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Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
For want of any better idea the military treated nuclear weapons as just another kind of weapon. The drive for
strategic superiority came primarily from America, which was always ahead of the Soviet Union in quality, and for a long time in quantity, too. The humiliation of the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 made the Soviets determined never to fall too far behind; they were continually trying to catch up and never quite getting there.
American policy-makers systematically – and perhaps deliberately – underestimated the destructive force of their own weapons and overestimated the threat from the Soviet Union. Thus in looking at the results of an American strike, the country''s planners took account only of deaths caused by the blast from nuclear weapons and ignored those from fire and fallout. When John Kennedy became president he was briefed on America’s plans for a retaliatory (or preemptive) strike. He learnt that it consisted of blasting a path through Eastern Europe, destroying every Soviet city of any size, and taking in China as well, just in case.
Kennedy was also himself guilty of threat inflation: he campaigned for the presidency on the ''missile gap'' with the Soviet Union – something that never existed. After this he felt obliged to add another 1,000 missiles, though he knew they were not all necessary. At least this was fewer than the 10,000 in strategic Air Command’s original bid. The CIA was professional in its estimates; as a result, those who disliked its conclusions made their own amateur efforts to second-guess it. There are echoes of Iraq. On one occasion,''Team B'', set up to challenge the CIA orthodoxy, misidentified a Soviet test site as being for nuclear-powered lasers (a fantasy weapon). On another, one of Team B’s members said of an imaginary Soviet weapon system: ''It’s probably out there, but it’s so good that it’s invisible.''
Along with this distortion of Soviet capabilities went a systematic but more understandable misjudgment of Soviet intentions. The Soviets contributed to this through the Berlin and Korean crises. But by the 1980s the country that had once believed in the eventual triumph of communism was essentially conservative. Ronald Reagan nonetheless believed that they were aiming for a single world state, and was surprised that Gorbachev never mentioned this to him.
Deterrence was never deeply accepted. Stanley Baldwin had warned in the 1930s: ''Fear is a dangerous thing. It may act as a deterrent . . . but it is much more likely to . . . make them want to increase armaments.'' Reagan, a man to whom hope and faith came more naturally than fear, hated nuclear weapons and kept looking for ways out. One fantasy was strategic superiority; another was abolition of nuclear weapons; a third was a perfect missile shield. At times, Reagan seemed to be pursuing all three.
The American policy, from Harry Truman on, of negotiating from strength, often amounted to not negotiating at all. On both sides, officials saw negotiations as part of a propaganda war and devised ingenious proposals that sounded good but were designed to be unacceptable to the other side. The original Reagan idea was to get to nuclear disarmament ''by being so strong the enemy has no choice''. This took the form in his first term of a huge arms build up, spending more on defence than Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter together, and aggressive military activity, which led Soviet leaders to believe that America was preparing to attack them – as Reagan was horrified to discover. This never worked. America was consistently stronger; but nuclear weapons meant that strategic superiority was always a chimera.
Published: February 25, 2008
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