nuclear option, which is just total pie in the sky and a big waste of time, if you ask me. But in a way to really talk about the specific problems with specific results in charge. Because otherwise, it's just all fluff, and I can’t stand fluff in government.

MARVIN KALB:   Okay. 

RICHARD RHODES:   That conceded, I think I've always pondered what the world would think of this democracy of ours if we had managed to kill 65 million people on one of our Curtis LeMay excursions across Europe and Russia and China. What exactly would democracy mean under those circumstances? My point is this: allowing for the differences between the sides, allowing for the worst possible Soviet intentions, the real danger was, and is, nuclear weapons themselves. Not the moral issue of who’s right and who’s wrong, in my judgment. I think that's where the Reagan Administration went wrong, by basically, and even more so the second Bush Administration, with the idea that somehow it’s okay to have nuclear weapons if you're the good guys, but it’s not okay to have nuclear weapons if you're the bad guys. [applause] 

MARVIN KALB:   Hang on, you had your shot. 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I just disagree.

MARVIN KALB:   Tom, you wanted to contribute. 

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Well, first, just to follow up on what Dick just said, I do think it’s bad policy to say good guys can have nuclear weapons and bad guys can’t because good guys change and become bad guys. The perfect example of that is that there was a lot of people advocating that we should engage in controlled proliferation back in the late ‘70s and see to it that our friends, the good guys, got nuclear weapons and kept them from the bad guys. And two of our friends that should get these weapons, it was thought then, were Iran and Yugoslavia. Wouldn't that have been a great idea? And so it is the weapons themselves.

MARVIN KALB:   Who came up with those ideas?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Well, a famous Washington Post columnist was one of them. His name begins with H. 

MARVIN KALB:   Who do you have in mind?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Well … 

MARVIN KALB:   Come on, who do you have in mind?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   I can’t remember his full name. He’s the man in the wheelchair. 

What's his name?

MARVIN KALB:   Charles Krauthammer.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Krauthammer, yes. It wasn't H. 

MARVIN KALB:   And Charles is the one you say who came up with the idea of …?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Well, I wouldn't say he came up with, but he was one of the people.

MARVIN KALB:   Who was pushing the idea?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Who recommended this as a possible … 

RICHARD RHODES:   Well, George W. Bush as well. You know, he opened the way to India becoming a part of the whole program without joining the nonproliferation treaty, so he had that idea as well.

MARVIN KALB:   Talking about Bush II.

RICHARD RHODES:   Bush II, yes.

MARVIN KALB:   Tom, finish your point.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   What I wanted to address was some of the things that Ken said. I don't think it ever was the intent that arms control negotiations or limitations on arms would bring down the Soviet Union. Not that people were against bringing down the Soviet Union, it is just that it was thought that what's really important here is to control these weapons so we don’t destroy each other and bring them gradually under control. The only arms control negotiation in which I was involved that I thought maybe did have that, at least partially as an objective, was the conventional armed forces in Europe treaty, direct negotiation between the Warsaw Pact. And that is when the East fell apart and the Soviet Union dissolved as the aftermath of that negotiation.  But that was different. These nuclear negotiations, the purpose was to establish stability. And I will concede absolutely that President Reagan did a lot to bring the Cold War to an end and to bring down the Soviet Union. I wouldn't dispute that at all. I just don’t think arms control had anything to do with it, nor was it intended that it did.

MARVIN KALB:   I would dispute that. I'm not sure that the Reagan Administration was principally responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   I said a lot, a lot.

MARVIN KALB:   A lot or however you want to define a lot, Mr. Diplomat. No, I mean seriously. What principally brought the Soviet Union down was, in my judgment, was that it was a rotten system and it would ultimately collapse.

KENNETH ADELMAN:  Not that way.

MARVIN KALB:   Oh yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Nick, did you want to contribute?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   I want to, in a way, sort of come … Tom’s point was that arms control wasn’t designed to bring down the Soviet Union. Your point is that the Soviet Union was a rotten system that was going to collapse. I think you can actually make the argument that American foreign policy is defined by any one word during the

Cold War, is defined by containment. And the idea of containment, as framed by George Kennan when he came up with the idea, was that the Soviet Union is a rotten system and we should be confident in our ability that if we can draw this out, if we can prevent the Soviet Union from expanding, if we can just contain them, eventually we will prevail. 

And he said, in his famous X article, he said the Soviet Union could overnight go from one of the most powerful nations in the world to one of the most piteously weak. And this is a very important idea, even for today. And remember that if you have confidence in America, you don't necessarily need to destroy the enemies, you just need to contain the enemies. Now, what exactly that means in foreign policy debates today, we could have long, long conversations about. But it’s a very important idea, and I think it’s one from the Cold War that we should not forget. 

THOMAS GRAHAM:   One second. The nexus between a rotten system and arms control, I think, is most graphically displayed by the SALT I treaty, and I think many people believe that's a good treaty. Certainly, a big effort right now is going into finding a replacement for it when it expires. But if George Bush the first hadn’t taken the position that he wanted to sign that treaty before he started his Maine vacation, we never would have had that treaty. He agreed with Gorbachev that he was going to sign it on July 31 st , and go on vacation August 1 st . And the coups took place on August 9 th .  If the START treaty had been delayed until the fall, there never would have been a START treaty or limitations on strategic options because the Soviet Union, being rotten, was falling apart. So there is a relationship.

MARVIN KALB:   We have to move on to the next phase. I know you have something to say. 

THOMAS GRAHAM:   You've got to let Ken … Give him … 

MARVIN KALB:   Ken, I want to give you at least … 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Thirty seconds.

MARVIN KALB:   Thirty seconds.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Okay. 

MARVIN KALB:   Forty.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Forty-five.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I feel like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

MARVIN KALB:   Don’t joke about it, you're losing time. 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I feel like Davy Crockett at the Alamo, swinging Betsy around.

MARVIN KALB:   You've just blown 20 seconds. [laughter] 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Taking on just not my panel members … 

MARVIN KALB:   Twenty-five.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   … but the moderator as well I have to take on.

MARVIN KALB:   You blew it. Let’s move on. [laughter] 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Let me tell you, Richard, I think, is mostly wrong because the problem is I understand nuclear weapons, but the problem is who has the nuclear weapons. We don’t worry about Britain and France having nuclear weapons. There is a difference between a scalpel, a knife in the hand of a surgeon as opposed to the hand of a mugger in the alley. And, therefore, the problem is not primarily nuclear weapons, the problem is primarily who has it. I think in Tom Graham I disagree … Let me just go around. This is equal treatment on that. Tom, you say that arms control was not bringing about the nirvana. But every president who gets around an arms control agreement talks about the nirvana, and it is impossible to separate the two on that. 

Our moderator I'll take on …  

MARVIN KALB:   Esteemed.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Esteemed moderator, on that because he’s giving me this extra time, for which I'm very grateful. And it’s not true that the Soviet Union collapsed because it’s a rotten system that was bound to collapse. It is true it was a rotten system that collapsed, okay? But lots of rotten systems around the world don't collapse. Lots of rotten systems around the world keep building up their military, especially because that's the one thing they do very well on that. And we just saw Henry Kissinger up in the sky here talking about North Korea. That is a rotten system, that is far more rotten than the Soviet Union. They are doing fine on building nuclear weapons, thank you very much, and they are not collapsing, unfortunately to me, and they have not for those years. So that analogy, that oh my God, it was so rotten it had to collapse, is just wrong, Marvin, with all due respect. 

MARVIN KALB:   Ken … 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Nick, let me turn to you. 

MARVIN KALB:   No, no, no. You're finished. You're finished. I mean, you're not only wrong, you're finished. 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I just wanted to leave no friends on the panel. 

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   We'll go through the audience when … 

MARVIN KALB:   Down, Fido, down, down. [laughter]  We talked earlier about the possibility that great leaders are actually thinking, and Dick, you had mentioned that, and Kissinger alluded to it, sort of, the idea that we can end nuclear weapons, that we don’t need them anymore, that we can somehow live in a world without them. And that idea actually came up at Reykjavik, at the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. And if the screen would come down once again, we will have a look at these two leaders either before or after or during their discussion of this issue.

MARVIN KALB:   I don't know about you, but I just heard President Ronald Reagan speak in the schmaltziest way about a communist leader, about looking at his eyes and the soul and all that bologna. 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   You have to explain that.

MARVIN KALB:   No, I don't even want the explanation. But I tell you something that's quite interesting … 

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Why don't you all think what I would have said had I been given a chance.

MARVIN KALB:   You got the chance, you blew it. I would like to get at this issue because you spoke about this earlier, Dick.  Are we engaging in something that is totally an illusion to believe, even though George Schultz believes it and Henry Kissinger and Max Kampelman. These are very responsible …  

RICHARD RHODES:   Indeed.

MARVIN KALB:   And they are saying in the most serious way now that we've got to move toward an absolute zero end to nuclear weapons. I mean, it's a great idea, but why should I take it, I'm being a cynic here, why should I take that seriously?

RICHARD RHODES:   This group came together for the 20 th anniversary of the Reykjavik summit, Schultz and Sid Drell, a physicist at Stanford, talked about it and then elaborated it into quite a large group of people involved. They saw it as what followed from Reykjavik. And from their perspective, as people who were there, what followed was the hope on the part of both Reagan and Gorbachev, however blue sky it may have seemed to Ken, that it might be possible to eliminate nuclear weapons. Gorbachev had an argument that he called common security, which is basically the idea that you can only be safe if your enemy is safe, not if your enemy is unsafe. He got it from Billy Brontz (?), who got it indirectly from Niels Bohr, all the way back to the Second World War. That's what Gorbachev was discussing at Reykjavik with Reagan.

Reagan’s dream was the technological solution, not common security, but SDI and they faltered at that point. It’s kind of a tragic moment; I've actually read the play about it, which is getting readings around the country these days. It was such an interesting, dramatic moment. 

Twenty years later, Schultz and this group of people included eventually Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Bill Perry and others, felt that the time was right and they had a particular advantage over all of the peace-oriented people over the years who have tried to move to zero. They were insiders or had been insiders. It wasn't possible for people to say to them, from the perspective of government, “If you knew what I knew, but you can’t because it’s secret, then you would know that these things aren’t practical.” They have been moving quietly, but I think effectively, in the years since 2007 when they started this process, late 2006, toward discussing this and moving this with leadership around the world. And I think they've made quite a bit of progress, most of all in convincing President Obama, when he was a candidate, that he should sign on for this movement. 

So recently when Obama spoke at the United Nations, the four horsemen, as they're now called, were sitting in the front row. There is something moving now, and I think it gives great hope. It partly derives from the fear that arose with 9/11 that it now becomes possible to conceive of sub national entities that could produce a nuclear weapon or steal a nuclear weapon and use it for terrorist purposes and would not be deterrable. So that's another aspect of the story. But times have indeed changed.

MARVIN KALB:   Tom, you're a professional diplomat and you've been involved in this sort of negotiation for a lot of time. Do you believe that it is realistic for people to spend hours, weeks and months pursuing an end to all nuclear weapons.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Well, we're all required to do so as parties to the nuclear nonproliferation treaties.

MARVIN KALB:   To go down to zero as part of the deal?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   As part of the deal, ultimately. And the question is what does ultimately mean? What Schultz, and I'm part of that group …

RICHARD RHODES:   I should not have left Mr. Graham out; he’s been very much a part of that group.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   I was in part of it from the beginning. And as Dick was suggesting toward the end of his comments, the original motivation was, some variation of we can’t go on like this. It’s too dangerous. We have to find some way out, recognizing it's extremely difficult. And the Schultz group is not saying we should negotiate for zero tomorrow or next week or next year. It’s saying that we should try to actually implement what we're already obligated to do over a very long period of time, find a solution to nuclear weapons. And beginning with some first steps like securing fissile material, achieving ratification of the test ban treaty, and so forth. 

And Sam Nunn, one of the participants, frequently refers to this as zero nuclear weapons as the top of a high mountain. We can’t even see the top yet, but we've been going down the mountain rather than up. Let’s start going up.

MARVIN KALB:   We've only got about eight more minutes for this panel and I'd like to get some questions in from the audience. And one of them, which I'll direct to Nick immediately, is President Obama just received the Nobel Peace Prize. Time magazine has suggested that the nuclear weapon itself should have been the prize for keeping the peace for the last 60 years. Any validity in your mind to that?

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   Of course, there's some validity for that. I mean, there's no question that one of the reasons there wasn't ever a ground conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was because of nuclear weapons. So, yes, there's validity in that. I think that there's a useful anecdote about my grandfather Nitze which connects back to this and to that as well. During the Cold War he was utterly convinced that America's arsenal need to be not as large as possible, but calibrated to minimize a risk of a Soviet strike. The Cold War ended, and he completely flipped. And his view at the end of his life -- when he was 92, he wrote an op ed in the New York Times and said, “Look, the Cold War is over. We need to move to zero.” And so he was very much on the side of Graham here.  And I think there's a very strong case you can make that nuclear weapons, though we ran a horrible risk during the Cold War, did keep the Cold War calm. Now, the situation is entirely different and we should work towards zero.

MARVIN KALB:   This is a serious question, Tom. Are any young people involved in this pursuit, or is it just people sort of towards the twilight of their lives who want to move toward big and virtuous things?

RICHARD RHODES:   I beg your pardon?

THOMAS GRAHAM:   That's the right answer. Trust Dick to … 

MARVIN KALB:   Thank you, Tom. 

THOMAS GRAHAM:   Trust Dick to come up with the right answer.

MARVIN KALB:   Ken, here's a question that was designed for you. Would you address the political influence of the corporate powers of our country in the delay of the decrease of all weaponry, nuclear or otherwise?

KENNETH ADELMAN:   I think the simple answer is no. What is the question again? 

MARVIN KALB:   No, I think what the writer is getting at here is can you ascribe to the military industrial complex, the big corporate interests of the U.S., as the reason why we have not decisively cut our weaponry back? And you've already answered that.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   The answer is no, and it's wrong to say we have not decisively cut our weapons back and it's wrong, Tom, with all due respect, to say that we've been going down the mountain. The number of nuclear weapons, strategic nuclear weapons that the United States has now, are far, far less than anything I would have imagined taking office in the Reagan Administration in 1981, and then in the arms control business of ’83. I couldn't conceive that we would be at as low a level as we are today. So let's not have this totally wrong idea that it mounts and mounts and mounts and we're getting bigger and bigger, that's just wrong.

And secondly, I would say if you're asking me is the number of nuclear weapons we have and Russia has today too large, I would say yes. We should reduce it all the time. There are serious issues we have to deal with on nuclear weapons. There is the spread of nuclear weapons, there's permissive action links. Tom, you've been wonderful on fissile material spread. There's about a list of 12 things. To spend a lot of time, a lot of effort, talking about zero on this is, I think, diverting yourself from the real issues that have to be done, the serious work, and to show you really care. I mean really care, really, really care about it. And that, I think, is just wrong. I think it's a tremendous disservice. If I were in charge of the National Institute of Health or the Cancer Institute, and I went around and I said, “Let’s have a big conference on how we can eliminate cancer, just remove all cancer,” and do this time and time again, everybody would say to me, “Excuse me, Ken, why are you having all these expensive conferences on removing cancer? Why don’t you just have researchers start doing research to eliminate, to get rid of cancer, all right? Or do the best you can on that.”  I see no reason at all to spend a lot of time and high executive intelligence on something that is just talking about how wonderful it would be in a world without nuclear weapons. Yes, it would. Wonderful without cancer, wonderful without tooth decay … 

MARVIN KALB:   Got you.

KENNETH ADELMAN:   Wonderful without all these, you know, everything.

MARVIN KALB:   Nick, you wanted to say something. 

RICHARD RHODES:   I get ten seconds.

MARVIN KALB:   But you’ll all get a chance. Nick, go ahead.

NICHOLAS THOMPSON:   Very quickly, the question is whether corporate interests are why we can’t get to zero. Of course it’s not, and it’s an extremely complicated problem because as soon as we reduce, the value to other countries of having nuclear weapons increases, so you have to deal with that. If we had zero, then the value of having one for somebody else is much higher. So that's a hard, hard problem.

Another thing, getting to the bits that we have to decommission and the permissive action links, one thing that we've been arguing about all morning and we talked about later is the Soviet Union in the mid ‘80s actually built a doomsday machine, a device that would allow it to measure whether the United States had launched a missile that hit the Soviet Union. If it did, there were a set of steps, four steps, that could eventually bypass command authority and allow it to launch an automatic retaliatory strike. That system hasn't even been decommissioned. I mean, there are a lot of steps that we need to get to.

We need to get rid of things like that well before we can get down to zero.

MARVIN KALB:   Tom, you go first.

THOMAS GRAHAM:   It's not me that says we're going down the mountain, it’s Sam Nunn that says we're going down the mountain. I was just citing him. And he wasn’t referring to the number of weapons. Without question, the number of weapons has been vastly reduced. He was referring to proliferation and the threat of weapons worldwide. And the Schultz movement is not a movement that just talks incessantly about zero every day, all day. It’s a movement about how do we get on the road towards zero, such as controlling fissile material with zero as a far distant goal. Not that different from what we're obligated to do under the nonproliferation treaty.

RICHARD RHODES:   So to that, I would just point out what someone, I think it may have been Nitze in his op ed piece, which said that trying to deal with nuclear weapons in the real world, which is what Ken’s talking about, is in fact indistinguishable from moving towards zero. So those who feel that zero is an impossible goal, which I would add includes Sam Nunn and I think Bill Perry -- at least Perry told me he had not yet, in years of thinking about it, been able to figure out how you do that -- those who don't feel that that's a reasonable goal but think it’s something pie in the sky, can still commit to the other principles that are involved of getting the CTBT ratified, getting control of fissile materials around the world, reasonable reductions in coordination with Russia.

To which I would then add my last point of the nuclear weapons abroad in the world. Somewhere more than 90 percent are in the hands of the United States and Russia. So the question of getting to zero is mostly about us and our counterpart on the other side of the Earth. 

MARVIN KALB:   I think we might bear in mind, too, that many of the people, many of the leaders of this Schultz group, would be defined politically as middle of the road or even to the right of middle of the road -- conservative Democrats and Republicans, George Schultz at the very top would be the number one example of what it is that I'm trying to say.

But our time is up; the turning of the clock is such that we have to move on. Thanks, panel, and thanks to you all very much. [applause] 

END OF SESSION 

Stanford University

The Center for International Security and Cooperation is a center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies .

Nuclear Weapons and the Cold War in Europe (essay)

• David Holloway

The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.

Here’s How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be

W e know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video . It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation.

As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target.

More from TIME

Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid.

Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.

It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts.

We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

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The Cold War (1945-1989) essay

The Cold War is considered to be a significant event in Modern World History. The Cold War dominated a rather long time period: between 1945, or the end of the World War II, and 1990, the collapse of the USSR. This period involved the relationships between two superpowers: the United States and the USSR. The Cold War began in Eastern Europe and Germany, according to the researchers of the Institute of Contemporary British History (Warner 15).  Researchers state that “the USSR and the United States of America held the trump cards, nuclear bombs and missiles” (Daniel 489). In other words, during the Cold War, two nations took the fate of the world under their control. The progression of the Cold War influenced the development of society, which became aware of the threat of nuclear war. After the World War II, the world experienced technological progress, which provided “the Space Race, computer development, superhighway construction, jet airliner development, the creation of international phone system, the advent of television, enormous progress in medicine, and the creation of mass consumerism, and many other achievements” (Daniel 489). Although the larger part of the world lived in poverty and lacked technological progress, the United States and other countries of Western world succeeded in economic development. The Cold War, which began in 1945, reflected the increased role of technological progress in the establishment of economic relationships between two superpowers.   The Cold War involved internal and external conflicts between two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, leading to eventual breakdown of the USSR.

• The Cold War: background information

The Cold War consisted of several confrontations between the United States and the USSR, supported by their allies. According to researchers, the Cold War was marked by a number of events, including “the escalating arms race, a competition to conquer space, a dangerously belligerent for of diplomacy known as brinkmanship, and a series of small wars, sometimes called “police actions” by the United States and sometimes excused as defense measures by the Soviets” (Gottfried 9). The Cold War had different influences on the United States and the USSR. For the USSR, the Cold War provided massive opportunities for the spread of communism across the world, Moscow’s control over the development of other nations and the increased role of the Soviet Communist party.

In fact, the Cold War could split the wartime alliance formed to oppose the plans of Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the United States as two superpowers with considerable economic and political differences. The USSR was based on a single-party Marxist–Leninist system, while the United States was a capitalist state with democratic governance based on free elections.

The key figure in the Cold War was the Soviet leader Gorbachev, who was elected in 1985. He managed to change the direction of the USSR, making the economies of communist ruled states independent. The major reasons for changing in the course were poor technological development of the USSR (Gottfried 115). Gorbachev believed that radical changes in political power could improve the Communist system. At the same time, he wanted to stop the Cold War and tensions with the United States. The cost of nuclear arms race had negative impact on the economy of the USSR. The leaders of the United States accepted the proposed relationships, based on cooperation and mutual trust. The end of the Cold War was marked by signing the INF treaty in 1987 (Gottfried 115).

• The origins of the Cold War

Many American historians state that the Cold War began in 1945. However, according to Russian researchers, historians and analysts “the Cold War began with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, for this was when the capitalist world began its systematic opposition to and effort to undermine the world’s first socialist state and society” (Warner13). For Russians, the Cold War was hot in 1918-1922, when the Allied Intervention policy implemented in Russia during the Russian Civil War. According to John W. Long, “the U.S. intervention in North Russia was a policy formulated by President Wilson during the first half of 1918 at the urgent insistence of Britain, France and Italy, the chief World War I allies” (380).

Nevertheless, there are some other opinions regarding the origins of the Cold War. For example, Geoffrey Barraclough, an outstanding English historian, states that the events in the Far East at the end of the century contributed to the origins of the Cold War. He argues that “during the previous hundred years, Russia and the United States has tended to support each other against England; but now, as England’s power passed its zenith, they came face to face across the Pacific” (Warner 13). According to Barraclough, the Cold War is associated with the conflict of interests, which involved European countries, the Middle East and South East Asia. Finally, this conflict divided the world into two camps. Thus, the Cold War origins are connected with the spread of ideological conflict caused by the emergence of the new power in the early 20-th century (Warner 14). The Cold War outbreak was associated with the spread of propaganda on the United States by the USSR. The propagandistic attacks involved the criticism of the U.S. leaders and their policies. These attacked were harmful to the interests of American nation (Whitton 151).

• The major causes of the Cold War

The United States and the USSR were regarded as two superpowers during the Cold War, each having its own sphere of influence, its power and forces. The Cold War had been the continuing conflict, caused by tensions, misunderstandings and competitions that existed between the United States and the USSR, as well as their allies from 1945 to the early 1990s (Gottfried 10). Throughout this long period, there was the so-called rivalry between the United States and the USSR, which was expressed through various transformations, including military buildup, the spread of propaganda, the growth of espionage, weapons development, considerable industrial advances, and competitive technological developments in different spheres of human activity, such as medicine, education, space exploration, etc.

There four major causes of the Cold War, which include:

• Ideological differences (communism v. capitalism);
• Mutual distrust and misperception;
• The fear of the United State regarding the spread of communism;
• The nuclear arms race (Gottfried 10).

The major causes of the Cold War point out to the fact that the USSR was focused on the spread of communist ideas worldwide. The United States followed democratic ideas and opposed the spread of communism. At the same time, the acquisition of atomic weapons by the United States caused fear in the USSR. The use of atomic weapons could become the major reason of fear of both the United States and the USSR. In other words, both countries were anxious about possible attacks from each other; therefore, they were following the production of mass destruction weapons. In addition, the USSR was focused on taking control over Eastern Europe and Central Asia. According to researchers, the USSR used various strategies to gain control over Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the years 1945-1980. Some of these strategies included “encouraging the communist takeover of governments in Eastern Europe, the setting up of Comecon, the Warsaw Pact, the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, and the Brezhnev Doctrine” (Phillips 118). These actions were the major factors for the suspicions and concerns of the United States. In addition, the U.S. President had a personal dislike of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his policies. In general, the United States was concerned by the Soviet Union’s actions regarding the occupied territory of Germany, while the USSR feared that the United States would use Western Europe as the major tool for attack.

• The consequences of the Cold War

The consequences of the Cold War include both positive and negative effects for both the United States and the USSR.

• Both the United States and the USSR managed to build up huge arsenals of atomic weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
• The Cold War provided opportunities for the establishment of the military blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
• The Cold War led to the emergence of the destructive military conflicts, like the Vietnam War and the Korean War, which took the lives of millions of people (Gottfried13).
• The USSR collapsed because of considerable economic, political and social challenges.
• The Cold War led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the unification of the two German nations.
• The Cold War led to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact (Gottfried 136).
• The Cold war provided the opportunities for achieving independence of the Baltic States and some former Soviet Republics.
• The Cold War made the United States the sole superpower of the world because of the collapse of the USSR in 1990.
• The Cold War led to the collapse of Communism and the rise of globalization worldwide (Phillips 119).

The impact of the Cold War on the development of many countries was enormous. The consequences of the Cold War were derived from numerous internal problems of the countries, which were connected with the USSR, especially developing countries (India, Africa, etc.). This fact means that foreign policies of many states were transformed (Gottfried 115).

The Cold War (1945-1989) essay part 2

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The Profession of Arms during the Nuclear Age, the Cold War, and the End of History

Mick Ryan | 03.12.21

Author’s note: This is the third in a series of articles about the profession of arms. Over the series, I will chart the modern development of our profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining that development through the lens of four themes that have driven and influenced it: events, technology, ideas, and institutions. I will then examine how change in the strategic environment will drive continued evolution in the profession of arms. Importantly, I will propose areas where we, as members of this profession, must lead change and ensure our military institutions remain effective—at every level—into the twenty-first century.

You can also read the first and second articles in the series.

The twentieth century witnessed a series of turning points in the modern profession of arms. The technological developments of the Second Industrial Revolution—which bracketed the turn of that century—drove the transformation of military ideas and institutions, and saw the conduct of war leap into a new domain with the birth of aerospace forces. The period to the end of World War II was explored in Part Two of this series. The technological, ideological, and societal changes in the period before World War II resulted in a profession that possessed an expanded view of military activities within broader national security approaches. The profession of arms also evolved alongside an improved the capacity to mobilize populations and national industry. As Margaret MacMillan has recently written , “One of the great tragedies of modern war was that the very strengths of societies—in organization, industry, science or resources—could turn them into such effective killing machines.” This necessitated a broader view of strategy, which until now had largely been a military preoccupation. As Lawrence Freedman has written , “It was only the shocking experience of World War I that led to attempts to broaden the meaning of strategy.”

With the first use of atomic weapons in the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, members of the profession of arms witnessed clear evidence of the potential for military activities henceforth to be able to extinguish not just an enemy army, but all of humankind. As this article demonstrates, the advent of nuclear weapons would have a significant impact on the profession. This also represented the start of a pulse of professionalism in the twentieth-century profession of arms.

This article examines the post-atomic era, which like the first forty-five years of the twentieth century saw many milestones in the development of the modern profession. This second pulse of professionalism was driven by geopolitical competition, decolonization by European powers, new technologies, and eventually a world transformed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Like the first two parts of this series, the development of the modern profession of arms in this article will be explored through the framework of events, technology, ideas, and institutions. This part will focus on events, with the other three legs of the framework covered subsequently in the series.

The multi-decade Cold War laid a foundation for the profession of arms as it exists in the twenty-first century, and provides many lessons about great power competition that retain relevance today. It is therefore appropriate that we spend some time reviewing the events of the Cold War to set the scene for our continued examination of the profession of arms in the twentieth century.

The Cold War. It would be impossible here to provide a full history of the Cold War. Our aim is not to provide a full account of the period between 1947 and 1991 but to assess the impact of the Cold War on the profession of arms and its members. Characterized by the grand competition between the United States and its allies on one side and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its client states on the other, the Cold War saw the rise of nuclear weapons and the strategies associated with their possession. It also featured political warfare, influence operations, the space race, and a nearly constant threat of nuclear warfare.

The confrontation between the two blocs during the Cold War was heavily shaped by the largest member of each of these blocs. After the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949 , and then a thermonuclear weapon in 1953 (one year after America), the security policies and military strategies of both sides were increasingly based on nuclear deterrence. The dominance of nuclear deterrence was to have a significant impact on the profession of arms.

First, and perhaps most importantly, it led to the creation of a new breed of defense intellectuals whose main concern was nuclear strategy. While the idea of strategy was not new, the addition of such destructive weapons to the arsenals of NATO and the Warsaw Pact meant that nations had to evolve strategic thought to take account of the potential impacts of their use. Strategists such as Herman Kahn , Bernard Brodie , Thomas Schelling , and Albert Wohlstetter (among many others) all made significant contributions to various theories around nuclear strategies from the 1950s onwards. A second generation, composed of strategists such as Lawrence Freedman and Colin Gray , followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Cold War, and the developments in nuclear strategy, also led to research and debate on the conduct of civil-military relations. Despite nuclear weapons being deployed by the military services of the United States, Britain, and France, the control of these weapons was ultimately vested in the civilian political leaders, not the military. This demanded that new forms of interaction between civilian and military leaders and strategists be developed.

The relief of Gen. Douglas MacArthur by US President Harry Truman during the Korean War provided an exemplar of how the implementation of strategy was evolving and how nuclear weapons were changing the interaction of civilian political leaders and senior military leaders. In early 1951, MacArthur issued a series of public statements that included a communique offering a ceasefire to China in March 1951. Truman believed these statements challenged his authority. Further, Truman felt that some of MacArthur’s military operations unnecessarily provoked China. Fearing that these events not only challenged presidential authority, but also set a bad precedent for future civil-military relations in the United States, Truman relieved MacArthur from command in April 1951.

Another useful case study in the evolution in civil-military relations was the Cuban missile crisis. The difference in thinking about nuclear weapons on display during that event was stark. While President John F. Kennedy and his civilian advisors did not think it was possible to win a nuclear exchange and sought to find a negotiated solution, senior military leaders based their planning on the theory that it was possible to win a nuclear exchange and retain a society with a population above minimum viability. The crisis, playing out over thirteen days , provided lessons in crisis management, bureaucratic decision making, political control over the use of nuclear weapons, diplomacy, nuclear strategy, and civil-military relations.

The lessons of the MacArthur relief, the Cuban missile crisis, and dawning understanding that nuclear exchanges would result in mutual destruction drove a change in how military institutions interacted with civilian policymakers. Senior military leaders, many of whom had spent their formative years on the battlefields of World War II, now required the ability to better appreciate and analyze the military implications of the policy requirements of their civilian leaders. To be effective strategic leaders, senior military leaders needed to understand the art and science of military activities, as well as how to inform and participate in high-level policy discussions with civilian leaders. This in turn drove evolution in the training and education of military officers and reinforced the requirement for high-level education—in the form of war colleges—in every major country. We will return to the theories of civil-military relations—what Eliot Cohen has called “the unequal dialog”—in the next part of this series.

The Cold War also saw new skillsets and career pathways emerge in the profession. In biology, speciation is an evolutionary process whereby populations of living things evolve to become distinct species. Subspeciation is the way in which these species then divide into subspecies. An element of the natural world, we can also see this process occurring in the profession of arms because of new technologies introduced during the Cold War. New subspecialties (and new doctrines) within existing services arose to meet the requirements of nuclear deterrence and to exploit the power of new technologies such as nuclear power generation, space-based satellites, and long-range missiles.

The US Air Force Strategic Air Command was established in 1946 on the foundation of World War II bomber commands and became a principal element of the US nuclear deterrent. The development of intercontinental missiles and their nuclear warheads saw the establishment of a new missile division within the command in 1957. With the advent of satellites, the Air Force established its first space organization in 1954, which in due course provided the foundation for the establishment of the service’s Space Command in 1982. The development of nuclear-powered submarines by the United States Navy in the 1950s resulted in the establishment of an entirely new professional community within the service. Each of these new organizations and subspecialties required supporting doctrine, training, education, career pathways, and leadership models. The profession of arms expanded its knowledge base and increased the number of “subspecies” that belonged to it. Eventually, this broadening of military capabilities would drive the need for better joint collaboration and integration, which will be explored in the next part of this series. The combination of new technologies, strategic competition, new institutions, and new doctrines was a principal driver in the second pulse of professionalism for the twentieth-century profession of arms.

The Cold War was also the background to a different form of conflict in the post–World War II period: the withdrawal from colonial possessions by European powers. From 1950 until almost the end of the Cold War, decolonization was a factor in conflicts in Africa and Asia. Some of these conflicts—like wars in Vietnam and Algeria—featured indigenous forces conducting insurgencies. These insurgencies were often supported by third parties, and were frequently viewed as proxy struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union. The nuclear standoff of the Cold War coexisted with low-level, guerrilla warfare. Lawrence Freedman wrote that “if nuclear weapons pulled military strategy away from conventional warfare in one direction, guerrilla warfare moved it in another.” In various guises over the rest of the twentieth century, this indirect approach to securing political objectives was to distract, and at times consume, Western strategists and military leaders.

As a form of warfare, this was hardly new. But it was Mao Zedong from China who would refine the approach to an art form in his struggle against the Chinese Nationalists in the late 1940s. While Mao never saw guerrilla warfare as the exclusive path to victory, it suited his lack of material and military resources. The military institutions of the West had to work hard to adjust their tactics, doctrine, and training to adapt to the kind of unconventional—and very political—operations described by Mao in his book On Guerrilla Warfare . The Malayan emergency between 1948 and 1960 saw British Commonwealth forces fighting the Malayan National Liberation Army, a communist organization seeking Malayan independence. Under the remarkably innovative leadership of the British Army’s Gen. Sir Gerald Templer , the early 1950s saw development of new counterinsurgency theory and doctrine that unified social, economic, political, police, and military efforts.

At nearly the same time, France struggled with its Algerian colony fighting for independence. Over the period of 1954 to 1962, French forces—often brutally— sought to suppress the independence movement led by the indigenous National Liberation Front. The most important contribution to the profession of arms’ thinking about guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency from the war in Algeria was that of French military officer David Galula . As a young company commander in that conflict, he successfully eliminated the insurgency from the area he was responsible for. But his ideas , especially isolating insurgents from the populace, were never widely adopted by French forces and Algeria gained its independence in 1962.

With a couple of exceptions, the theories of Mao, Templer, and Galula were largely forgotten by US forces during the Vietnam War. As David Fitzgerald writes in Learning to Forget , “Although there has been a long tradition within the Army of fighting small wars, it is also true that these wars have not lingered in the organization’s historical memory.” Thus, the hard-earned lessons of Vietnam were similarly left behind in the wake of the US defeat there. Counterinsurgency became a subject studied by very few either inside or outside the military. But the wars spawned by the 9/11 attacks on the United States led to a re-examination of these ideas from the few decades after World War II. A new generation of young scholars, such as David Kilcullen , John Nagl , Emile Simpson , and others, would recast revolutionary warfare and counterinsurgency theories for a new generation of military planners and leaders in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

It was not only unconventional conflicts that drove changes in thinking in the military profession during the Cold War. The Cold War also provided the background for industrial-style conflicts in which massed armies, air forces, and navies undertook what we might understand as conventional operations. Very early in the Cold War, some hoped that the possession of nuclear weapons would negate the need for large (and expensive) standing conventional militaries. This idea eventually foundered on the lessons of the defeat of Task Force Smith in Korea in July 1950. Superpowers and other major powers such as Britain and France would thereafter have to sustain both their growing nuclear arsenals and large standing conventional military organizations.

In his book The Utility of Force , Maj. Gen. Rupert Smith called these “parallel conflicts.” These conflicts were conducted generally with the same forces that had been built for the Cold War competition. Additionally there were often (but not always) underlying connections between the specific conflict and the large competition between the two blocs involved in the Cold War. The Korean War, which broke out in 1950, was a largely a conventional conflict, although new elements such as United Nations Command—and possession of nuclear weapons by one of the protagonists—differentiated it from the recently concluded World War II. But other wars featuring traditional military classes were also fought in Kashmir, between Israeli and its neighbors, between China and Vietnam in 1979, over the Falkland Islands in 1982, and between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988.

These conflicts reinforced to many that the era of conventional, or Industrial Age, conflict was not over. More importantly, they provided an important source of lessons about new approaches to tactics such as air-land integration, and vital insights into the use of new technologies such as antitank missiles. But perhaps the high point of conventional excellence during the second half of the twentieth century was the 1991 Gulf War. It was a harbinger of a new era of integration of joint capabilities, recon-strike capabilities, and advanced technologies. But it was also an example (again) of how conventional excellence does not always lead to enduring political solutions. And it provided important insights for both state and nonstate actors that would seek to challenge the West’s ideas and military forces in the twenty-first century.

The Cold War, from 1947 through to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union , drove the development of many technologies that continue to have an impact on military institutions and the profession of arms. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet military leaders wrote about a new revolution in military affairs. As Andrew Krepinevich has written , this stemmed from their concern over the United States’ possession of more advanced technology and its incorporation into military systems. Using the term “military-technical revolution,” the Soviets speculated that new advanced technologies, particularly those enabling greater precision and networking through information systems, would see quality becoming more important than quantity, thereby revolutionizing warfare. The development of better computers and the internet allowed more rapid sharing of information and networking of sensors. Space-based capabilities increased the precision and discrimination of warfare. During this era, new subspecialties within the profession that focused on long-range strike, communications, nuclear-powered vessels, and other areas emerged. We will return to this topic—and the debate around the notion of a revolution in military affairs —in a subsequent article in this series.

But perhaps the most important event of the Cold War is what did not occur—a breakout of hostilities leading to a nuclear exchange. Scholar Reed Robert Bonadonna has proposed that the greatest accomplishment of the military profession during the twentieth century was its evident restraint while it exercised stewardship and control over nuclear weapons, which were not employed. This may overstate the role of the profession somewhat given the contributions of strategists, policymakers, political leaders, industry, and various elements of society to this outcome. However, there is little doubt that the professional military institutions that appeared after World War II did play a large part in this positive outcome for all human beings. There are lessons in this for our profession as we grapple with the challenges of another strategic competition between two wealthy, highly advanced but ideologically different powers in the twenty-first century.

A World Transformed? It would have been a neat ending indeed to finish this exploration of key events with the end of the Cold War. However, history had one more act to play out as the century drew to a close. As John Lewis Gaddis writes , “At the beginning of 1989 . . . the Soviet Union, its empire, its ideology—and therefore the Cold War itself—was a sand pile ready to slide.” Even newly inaugurated US President George H.W. Bush did not appreciate the massive geopolitical change that lay ahead for his administration. As he notes in A World Transformed , “Did we see what was coming when we entered office? No we did not. The world we encountered in January 1989 was the familiar bipolar one of superpower rivalry. . . . Yet in only three years, the Cold War was over.”

Throughout 1989, a series of events in Eastern Europe, including the removal of the fence between Hungary and Austria, elections in Poland, and the opening of the wall between East and West Berlin by East German border guards heralded massive changes in Europe. By 1991 the end was in sight for the Soviet Union. On December 25 of that year, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev , signed a decree making his office extinct and handed over his powers to Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union was no more, and the Cold War was over.

While the Soviet Union may have no longer existed, millions of troops still occupied positions throughout Europe. Fleets of strategic bombers, nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear missile submarines were still at high readiness, maintaining the nuclear deterrents for their nations. But it did not take long for demands for a peace dividend in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union to build. The states on both sides were left with a surplus of military power. The years between 1992 and 2000 saw a significant reduction in forces as a result of government desires to reduce defense expenditures and arms control treaties such as the 1993 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II).

Despite the victory of the US coalition forces over Iraq in early 1991 , the profession in the West now faced a challenge: What would its future role be with the disappearance of the existential challenge posed by the Soviet Union? The large peer competitor against which all military capability was compared in the West no longer existed. But while military institutions began a period of introspection and, to a certain degree, hand wringing, civilian policymakers were already looking to solve new national security challenges. Failing states, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, terrorism, and ethnic civil wars would come to dominate the security focus of leaders in Western nations in the immediate post–Cold War era. Writing in 1991, Lawrence Freedman described the global security environment as one characterized by “confused interests,” “confused principles,” and “confused instruments.” And as Theo Farrell writes in Transforming Military Power since the Cold War , these new challenges were less about “the amount of military power, and more [about] military agility.”

Military institutions, and the wider profession of arms, henceforth would focus less on large-scale conventional operations and more on peacekeeping, stabilization, and humanitarian support activities. There was ample opportunity for military organizations in the 1990s to develop new approaches for operations in places such as Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Liberia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Cambodia, and beyond. Over the decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, military organizations that had spent decades preparing for war with the Warsaw Pact would adapt to undertake what became known in the US military as “ military operations other than war .”

As the profession came to grips with the implications of this “ unipolar moment ,” military organizations adapted what they taught in their training schools, officer academies, and war colleges. Less warfighting and more peacekeeping became the focus in many military institutions. Accompanying a surge in regional studies and examination of the politics of a new world order, new military doctrine was developed to support this shift.

Importantly, new military operations incorporated many other nonmilitary players that had not been present in more conventional operations. Other government agencies and nongovernmental organizations all played a part in the stabilization and rebuilding of disrupted societies. This demanded a new approach to planning and executing military operations. It was an approach that required greater civil-military integration. Charles Moskos , writing in The Postmodern Military , proposed that “whatever the future holds, we can for now confidently state that the dominant trend is a blurring of the lines between the military and civilian entities, both in structure and culture. This permeability between military and civilian structures is a major new historical phenomenon.” This transition to a new postmodern military was still very much underway when airliners flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on that September morning in 2001.

As the profession of arms responded to the post–Cold War era, including the reductions in force sizes and adapting to new missions, major developments were continuing to take place in technology. In the 1990s, computers became more widely available, more powerful, and cheaper to acquire. At the same time, technologies such as GPS were enabling a revolution in precision warfare. Finally, the internet became widely accessible. These technological imperatives, along with the geopolitical changes of the post–Cold War era, drove transformation in the profession of arms. This spawned new theories of warfare including, as highlighted earlier, the concept of a revolution in military affairs. We will examine the idea of revolutions in military affairs in a subsequent part of this series. But before we do, we must turn to an exploration of the technologies developed after World War II that would drive evolution in how military institutions, and the profession of arms, thought about and conducted military operations. This will be the focus of Part Four of this series on the modern profession of arms.

Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan is an Australian Army officer. A graduate of  Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies  and the USMC Command and Staff College and School of Advanced Warfare, he is a passionate advocate of professional education and lifelong learning. He has commanded at platoon, squadron, regiment, task force, and brigade level, and is a science fiction fan, a cricket tragic, terrible gardener, and an aspiring writer. In January 2018, he assumed command of the  Australian Defence College  in Canberra, Australia. He is an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute, and tweets under the handle  @WarInTheFuture .

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image: NATO officials observe the Boltzmann nuclear test, part of Operation Plumbbob, on May 28, 1957, at the Nevada Test Site (credit: National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Field Office).

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George Orwell and the origin of the term ‘cold war’

Oxford Dictionaries

• By Katherine Connor Martin
• October 24 th 2015

On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “ You and the Atom Bomb ,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

This wasn’t the first time the phrase cold war was used in English (it had been used to describe certain policies of Hitler in 1938), but it seems to have been the first time it was applied to the conditions that arose in the aftermath of World War II. Orwell’s essay speculates on the geopolitical impact of the advent of a powerful weapon so expensive and difficult to produce that it was attainable by only a handful of nations, anticipating “the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them,” and concluding that such a situation is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘ peace that is no peac e’.”

Within years, some of the developments anticipated by Orwell had emerged. The Cold War (often with capital initials) came to refer specifically to the prolonged state of hostility, short of direct armed conflict, which existed between the Soviet bloc and Western powers after the Second World War. The term was popularized by the American journalist Walter Lippman, who made it the title of a series of essays he published in 1947 in response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s ‘Mr. X’ article, which had advocated the policy of “ containment .” To judge by debate in the House of Commons the following year (as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary ), this use of the term Cold War was initially regarded as an Americanism: ‘The British Government … should recognize that the ‘cold war’, as the Americans call it, is on in earnest, that the third world war has, in fact, begun.” Soon, though, the term was in general use.

The end of the Cold War was prematurely declared from time to time in the following decades—after the death of Stalin, and then again during the détente of the 1970s—but by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War era was clearly over. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously posited that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such,” with the global ascendancy of Western liberal democracy become an inevitability.

A quarter of a century later, tensions between Russia and NATO have now ratcheted up again, particularly in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014; commentators have begun to speak of a “ New Cold War .” The ideological context has changed, but once again a few great powers with overwhelming military might jockey for global influence while avoiding direct confrontation. Seventy years after the publication of his essay, the dynamics George Orwell discussed in it are still recognizable in international relations today.

A version of this article first appeared on the OxfordWords blog. 

Image Credit: “General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon from the USS Mt. McKinley, September 15, 1950.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Katherine Connor Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

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Orwell always surprises us. He was and still is a genius.

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April 25, 2024

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New 'cold war' grows ever warmer as the prospect of a nuclear arms race hots up

by Becky Alexis-Martin, The Conversation

Champagne corks popped on December 3, 1989 as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US president George H.W. Bush met on the cruise ship, Maxim Gorky, off the coast of Malta to declare the end of the cold war.

Gorbachev and Bush's predecessor in the White House, Ronald Reagan, had—at two summits over the past five years—thrashed out agreements that would limit and reduce both sides' nuclear arsenals. With the cold war over, Gorbachev liberalized the Soviet Union, presiding over its dismantling, which formally occurred on December 26, 1991.

To those adversaries who accused him of capitulation and the tame surrender of the Soviet bloc countries, his reply was simple: " To whom did we surrender them? To their own people ."

Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that a nuclear war couldn't be won, so must never be fought. Yet this month, the UN's high representative for disarmament affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu , warned that "the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is higher now than any time since the height of the cold war and the architecture designed to prevent its use is ever more precarious."

So how did we get here? Russia's aggression under the leadership of Vladimir Putin has plunged the world into a new era of nuclear uncertainty by reasserting Soviet isolationist strategies. By embracing the notion of a nebulous western threat , he has preserved his totalitarian leadership, while justifying political isolation, party control within Russia, and revanchist adventurism abroad—the latest of which has been the unlawful invasion of Ukraine.

Nuclear saber-rattling and posturing are unsettling features of Putin's military strategy. He has now explicitly threatened to resort to use of nuclear weapons three times since launching his invasion in 2022. And he recently ordered that tactical weapons be stationed in Belarus .

His strategists clearly see the threat of a nuclear confrontation as a realistic deterrent to Nato intervention in Ukraine . Nuclear blackmail is being used to guarantee Russian sovereignty, to coerce and force adversaries to adhere to Russian terms, and to dissuade global actors from meaningful intervention or resolution in Ukraine.

Putin's behavior is emblematic of a global shift in attitude towards the nuclear taboo . Other leaders, among them the former US president Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong-un have carelessly returned nuclear warfare to the table as a viable strategy instead of a deterrence.

'Nuclear neolateralism'

This is an age of nuclear neolateralism . Nation states have unstable and mercurial political, economic and cultural relations involving new networks, conflicts and complexities. Since the turn of this century, the world has seen the resurgence of populism and religious nationalism, the near ubiquity of digital technology, and an increasing velocity of nuclear proliferation and brinkmanship.

These factors make our current situation more complex than the cold war. A new Silk Road nexus has emerged across China, Russia, Iran, Israel and North Korea since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. This web of relationships is shaped by regional dynamics, strategic interests and global power shifts that influence security and global weapons proliferation.

China and Russia have recently developed stronger strategic ties. But tensions remain along shared borders—and freshly leaked classified papers reveal Russia's fear of Chinese nuclear attack . China has 500 active nuclear warheads, and is expanding its nuclear arsenal. Beijing is also learning lessons from Russia and Israel about how a future Taiwanese conflict may unfold.

An unexpected alliance has arisen between North Korea and Russia . Historically, Russia advocated for diplomatic solutions to North Korean nuclear proliferation. Pyongyang has supplied weapons to Russia since 2023 in violation of UN security council sanctions, and seeks to leverage this support to gain acceptance as a nuclear state.

In 2019, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned his people to prepare for war with the US by 2024. A leaked military document confirmed this, saying: "the Dear Supreme Commander will dominate the world with the nuclear weapons." On April 22, Pyongyang claimed it had tested a new command-and-control system in a simulated nuclear counter-strike exercise .

South Korea has responded by developing its own submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) in 2022 and is the only nation state to possess SLBMs without nuclear warheads. In February 2023, the leader of the People Power Party, Chung Jin-suk, argued that South Korea needs nuclear weapons . But this strategy could also make South Korea more vulnerable to attack from hostile North Korea.

Iran and Russia are cooperating in the nuclear sphere. Iran's nuclear weapons program was limited under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But Trump pulled the US out of the treaty in 2018 and there is strong evidence (denied by Iran) that it has reinvigorated its weapons program. In 2023, UN inspectors reported that Iran had enriched trace amounts of uranium to almost weapons grade .

Israel has targeted Iran with assassinations, cyberwarfare, drone attacks and commando raids to destroy its burgeoning nuclear program, adding to Middle East tensions. Saudi Arabia does not have nuclear weapons, but officials have said that they will acquire them if their regional rival, Iran, becomes nuclear.

A new arms race

The UN has said that a quantitative arms race seems imminent. The latest US nuclear posture review revealed a plan worth US$1.5 trillion (£1.21 trillion) to modernize US nuclear capability and create a " nuclear sponge " of 450 nuclear silos to absorb a future Russian attack.

Now the UK has announced it will increase its defense budget to 2.5% of GDP to put it on a "war footing." The government has reaffirmed its commitment to its nuclear arsenal, despite Britain's UN ambassador, James Kariuki , stating: "Nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought" at a recent security council meeting.

Professor Ramesh Thakur , the director of the Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament at the Australian National University, expressed the same thought more hauntingly when he wrote: "If you want the peace of the dead, prepare for nuclear war." We must hope that this new cold war doesn't become hot.

Provided by The Conversation

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