UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 11 - The Cold Peace - 01h 21m 00s

The Socialist Economy Continued from Last Lecture

[0:00]

About sort of the socialist economy, we didn't quite get to the end of our discussion of the socialist economy, last Thursday.

[0:09]

It's an important topic so I would just like to continue last Thursday's lecture which I don't ordinarily like to do but...this material is important to get through.

[0:22]

I'll try not to include any video clips this week because I blame last week's video clip for my not having finished this lecture.

[0:29]

Okay, so where did we get to at the end of last Thursday's lecture?

[0:35]

We recapitulated the distinction between extensive↗ and intensive growth↗. That's an important distinction so I'd just like to go over it one more time to make sure that you all understand it.

[0:45]

Would anybody care to sort of formulate the distinction between extensive and intensive growth for the class?

[0:53]

What are these? What are the, you know, key distinctions between them? Where does extensive growth come from?

[1:02]

Sorry...

(student response)

[1:10]

Absolutely. Extensive growths comes from an expansion of inputs to the you know process of production. You add more factors. Whether those be land, labor or capital, extensive growth is about sort of expanding the factors of production.

[1:25]

Intensive growth -- where does that come from?

[1:28]

(student response)

[1:30]

Absolutely -- from improving the productivity of existing factors of production.

[1:36]

So if you grow your population and that makes your economy grow that's extensive growth. If you devise ways of doing more with the same factor inputs that's intensive growth.

[1:48]

Understandably intensive growth is harder to achieve than extensive growth. Achieving extensive growth can be as you know straightforward as reproducing biologically or expanding the domain of your territory, or increasing your savings rate. Intensive growth is harder to achieve.

[2:05]

Socialist economies do a pretty good of producing extensive growth in the decades immediately subsequent to the Second World War. Why is this?

[2:14]

Well, of course of the starting point is very low. The Second World War has rendered immense destruction. The opportunities for extensive growth are bountiful. It's also the case that the command economy does a pretty good job of orchestrating extensive growth. It's able to mobilize a high rate of savings.

[2:31]

It's able to some extent to command the expansion of the labor market. The fast growth of the postwar decades, the immediate postwar decades, of course hits limits. It begins to, you know sort of, we begin to see signs of this from the early 1960s onwards.

[2:50]

The limits to extensive growth are sort of hit when the available labor is all mobilized. When all of the, you know, sort of surplus agricultural labor that the Soviet Union had available to it has become industrialized then the opportunities for converting farm workers into industrial workers are exhausted.

[3:10]

Once women for the most part working then that available pool of surplus labor has also been exhausted. So the opportunities for extensive growth are finite.

[3:20]

And by the 1960s the Soviet Union has begin to exhaust them. Of course...there are other ways to produce growth, you can try to make the transition from extensive to intensive growth. But this is difficult to do.

[3:38]

The command economic system is not a terribly sort of effective mechanism for producing the improvements in efficiency and productivity upon which intensive growth depends.

[3:49]

To understand we should think a little bit more about the nature of the planning system. So let me just talk about the planned economy for a few moments.

The Planned Economy of the Soviet Union

[3:57]

How does a planned economy function? How is it distinct from a market economy?

[4:01]

Well, very crudely, the market economy is the economy with which you're familiar. It's a sort of institutional framework in which the market supply and demand is the basic framework for the allocation of scarce resources.

[4:17]

The planned economy is very different. There's no market for the allocation of resources in the planned economy. Scarce resources, you know land, capital, inputs to the manufacturing process, and so on are allocated not by market demand but by the state.

[4:33]

So you might think of the planned economy as being a little bit like a firm or a corporation, right, in which all decisions are centralized at the top of the firm.

[4:42]

In which a planning apparatus determines how scarce resources are to be allocated. If the market economy is driven by bottom-up demand the planned economy operates according to a top-down design.

[4:55]

It's orchestrated according to the sort of diktat of a political leadership. In the Soviet Union the principle institution responsible for economic planning is Gosplan↗ -- the main planning agency. Its name changes and evolves over time but for most of the period that we're concerned with Gosplan is the state planning agency.

[5:16]

And Gosplan sort of allocates instructions and expectations to state owned industries. So if you are you know a manufacturer, manufacturing refrigerators, we talked a little bit about the refrigerator manufacturer at the end of Thursday's lecture, then you receive your planning targets from Gosplan.

[5:33]

And it is your job as manufacturer of, as a manager of a state owned manufacturing plant, to manufacture a predetermined quota of refrigerators.

[5:45]

Now let me be clear about the limits of the planned economy. It's not as if everything is planned in the Soviet Union. It is production that is planned.

[5:53]

Some other aspects of sort of economic life are you know more loosely controlled. Though labor is forcibly mobilized by the state during the 1930s and during the Second World War labor is not planned subsequent to the Second World War.

[6:09]

You know Soviet citizens are sort of free to work for the most part where they want to work. If you're an inmate in a, you know in the gulag, then of course you're not free to work where you want to work. But if you are an ordinary Soviet citizen then you can pick your choice of occupation.

[6:25]

So it's not as if labor inputs are planned as such. Nor is household consumption planned. The state doesn't tell you, you know, which toothbrush to purchase. Of course there may be only toothbrush which you can choose to purchase (laughter from the class). But the state doesn't dictate you know what you do with your scarce household resources.

[6:43]

Nor is foreign trade planned. Of course foreign trade by definition can't be planned insofar as it's undertaken with you know other planned or even non-planned economies. Foreign trade is not something that the state can orchestrate.

[6:56]

On the other hand there's not a whole lot of foreign trade -- at least in the 1950s and 1960s.

[7:02]

It's easy to talk about the adverse consequences of planning. We, for the most part, agree that the planned economy had numerous deficiencies and debilities. It was not conducive to innovation. Over the long term it fared poorly in the competition with its capitalist competitor.

Advantages of a Planned Economy

[7:25]

But what of the advantages of planning? Are there any advantages to the planned economy?

[7:31]

If we look at the history of the Soviet Union this is what we might see. The planned economy did produce impressive macroeconomic stability. It was less prone to recession than the market economy was.

[7:43]

In part this is because a centrally planned economy is not so subject to recessionary downturns caused by tailing off of demand -- as the market economy is.

[7:55]

Rates of investment were fairly high. This is because the state was able to forcibly mobilize savings. State banks were able to maintain high rates of capital investment. So the planned economy does a pretty good job of capital formation.

[8:09]

And there's also low unemployment in the planned economy. State owned enterprises, not so concerned about the bottom line as capitalist enterprises are, thus they're able to maintain sort of high rates of employment across the economy as a whole.

Disadvantages of a Planned Economy

[8:24]

The disadvantages are more familiar. The planned economy is inefficient. Ratios of inputs to outputs are very high which is not good. The composition of output is also rigidly determined by central planning.

[8:40]

It's difficult for managers of state owned enterprises to innovate. There's little incentive to devise new kinds of product.

[8:49]

Right, if your production targets are set with you know one particular product in mind then you have no incentive to innovate or provide different kinds of products. In fact there may even be disincentives that inhibit you from doing so.

[9:03]

The fact that sort of output from state owned enterprises was valued in terms of its weight, you know, of course incentivizes the production of, you know, clunky heavy consumer goods, and we talked a little bit about the refrigerator last Thursday.

International Connectedness of the Planned Economy

[9:21]

Let's talk about the international connectedness of the planned economy. To what extent was the Soviet economy or the socialist economy more broadly an international economy? What was the range and nature of its connections with the larger world?

[9:36]

Let's talk first of all about relations between the socialist world economy and the capitalist world. How extensive were these connections? They weren't terribly substantial.

[9:47]

The planning system inhibits East-West trade. It's difficult for a planned economy to trade profitably with a capitalist economy. In part this is because of the way in which prices are set.

[9:59]

In the socialist economy prices are not set by market demand. They are rather determined by central planners. And this makes it difficult for the Soviet manufacturers to trade with Western purchasers.

[10:16]

The prices were often incompatible. From the 1970s onwards there will be more trade between the socialist world and the capitalist world. But it will be financed for the most part by debt. And that is to say that socialist economies take on debt in order to finance imports from the West.

[10:35]

This will be a really interesting theme in the evolution of the socialist economy. And it's something that we'll talk about much more as we sort of progress towards the contemporary era.

[10:46]

It might be worth sort of momentarily talking a little bit about investment in the East Bloc because this is one area where interaction between the capitalist and socialist worlds is especially pronounced and consequential.

[11:01]

The Soviet Union solicits foreign investment in the Soviet economy from fairly early on. By the late 1950s Khrushchev is encouraging Western chemical manufacturers, for example, to set up factory plants and to operate factory plants within the Soviet Union.

[11:17]

Probably the most famous example of Western investment in the Soviet Union in the postwar era involved the construction of a Fiat↗ plant in the city of Tolyatti↗.

[11:30]

The interesting thing about Tolyatti is that it was initially named Togliatti for the Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti↗.

[11:38]

So Italy, a capitalist, an Italian capitalist auto manufacturer, Fiat, is invited into the Soviet Union to create a manufacturing city which will be named after a prominent Italian Communist leader.

[11:52]

Sort of the irony abounds and the cars were made. For the most part they were fairly, you know, shoddy cars by comparison with those that Fiat was manufacturing in Italy.

[12:01]

Which were fairly shoddy compared to the cars being manufactured in Germany at the time. So it's a pretty low bar. But the phenomenon of sort of capitalist investment in the heart of the Soviet Bloc is nonetheless a striking one.

[12:16]

By the mid-1970s these vehicles were rolling off the production line.

Trade Within the Soviet Bloc

[12:20]

Okay, what about trade within the Soviet Bloc, sort of that is to say, among the economies that constitute the CMEA -- the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance↗ that was created in 1949.

[12:37]

Under Stalin economic relations are, you know, relatively circumscribed even between the socialist countries. These relations expand somewhat under Khrushchev who was eager to cultivate and build the East Bloc as an interdependent sort of economic entity or unit.

a[12:57]

However, intra-bloc trade is difficult to orchestrate. In part this is because much of the trade that takes place within the East Bloc is bilateral. That is to say the Soviet Union is sort at the core of the system; other countries like Poland and Romania and Czechoslovakia and Hungary conduct bilateral trade with the USSR.

[13:17]

But they don't conduct a great deal of trade with each other. So trade is not multilateral as it will be in the West; rather, it operates on a sort of bilateral hub and spokes model with the Soviet Union sitting at the hub and trade occurring mainly along the spokes.

[13:33]

Some specialization based upon comparative advantage does emerge within the East Bloc. The Soviet Union will end up, you know for the most part, importing advanced industrial machinery from the more developed East Bloc economies like Czechoslovakia and East Germany. Less developed East Bloc economies like Romania and Bulgaria will specialize in agricultural output.

[13:57]

So there is some degree of trade specialization but it doesn't really constitute a complex sort of interdependent economic system; rather, the system as a whole resembles a sort of dependency framework almost with the Soviet Union at the core and the less developed East European economies existing at the periphery of that system.

[14:23]

The more developed East European economies, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, are better able to fulfill their own economic needs; however, they will also be at the forefront of the turn to the West in the 1970s for reasons that you know have to do with the political imperatives of satisfying consumer expectations for advanced products. All of this we'll come to a little bit more in due course.

Economic Reform in the Khrushchev Era

[14:51]

What about economic reform in the Khrushchev era? How successful is it? What are its limitations? Khrushchev of course struggles to reform the Soviet economy. But he embarks upon a reform project that at least at the outset has clear goals. What are these goals? First Khrushchev wants to sort of refocus the planned economy on the production of consumer goods.

[15:16]

Under Stalin the Soviet Union had focused upon the production of heavy industrial output: coal and steel and so on. Khrushchev seeks to sort of refocus planning targets so as to emphasize consumer durables.

(silence beginning at 15:30 and ending at 17:21)

[17:21]

Okay, so we're talking about the failures of the Stalin era: the overwhelming emphasis on heavy capital formation, the neglect of consumer needs, and of course the brutal and frequently violent exploitation of the peasantry.

[17:36]

Khrushchev seeks to remedy each of these deficiencies. But, and here is the crucial point, the basic structural framework of central planning endures. Khrushchev does not embark upon a phase of structural reform rather he simply sort of redirects the purposes of the planned economy towards the satisfaction of consumer needs.

[18:03]

He doesn't try to rethink or reform the system itself. There's no effort to introduce market incentives for example. There's no real effort undertaken to decentralize or reform the planning process. The Stalinist system endures even as the goals of the Stalinist system are sustained.

[18:25]

And there's an irony to all of this, and the irony is this. The Stalinist system was much better suited to the pursuit of Stalinist objectives than it will be to the pursuit of the objectives that Khrushchev sets for it. The system is pretty good at mobilizing high rates of savings in order to sustain heavy capital formation.

The Failure of Economic Reform Under Khrushchev

[18:51]

It's less adept when it comes to the development of new consumer goods. It's less adept at applying technology to the purposes of advanced production. There are few incentives in the system to produce and sustain innovation over the long term.

[19:09]

By consequence the system will enter a phase of crisis, which becomes particularly clear from the 1970s onwards. As the opportunity for extensive growth expire growth rates begin to recede.

[19:26]

As a consequence reform as a sort of project of improving the economy will become abandoned. It's hard to sustain a reform project when it doesn't produce results. So Khrushchev's reforms taper off, and the system enters a sort of phase of you know kind of ossified stagnation.

[19:47]

During this phase of stagnation which sets in from the '70s onwards, and this is something that we'll talk about more in due course, I just want to sort of anticipate that history for you, the socialist system becomes increasingly dependent upon palliatives. What are these palliatives?

[20:03]

Well, borrowing from the West is one. In order to finance imports of consumer goods from the West, the socialist economies of Eastern Europe will turn to borrowing from the West.

[20:15]

They become heavily indebted sovereign borrowers. There are other palliatives too. The Soviet Union itself is richly endowed with natural resources -- particularly oil.

[20:26]

Insofar as the price of oil goes up in the 1970s the Soviet Union is in a position to export oil to the world in order to be able to finance imports: imports of grain, imports of consumer goods. So the Soviet Union, in effect, transforms itself into a petrostate.

[20:46]

The system in short is headed towards crisis. This will not be obvious necessarily until the 1970s but if you look at the dwindling of growth rates within the socialist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after 1973 the overarching trajectories are clear enough.

[21:07]

A system that had sustained high levels of growth driven by extensive growth in the 1950s and 1960s slows dramatically in the 1970s and after.

[21:21]

Of course China's experience is very, very different. And the reasons for that we'll have to consider in due course. Does China successfully make the transition from extensive to intensive growth?

[21:32]

That's one possibility. Or is it China's growth from the 1970s onwards driven by an ongoing process of extensive growth? Are the opportunities for extensive growth in China larger than they are in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union?

[21:49]

These are you know kind of different possibilities and we'll explore them in due course. For now let's just take stock of the striking divergence between the Soviet Union's performance after 1973 and China's performance after 1973.

[22:03]

Okay, that's where we should have concluded on Thursday.

The Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s

[22:07]

So let's talk now about the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.

[22:17]

So far we've talked about the Cold War as a process of division -- a process of division that ultimately transformed the international system in the five years or so subsequent to the end of the Second World War.

[22:30]

The Cold War of course bifurcated the postwar international order -- divided it in two. Within this divided world two distinctive international systems develop: a Western system led by, arguably dominated by, the United States, and an Eastern or socialist system dominated by the Soviet Union.

[22:54]

But what of the relationships between these worlds? The East Bloc and the West Bloc? Were relations between them essentially stable? Even benign? Or was the world, for the duration of the Cold War, dancing on the brink of catastrophe?

Views of the Cold War

[23:13]

What was the Cold War? Was it a long war? Or was it a long peace? You know these are very fundamental questions about the Cold War's nature and historians continue to debate them through to the present day.

Bipolar Stability

[23:26]

How should we conceptualize the Cold War as an era of international history? Is it an era in which bipolarity, the division of the world in two, produced stability?

[23:36]

After all no major wars were fought between the superpowers between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. But how inevitable was this? Was it simply by chance that the Cold War remained stable? Or were there structural aspects to the Cold War division of the world which diminished the risk of conflict and helped to insure that the Cold War world remained peaceful?

[24:02]

Different historians will offer, you know sort of, different answers to this question. The Cold War historian John Gaddis↗ famously wrote an article titled "The Long Peace" which made the argument that there were structural aspects to the Cold War which diminished the risk of conflict and helped to ensure the basic peacefulness of the postwar world.

[24:23]

What might these structural aspects have been?

(student response)

[24:28]

Nuclear weapons, of course. Those are utterly crucial. Really the two structural conditions which helped to make the Cold War world so peaceful, in Gaddis's framework, are nuclear weapons and bipolarity.

[24:43]

Bipolarity is important because it's relatively stable; Gaddis is certainly not the only person to have made this argument. Probably the most influential theory of bipolar stability was articulated by the political scientist Kenneth Waltz↗ in the 1970s.

[25:01]

But theorists of sort of bipolar stability argue that a world divided in two is relatively stable because the two power blocs balance each other. Nuclear weapons compound this stability because they raise the stakes of conflict to such an unacceptably atrocious level that both sides have powerful incentives to avoid conflict at virtually all costs.

[25:26]

And this sort of constitutes one view of the Cold War as an international system. It was peaceful because of structural conditions integral to the system that made it so.

Peace Achieved by Statecraft

[25:40]

Another perspective would take the peacefulness of the Cold War less for granted and would see the fact that no major conflict was waged between the superpowers as owing to serendipity as much as to structural conditions.

[25:59]

In this view the Cold War ended up being peaceful because, in part of good fortune, also because leaders on both sides had the wherewithal to avoid conflict at particularly dangerous moments.

The Cold War as not Inherently Peaceful

[26:14]

But historians who are more skeptical about the claim that the Cold War was inherently or intrinsically a peaceful configuration of international relations might be able to point to particular flash points -- such as the Cuban Missile Crisis↗ or the Korean War↗ or the sort of military escalations of the early 1980s and construct counterfactual arguments to the effect that the world came very close to confrontation and that things might very well have played out differently.

[26:44]

You know but for certain events, you know, falling as they did we could have been plunged into a sort of catastrophic confrontation. This is a sort of counterfactual mode of arguing that challenges the hypothesis that the Cold War was a structurally stable configuration of international relations.

The Cold War Over Time

[27:06]

As we sort of think about this basic conundrum -- was the Cold War structurally stable or was it poised on the brink of catastrophe -- we should reflect about the ways in which the Cold War changed over time.

[27:18]

My own perspective as a historian is that it's dangerous to talk about the Cold War as a monolithic whole. The Cold War after all went on for four decades, and we should be sensitive to the ways in which the Cold War evolved during that period of time.

[27:34]

Of course the relationship of military power to the bipolar structuring of international relations changed considerably between the late 1940s and the late 1980s.

[27:44]

At the beginning of the period the United States was the world's sole nuclear power. At the end of the period the Soviet Union had more nuclear missiles than the United States and there were four other nuclear powers, at least four other nuclear powers, in the world system.

[28:00]

So the role of nuclear power, or nuclear weapons, evolves considerably during the era of the Cold War. So too do relations between the superpowers evolve considerably between the late 1940s and the late 1980s.

[28:12]

The Cold War will pass through a number of distinct phases. Estrangement in the late 1940s gives way to a period of sort of relative cooperativeness from the late 1960s through to the late 1970s.

[28:27]

Then the estrangement will reassert itself in the 1980s. So the diplomatic relationship is a dynamic one. It's not something which is fixed and unchanging.

[28:37]

Of course sort of being able to perceive this requires some familiarity with the history of the Cold War which of course you will all acquire during the course of this semester.

[28:49]

But even you know at this stage in our learning we might try to, you know, sort of represent the dynamic evolution of the Cold War by thinking about sort of the ways in which the risk of catastrophic nuclear conflict evolved and changed over time.

The Doomsday Clock

[29:05]

How did we quantify something so you know inherently unquantifiable as the risk of nuclear war?

[29:13]

What I've you know tried to do in this chart is to use a you know fairly available source of data which is the estimates of nuclear risk that were made by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists↗, a...well-known and highly respected policy journal published by a consortium of nuclear physicists, to gauge the risk of nuclear war as it evolved during the course of the entire Cold War.

[29:43]

This data is taken from the Doomsday Clock↗. How many of you have heard of Doomsday Clock?

[29:48]

Okay, a good number of you. The Doomsday Clock for those of you who haven't heard of it was a clock that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a policy journal, created to represent the risk of catastrophic war.

[30:02]

This clock was created in 1947 and the people who created it did so in part because you know many of them had been involved with the Manhattan Project↗ they felt, you know, a sense of responsibility for the atomic bomb and the Bulletin was conceived to offer you know sort of guidance to the policy makers who would be charged with sort of using nuclear weapons.

[30:21]

(student question)

[30:28]

I'm just going, I'm going to explain that. The graph is upside down. But let me tell you about the...

[30:33]

(laughter from the class)

Let me tell you about the Doomsday Clock first of all and that will explain why the graph is upside down.

[30:39]

So the Doomsday Clock is created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and what it tries to do is to measure the risk of nuclear war. And it does this with a clock.

[30:48]

Literally -- a traditional clock, not a digital watch, but one like the one in the back of the room, with hands.

[30:54]

And the clock shows how close to midnight the world is. And this is a metaphor for you know proximity to nuclear annihilation. If the hands of the clock, as they move closer to midnight, then the risks of nuclear war are you know greater and greater.

[31:11]

So if it's two minutes to midnight things are really bad. You know start packing for another planet.

[31:17]

(laughter from the class)

If it's ten to midnight than you can breathe a little bit more easily. So this is how the Doomsday Clock works. During the course of the Cold War the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists adjusts the hands on the Doomsday Clock a number of times so as to represent the dwindling or increasing probability of nuclear conflict as the Bulletin sees it. And it is this metric, the location of the hands on the Doomsday Clock, that this chart plots for you.

[31:51]

What you can see here is a history of the evolution of catastrophic risk during the Cold War as a, you know, sort of number of distinguished analysts and observers at the time perceived it.

[32:06]

When the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is created in 1947 there's only one nuclear power in the world: the United States. The risk of nuclear war is put at about seven minutes to midnight. This is your baseline.

[32:17]

With the detonation in 1949 of a Soviet nuclear bomb the risk of nuclear war seems to increase significantly. It's now, what, three minutes to midnight.

[32:28]

As tensions escalate over the Korean War the probability of nuclear war seems even closer. It's now two minutes to midnight. It remains two minutes to midnight which is to say, really, really, risky, for most of the 1950s.

[32:42]

Towards the end of the 1950s the probability of major conflict begins to recede somewhat. It goes up to, what, seven minutes to midnight in 1960.

[32:51]

During the 1960s the Cold War system seems to becoming so peaceful that the bulletin of the atomic scientists puts the hands on the Doomsday Clock back to twelve minutes to midnight.

[33:03]

(student question)

[33:05]

That's a terrific question. Why doesn't it plunge downwards in 1962? Because this is not done...What you're referring to of course is the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[33:15]

Probably the single most dangerous episode in the entire history of the Cold War. Why does the chart not reflect a vastly heightened probability of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

[33:27]

The answer is really simple and I'm afraid fairly mundane. The clock was not updated with sufficient rapidity to enable the data to take account of you know kind of short-term risks. or short-term escalations in the Cold War.

[33:45]

So what this is a representation of is kind of long-term trends in the diplomacy and you know kind of military relations of the two superpowers. It doesn't reflect episodic crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the crisis over the Middle East in 1973.

[34:03]

You can see that the risk of nuclear war seems to become a little greater in the late 1960s in part as a consequence of the escalation in Vietnam. During the mid-1970s relations essentially stabilize again. The risk of nuclear war looks to be as distant as it had been during the 1960s. Then from the late 1970s the Cold War world again becomes a much more risky place.

[34:31]

By the early 1980s it is again three minutes to midnight. The risks of nuclear catastrophe seem to be much greater than they had been a decade earlier.

[34:41]

Then of course from late 1980s as the Cold War ends and...major new arms controls negotiations are reached between the two superpowers the risk of nuclear confrontation seems to wither away.

[34:55]

So that's the history of the Cold War as a history of the risk of catastrophe as gauged by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This is a really superficial overview of Cold War history.

[35:08]

(student question)

[35:15]

These were serious nuclear physicists and as such they knew that there was no algorithm that could adequately sort of calculate the risk of nuclear war and that trying to quantify this was going to produce a worse outcome than taking a subjective position which is what they did.

[35:32]

So this is based on a qualitative not a quantitative estimation of the risk of catastrophic nuclear war.

[35:41]

So -- so this is a panorama on the history of the Cold War. And having dealt so far with this bit of it what we're going to do today is deal with this bit of it.

The Stabilization of the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1960s

[35:53]

The stabilization of the Cold War from the 1950s into the 1960s. We'll try to explain why.

Summary and Overview

[36:01]

So let's just recapitulate what we've already done and talk about what we're going to do today.

[36:05]

So we've talked about the Cold War division of Europe, the Cold War division of East Asia, and we've dealt at some length with the political economy of the Cold War Era with attentiveness to both the capitalist world and the socialist world.

[36:18]

We've also talked about American interventionism in the developing world. We haven't talked so much about Soviet intervention, which is something that we'll try to cover today.

[36:26]

But what we're going to do today is sort of continue the story of Cold War division and Cold War escalation with the particular attentiveness to the history of nuclear weapons, and to their relationship to the geopolitics of the Cold War.

[36:40]

We'll also talk about Soviet interventions in the developing world and those aspects of American interventionism, particularly in Vietnam and Latin America, which we've haven't yet had opportunity to deal with.

[36:53]

And all of this will lead us towards the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Missile Crisis represented sort of...an important episode in the history of the Cold War. It was in a sense a climatic episode that brought together underlying sort of rivalries: the nuclear arms race, and the struggle for influence in the developing world that had been bubbling for over a decade.

[37:22]

It would also be a turning point in the history of the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the superpowers very close to the brink of catastrophe. After the Cold War, sorry, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, new steps would be taken to diminish and control the risks of catastrophic confrontation.

[37:41]

So it's a vital episode both as an episodic instantiation of Cold War rivalries and as a turning point in the history of the Cold War competition.

Nuclear Weapons

[37:52]

Let's start by talking about nuclear weapons and their relationship to the Cold War. Of course the Cuban Missile Crisis would demonstrate very vividly the catastrophic potential of nuclear weapons. It was a confrontation that was borne out of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[38:13]

But how did it get to that point? How do we explain the arms race? How did we end up coming so close to catastrophe and ruin over Cuba?

[38:23]

As we think about the history of the arms race it's important not just to fixate on the Cold War but to see nuclear weapons as a development that have implications for international relations more broadly. The history of nuclear weapons cannot be confined to the history of the Cold War.

[38:40]

Of course we continue to live in a nuclear world -- a world in which nuclear weapons remain both an asset and a problem for statecraft.

[38:50]

Nuclear weapons of course originated in 1945. That was the moment of detonation so to speak. This might be seen as a revolutionary turning point in the larger history of international relations. With nuclear weapons of course military conflict became inestimably more destructive, at least potentially more destructive, than it had ever been in human history.

[39:16]

What were the consequences of this nuclear revolution for international relations?

[39:21]

Nuclear weapons certainly made war more deadly. At least in theory, or at least in terms of the, its capacity for destruction. Did they also make war less likely?

[39:32]

What about relations between the superpowers within the specific context of the Cold War? When we talk about nuclear weapons we do so within a historical context -- that of the bipolar Cold War.

[39:44]

Did nuclear weapons within this context make relations between the two superpowers more peaceful?

[39:52]

What was the relationship of nuclear weapons moreover to the superpowers themselves? Was it possession of nuclear weapons that made the superpowers super or vice versa?

[40:06]

After all possession of large nuclear arsenals is one of the criteria that differentiates the superpowers from other powers in the postwar international system, right?

[40:16]

The monopoly on nuclear power, on nuclear weapons is not absolute. Great Britain will detonate its first nuclear bomb in the 1950s. China and France will follow course in the 1960s.

[40:27]

But for the duration of the Cold War the superpowers have more and deadlier nuclear weapons than anybody else. So when we think about sort of the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War we should think not only about how nuclear weapons mediate relations between the superpowers but also about whether it is possession of nuclear weapons that differentiates the superpowers from the rest of the international system.

[40:51]

How did the balance between the two nuclear superpowers evolve over time?

[40:56]

It was not stable. What were the consequences of its evolution for the course of the Cold War?

The Manhattan Project and the Development of Nuclear Weaponry in the Second World War

[41:05]

Then of course we should also think about nuclear proliferation. This is a theme that has more to do with the history of the 1960s than it does with the history of 1950s, so we'll deal with it on Thursday not today.

[41:16]

But let's sort of recapitulate some of the history of this. Where do nuclear weapons come from? What is the context in which they are developed? Nuclear weapons, most directly, were a legacy of the Second World War.

[41:31]

The quest to build a nuclear bomb in the United States antedated the entry of the United States to the Second World War. In 1939, Leo Szilard↗, a émigré physicist, he was originally from Hungary, came to the United States during the 1930s, persuaded Albert Einstein, then the world's most famous scientist, to write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of the immense capacity for destruction that an atomic bomb might be able to produce.

[42:05]

The letter was intended to sort of warn Roosevelt of the adverse consequences that might ensue should Nazi Germany succeed in developing a nuclear bomb.

[42:16]

Einstein, after talking with Szilard, was very concerned about this prospect, and though Einstein was a pacifist of, you know, deep conviction, he was sufficiently alarmed by the prospect that somebody else, other than the United States, might develop a nuclear bomb that he consented to write a letter to Roosevelt, encouraging Roosevelt to initiate a program to develop an American nuclear bomb first of all.

[42:44]

The Manhattan Project↗ began to 1942, early in 1942. It was the sort of major institutional framework in which the United States would try to build an atomic bomb.

[42:58]

It was led, at least the scientific side of the Manhattan Project, was led by Robert Oppenheimer↗, a physicist associated with this institution, the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer taught here before going on to lead the atomic bomb project.

[43:14]

In fact UC Berkeley's involvement with the atomic bomb project was even greater than that. The University of California, Berkeley played a managerial role in the sort of national nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos for much of its history. So Berkeley has a history which is sort of intimately connected with the history of nuclear weapons.

[43:34]

The Manhattan Project very quickly achieved the major scientific breakthrough that enabled the construction of the nuclear bomb. In December 1942, this is less than a year after the initiation of the Manhattan Project, the first chain reaction in uranium was initiated.

[43:57]

Not at Los Alamos, not at Berkeley, but at the University of Chicago in a lab led by the nuclear physicist Fermi↗.

[44:07]

The initiation of the first chain reaction in a pile of uranium, made it, sort of offered in a sense proof, that a fission reaction was possible, that it would be technically feasible to create a nuclear bomb.

[44:23]

Before this, you know chain reaction was produced in practice, the theory that atoms of uranium could be split releasing massive destructive energy in the process, was just a theory.

[44:36]

The chain reaction of December 1942, provided you know sort of empirical validation of that theory and demonstrated that under the right conditions atoms could be split with an accompanying release of great, great energy.

[44:53]

Thereafter the challenge for the Manhattan Project was to engineer a device, a bomb, that would be capable of producing a chain reaction in uranium under sort of battlefield circumstances.

[45:05]

The first such device was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945. This was known as the Trinity Test↗ -- a test that detonated the world's first atomic bomb.

[45:20]

That bomb would of course be used in fairly short order to bring the Pacific War to a halt. Bombs were dropped over two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. Thereafter Japan surrendered shortly.

[45:38]

You know I don't know want to sort of delve into the utilization of the atomic bomb during the Pacific War. That's sort of a different story and it raises a different set of issues.

Nuclear Development in the United States and in Other Nations

[45:51]

More interesting question for our purposes might be the question of why the United States ultimately ended up getting there first. Why was it the United States, of all of the combating powers during the Second World War, that succeeded in developing an atomic bomb?

[46:09]

Can anybody offer any suggestions as to why the United States might have become the world's first nuclear power?

[46:19]

(student response)

[46:27]

Yeah, that's a really crucial point. The openness of the United States to immigration from Europe, particularly to the immigration of Jewish scientists, is a major asset for the United States.

[46:39]

Several of the men who are most essential to the success of the atom bomb project are refugees who flee Europe because of Nazi persecution. Einstein of course is the most prominent though Einstein is not centrally involved with the development of the atomic bomb.

[46:57]

But others who are Fermi, Szilard, and Teller, Edward Teller↗, are all refugees from Hitler's Europe. So the openness of the United States to immigration is a, you know, crucial asset for the U.S.

[47:15]

It's also the case that building an atomic bomb is really, really costly. It involves a vast mobilization of resources: financial, engineering, and technical. Of the Second World War's combatants the United States was uniquely well positioned to orchestrate this grand project.

[47:36]

One estimate which one historian has offered as a way of sort of gauging the scale of the Manhattan Project as an industrial and engineering undertaking is to compare it to the size of the prewar automobile industry.

[47:51]

And it has been argued that the scale of the Manhattan bomb project, in terms of the inputs that it required, was crudely similar to the scale of the prewar automobile industry. So this is a big, big undertaking. And of the war's protagonists the United States is uniquely well equipped to undertake it.

[48:11]

Germany might have tried to build an atomic bomb. After all Germany had tremendous scientific and technical resources -- a vast and sophisticated industrial base. Why did Germany not try to build an atomic bomb? Which is what Einstein and Leo Fermi had so feared?

[48:29]

In part the answer had to do with priorities. The Nazi leadership of Germany was very suspicious of nuclear physics. Hitler believed that nuclear physics was Jewish physics -- that no good could come of it, no use could come of it. And accordingly choose not to pursue an atomic bomb project. It simply was not a priority for the Nazis.

[48:49]

Of course the fact that the Nazis had already hounded most of Germany's top nuclear physicists out of the country meant that Germany would not have been in a very strong position to build an atomic bomb had it even tried to do so.

[49:03]

Japanese military leaders by contrast were much more receptive to the possibilities of nuclear physics for waging war, but Japan simply lacked the technical means and infrastructure to undertake a project of this scale.

[49:21]

The Soviet Union will of course be the next power to build an atomic bomb. And the Soviet Union has many of the same resources: a large industrial base, impressive scientific expertise, that allow the United States to succeed.

[49:36]

It's also the case that when the Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb in 1949, in August 194, that it benefits from what development economists would call the advantages of relative backwardness.

[49:49]

Which is a polite euphemism for saying that the Soviet Union copied aspects of the American atomic bomb. This owed in part to espionage. The Soviet Union certainly had representatives within the Manhattan Project who conveyed vital technical data back to Moscow. So spying helps the Soviets to imitate the American bomb design.

[50:13]

But that was not all. It was also the case that the United States government published, shortly after the completion of the atomic bomb project, an official history of the Manhattan Project, the Smyth Report↗, which provided a, you know, fairly detailed account of how the atomic bomb was built.

[50:31]

This is all true. The Soviet Union was able to utilize this report, a report that was available in all good book stores, and would have been available on Amazon.com had it existed, (laughter from the class), as a sort of how-to manual.

[50:45]

So the episode, you know, may be illustrative, of...the difficulties that an open society faces when you know waging a Cold War against a relatively, you know, closed society. And this issue will sort of recur through the history of the Cold War. But for now it helps us to understand how the Soviets got to build an atomic bomb so quickly.

Soviet Development of Nuclear Weapons and US Development of Thermonuclear Weapons

[51:10]

The fact that the Soviets catch up with the United States in just four years was a psychological shock to Americans. American atomic scientists had not for the most part expected the Soviet Union to get there so quickly.

[51:25]

The fact that they do transforms nuclear weapons into a source of urgent rivalry between the superpowers. Now that the Soviet Union in 1949 possess an atomic bomb similar to the one that the United States used in Hiroshima. The question of how to trump the Soviets is the most urgent one that American nuclear physicists have to address.

[51:53]

The Soviets have their bomb what can we do to build a bigger bomb? That is the question that American nuclear physicists like Edward Teller ask themselves in the fall of 1949.

[52:05]

The answer to that question is simple: you have to build a bigger bomb -- a better bomb, a more destructive bomb. How is this to be accomplished?

Fission Bombs and Fusion Bombs

[52:14]

You know, very simply, I don't want to delve too deep into the nuclear physics, which I'm not qualified to do, the answer is to build a different kind of atomic weapon, an atomic weapon that uses a sort of different method, a different principle of creating energy from the sort of chain reaction of, you know, in this case...

[52:43]

The distinction is that the first bomb, the bomb which is dropped on Hiroshima, depends upon splitting atoms -- bombards heavy unstable uranium atoms, a particular isotope of uranium, U-235, such that they split releasing kind of new atoms and energy in the process.

[53:08]

But splitting is what produces the initial atomic bomb in 1945. The new bomb, the potentially more destructive bomb, that Edward Teller and other nuclear physicists want to create, will operate according to a different principle, will operate according to a principle of nuclear fusion, which is to say joining rather than fission, which is splitting, the principle according to which the first bomb had operated.

[53:31]

The fusion bomb depends upon fusing two isotopes of hydrogen, hydrogen-2, deuterium↗, and hydrogen-3, tritium↗, to create a new atom: helium.

[53:48]

It's sort of relatively, you know, conventional inert kind of atom, helium atom. But this reaction does more than produce helium. It also produces a spare neutron and a lot of energy -- a whole lot of energy -- and this is where the sort of destructive power of the hydrogen bomb↗ comes from.

[54:09]

The hydrogen bomb using a different kind of fuel: hydrogen, two different isotopes of hydrogen, and it joins them together to produce helium and a whole lot of energy.

[54:19]

The geopolitical, you know, implications of this, are you know very simply, that the bomb is much bigger, it's explosive yield is much greater, and it is much deadlier than the conventional fission bomb had been.

[54:35]

The genealogy of this is important insofar as creating a sort of fusion bomb can only be undertaken once a fission bomb exists. These are two different kinds of atomic weapon but creating the fusion bomb depends upon the preexistence of a fission bomb.

[54:53]

And this is, you know, where some technical explanation is required. Creating a fusion reaction is really, really difficult to do. Or, you know, it can only be accomplished under very specific circumstances. Where does, where do fusion reactions happen, you know, constantly on an unimaginably vast scale all of the time.

(student response)

[55:13]

The sun. Exactly. Our sun is a great fusion reactor. What might that tell us about the circumstances under which fusion reactions can take place?

(student response)

[55:27]

That's right. They can only take place under conditions of immense heat and pressure. So to create a fusion reaction on earth you have to in a sense create conditions which resemble those on the surface of the sun.

[55:40]

It has to be really, really hot and under really, really high pressure in order for deuterium and tritium to be able to fuse to produce helium and energy.

[55:52]

So how do you make conditions on earth that resemble the conditions on the surface of the sun?

(student response)

[55:58]

A fission reaction. That's right. You use your fission bomb to create conditions, temporarily, that resemble those on the surface of the sun. And then in that context of immense heat and immense pressure you can orchestrate a fusion reaction that will fuel an even bigger nuclear weapon than your fission reaction could have done.

[56:22]

So the thing is staged and the basic design for the hydrogen bomb, or the superbomb as it was known at the time, depends upon the utilization of a fission bomb to create conditions in which a fusion reaction can be achieved.

[56:37]

So the hydrogen bomb will contain two distinct fuel sources. It will contain a fission bomb and it will also contain a sort of source of hydrogen fuel which permits a fusion reaction to take place. And the fission reaction is necessary in order to accomplish the fusion reaction.

The Destructive Capacity of Fission Bombs and Fusion Bombs

[56:57]

This transforms the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons. The first American and Soviet nuclear weapons, actually the date on this one, Joe-1↗ is the first Soviet nuclear bomb and it's detonated in 1949, not 1945, as it says on the slide.

[57:18]

But the destructive power of the first American and Soviet nuclear tests in 1945 and 1949 is about 0.2 megatons. This is pretty destructive by comparison with the kinds of bombs that you can build with conventional explosives.

[57:37]

But it pales by comparison with the first American fusion bomb test. The Ivy Mike↗ test in 1953, just eight years after the first fission bomb test, produces a destructive yield of about 11 megatons.

[57:55]

That is more destructive by some what fifty times. It's a substantial order of magnitude more destructive. The next year the United States tests a fusion bomb that produces a yield of about 48 megatons.

[58:15]

The improvement, if that's, you know, the right word, over the first atomic bombs, the atomic bombs that we used in Hiroshima is stunning. I mean exponential would hardly suffice to describe it.

[58:30]

In 1961 the Soviet Union tests a bomb which produces a yield of about 57 megatons. This is the biggest bomb ever tested in the history of humanity. The Soviets call it Tsar Bomba↗ -- King Bomb.

The Unprecedented Destructive Power of Nuclear Weapons

[58:47]

It's an appropriate name. But the scale of the destruction that these weapons are you know capable of producing is simply sort of unimaginable and that's very, very important to remember.

[58:59]

That in just fifteen years, nuclear weapons are transformed from being devices that had some familial resemblance to the most powerful conventional weapons, maybe not to single conventional bombs, but to the kind of destruction that a fleet of aircraft equipped with conventional bombs could achieve.

[59:19]

After all the bombing of Hiroshima is not really any deadlier than the bombings of Tokyo that took place that same year. You know a fleet of a hundred aircraft equipped with, you know, incendiary conventional bombs are capable of inflicting the same kinds of devastation that a single Hiroshima type bomb can do.

[59:38]

It might take them six hours as opposed to six minutes but the effects are you know more or less comparable. So that's sort of the beginning of the nuclear era.

[59:47]

It represents a sort of quantum shift from the era of conventional warfare. But the consequences so far as the waging of war is concerned are not all that transformative -- at least not yet.

[60:00]

By 1960 we're in a different world. We're in a world in which a single nuclear bomb can destroy an entire large city, and pollute its water, its air, the atmosphere around it for hundreds if not thousands of miles.

[60:16]

I mean how many bombs would it take on a scale of the, you know, Castle Bravo↗ or Tsar Bomba↗ device, to make the territory of the United States uninhabitable. The question could never be answered. It could be hypothesized. It can't be answered without an empirical test which nobody, you know, wants to do.

[60:35]

But...it wouldn't be all that many. So the destructiveness of these weapons escalates very, very quickly. And that's really, really consequential.

American Grand Strategy and Nuclear Weapons

[60:47]

There's real important consequences for nuclear strategy. Let's talk a little bit about the relationship of American sort of grand strategy to nuclear weapons, and here you can see the essential relationship between nuclear weapons and strategic choice laid out very clearly.

American Strategy Prior to NSC 68

[61:05]

During the Cold War's very earliest phase, the period in which the United States maintains an effective nuclear monopoly, American Cold War strategy is really more focused on economics than it is upon military methods.

[61:16]

During the era of the Marshall Plan↗ the United States focuses on building up its allies. It tries to contain Communism as a kind of political contagion by making societies, the societies of Western Europe in principle, resilient against it, by putting people back to work, by stimulating economic growth and so on.

[61:37]

There is you know relatively little attention paid to the military containment of Communism during the first years of the Cold War. The Cold War in this period is waged primarily as an economic struggle, a struggle to rebuild Western Europe.

[61:55]

After 1949, when the Soviet Union detonates its atomic bomb, things begin to develop in a rather different direction. The winter of 1949 to 1950 is a sort of bleak moment, a wikt:nadir of sorts, for the United States in the Cold War.

[62:12]

The explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb comes as a shock. Mao's triumph in China in October 1949 is less shocking. It had been obvious for years which way China was going. But the declaration of the People's Republic in October 1949 is nonetheless a setback. Then of course in the summer of 1950 the Korean War breaks out. So for the United States it looks you know rather as if the world is slipping away.

[62:39]

Things are developing in a direction disadvantageous to the United States. In this context the Truman administration articulates a bold, coherent, and new definition of American Cold War strategy.

NSC 68

[62:55]

This is a definition that is articulated in a policy planning document: NSC 68↗ -- arguably the most important strategic document of the entire Cold War era.

[63:08]

NSC 68 marks a major shift in American Cold War strategy. Whereas the United States had previously focused its efforts upon ameliorating the economic circumstance of Western Europe after the Second World War NSC 68 signals a bold shift towards the military containment of Soviet power.

[63:28]

NSC 68 envisages full spectrum containment. It is a military containment that is to be orchestrated using conventional weapons as well as nuclear weapons, but there's no ambiguity as to what the United States wants to achieve.

[63:41]

And this is to develop military resources sufficient to dissuade the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China from expanding their influence beyond their current borders.

[63:56]

Doing this the authors of NSC 68 understand will require a vast mobilization of American economic resources. The United States in 1950 was not the military power that it would become by 1960.

[64:15]

In order to successfully contain the Soviet Union and China, two vast powers in terms of their expanse, the United States would have to mobilize its industry, mobilize its society even, so as to develop a large and capable military apparatus. This is what NSC 68 proposed doing.

The Eisenhower Administration and the Shift to Nuclear Weapons

[64:36]

The transition in leadership in the United States from Truman to Eisenhower, a transition that occurred in 1953 when Eisenhower was inaugurated, marked a important shift in the underlying premises of American Cold War strategy.

[64:55]

The Truman administration, at least with NSC 68, had in effect been willing to pay whatever it cost to contain Soviet power.

[65:04]

Truman had envisaged mobilization of men, industry, as well as nuclear weapons. This was very expensive. The waging of the Korean War was very expensive for the United States.

[65:17]

There was reason to fear, at least Eisenhower argued, that the Truman administration was transforming the United States into a garrison society -- into a society whose sort of primary purpose and function was to organize itself for war.

[65:33]

And this prospect troubled Eisenhower. Though Eisenhower had made his career as a great general he did not want to transform the United States into a garrison state. He wanted to preserve what he saw as the essential sort of free market nature of American society. He didn't want to transform the United States into a facsimile of the United States, into a facsimile of the Soviet Union, into a society whose economy would be planned for the explicit purpose of organizing for and preparing for war.

[66:06]

Eisenhower then wanted to cut military spending. He was concerned that military spending under Truman had increased. He wanted to figure out some way to reduce military spending, perhaps quite dramatically, while maintaining an effective containment of the Soviet Union.

[66:23]

These were seemingly contradictory objectives. How do you reduce military spending on the one hand while continuing to contain and deter the Soviet Union on the other?

[66:38]

This was a conundrum. And nuclear weapons were the answer to it. Nuclear weapons relatively cost-efficient, by comparison with other sorts of military resources, like standing armies, or you know large battalions of tanks. Nuclear weapons are relatively cheap to manufacture and maintain.

[66:58]

Of course the initial development of nuclear weapons is really expensive. The Manhattan Project was very costly, but once you've figured out how to build nuclear weapons, once you've created, you know, nuclear reactors for the purpose of refining weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, then making more nuclear weapons and building more nuclear weapons is pretty cheap.

[67:18]

How many people does it take to maintain a nuclear weapon in its silo?

[67:23]

Not all that many. These are fairly coast efficient weapons of war in the, you know, comparative scheme of things. So in order to keep the costs of the Cold War manageable the Eisenhower administration during the 1950s will develop a Cold War grand strategy that places overwhelming emphasis upon nuclear weapons as a source of military power.

The Massive Retaliation Doctrine

[67:46]

In 1954 Eisenhower Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles↗, articulates a doctrine that becomes known as the Massive Retaliation Doctrine. What this doctrine puts forth is that the United States will retaliate against any Soviet attack, including conventional attacks, on Western Europe with nuclear weapons.

[68:06]

So even a nonnuclear offensive, a conventional offensive in Europe, will be met the United States proclaims, with a nuclear response. Of course this is all logical and necessary, if you're determined to keep costs down and to minimize your troop presence in Europe for economic reasons, you have to retaliate with nuclear weapons because if you're not prepared to do so then you're in effect inviting Soviet aggression into Western Europe.

[68:35]

So the nuclear retaliation doctrine, the Massive Retaliation Doctrine, is a sort of prerequisite for any credible effort to cut the costs of the Cold War by you know shifting American military strategy to a dependence on nuclear arms.

[68:53]

The only, the conventional forces that the United States maintains in Europe in the 1950s, are not intended to be capable of holding off the Red Army.

[69:03]

The United States doesn't maintain anything like enough military forces in Europe during the 1950s for those forces to have any plausible prospect of holding off a Soviet invasion. If the Soviets chose to invade Western Europe they would have very quickly succeeded.

[69:20]

The Red Army was much larger, had more tanks, had more men than the United States and the countries of Western Europe had. But what the United States has is nuclear weapons. And its conventional forces exist in Europe principally to provide a pretext for the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

[69:38]

So they provide a tripwire. This is the term that is used at the time to describe the role of the US conventional forces in Europe. If the Soviet Union invades Europe, it will necessarily have to engage in some conflict with American conventional forces, that conflict will provide a pretext for the use of nuclear weapons to retaliate against the USSR.

[70:00]

So the US develops a Cold War grand strategy that is heavily, profoundly, dependent upon the use of nuclear weapons as instruments of massive retaliation.

Delivery of Nuclear Weapons via Bombers and via Missiles

[70:10]

How are these nuclear weapons to be delivered? Initially via bombers. It's a misconception to presume that the nuclear arms race was waged by sort of missiles from the very beginning. For most of the 1950s airplanes, bombers, are the essential sort of instrument in the arsenal of Strategic Air Command↗ -- the branch of the United States Air Force that is responsible for waging nuclear war.

[70:39]

During the 1950s of course the United States will experiment with rocket technology, so too does the Soviet Union. Both superpowers utilize sort of the resources of German rocket building during the Second World War. They both recruit Nazi, former Nazi rocket scientists, to try to build ballistic missiles for them.

[71:00]

There's an application of these technologies too in the space programs of both superpowers. But the key point that you ought to remember is that developing rockets is a technically complex and difficult process. For most of the 1950s rockets, rocket technologies, have very little application to the nuclear arms race. Airplanes and bombers are the mainstays of strategic power during the 1950s.

[71:28]

It's only from the late 1950s that viable intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs↗, begin to come online. The first American ICBM, actually, it's not quite the first, but the mainstay of the American ICBM force in the 1960s, the Minuteman Missile↗ is not introduced until the late 1950s.

Advantages of Missiles over Bombers

[71:48]

The advent of rocket technology and its marriage to hydrogen bombs has really important, really transformative implications for the Cold War arms race. Missiles have a number of really important advantages over bombers as vehicles for delivering nuclear weapons.

[72:10]

First of all they're must faster. Second they're much cheaper to manufacture and maintain. You don't have to keep a crew, a flight crew, you know housed and paid, you just keep a bomber in a concrete silo with somebody watching a computer ready to fire it if necessary.

[72:25]

And of course you have mechanics and so on but these are much cheaper, more cost-efficient weapons than bombers are. Even more important it's much easier to defend nuclear missiles against preemptive attack than it is to defend airplanes. Airplanes are very vulnerable to enemy attack when they're sitting on the ground.

[72:44]

Right, if you have a squadron of heavy bombers that are sitting out, you know, kind on an airstrip somewhere in, you know, the northeastern United States, a Soviet preemptive attack would be able to do catastrophic damage to those airplanes. Just one bomb well positioned could prevent any of them from flying ever again and attacking the Soviet Union.

[73:07]

If you have nuclear missiles which are buried deep in concrete silos in the earth's surface, which is how they're stored, it's much harder for an enemy to preemptively attack and to take out your offensive capability.

[73:21]

So nuclear weapons are much more survivable than bombers had been. Survivability is a keyword that nuclear strategists, you know, talk about in the late 1950s and 1960s. One of the myriad advantages of missiles over bombers is that they have much greater capacity for surviving a nuclear attack.

Preemption and Mutually Assured Destruction

[73:40]

And this is really important and it brings us back to the theme of preemption, right. A nuclear world, a world in which both superpowers possess nuclear weapons, is a world in which, at least in theory, there might be structural incentives to launch a preemptive war.

[73:55]

If you think that you can get away with attacking your opponent preemptively, if you think that you can take out their capacity to retaliate against you in a preemptive sneak attack, you'd be crazy not to do it. I mean, putting aside the ethical implications, as a strategic issue, preemption would make a certain sense in a nuclear world if you could ensure that it was successful because preemptively attacking your opponent would assure your own safety.

[74:27]

Now the only deterrence against preemption, the only plausible deterrence against preemption, will be the capacity to maintain sufficient survivable nuclear forces that you would be able to withstand a preemptive attack against your territory with sufficient nuclear forces intact, to be able to retaliate against your opponent with devastating force.

[74:55]

You have to have enough nuclear weapons buried in silos deep in, you know, the mountains of Colorado and you know the plains of Nebraska to be able to be fairly confident that, even if the Soviet Union preemptively attacked you, enough of your nuclear forces would survive that attack that you could launch a devastating retaliatory attack against the USSR. Because that capacity makes it not in the interest of the Soviet Union to attack you under any circumstances. Right.

[75:25]

And it's not until the early 1960s that both sides will sort of reach the position, maybe even later, this is something which is very difficult to know for sure, but it's not until the 1960s that both sides will reach the situation at which they have sufficient survivable nuclear forces to be able to, at least in theory, withstand a preemptive attack by the other superpower with enough nuclear forces intact to be able to launch a devastating counteroffensive.

[75:56]

This is really, really crucial to the logic of Cold War stability. Because it's only once both superpowers have enough resources, enough nuclear weapons that are able to survive a potential preemptive attack, that a situation of stable deterrence could be said to exist. Right, because without that capacity for survivability there's no logical reason why the other superpower shouldn't preemptively attack you first of all.

American Grand Strategy and Survivability

[76:28]

So American sort of strategic policy from the late 1950s becomes in a sense a quest to build a survivable nuclear force. A nuclear force that will be able to withstand sneak attack and to deliver a knockout punch against the Soviet Union in return.

[76:46]

To this end the United States will complement the bomber fleet that is built in the 1950s with intercontinental ballistic missiles, which live in concrete silos and are relatively defensible, and with sea launched ballistic missiles. These are missiles that are located on nuclear submarines which patrol the oceans.

[77:06]

And the sole purpose of these nuclear submarines armed with nuclear weapons is to be able to retaliate against the Soviet Union in the event of a Soviet preemptive attack on the United States.

[77:19]

Submarines are you know terrific as a source of deterrent nuclear power because it's impossible to preemptively take out a nuclear submarine fleet. These are vessels that are located deep under water. They're indestructible.

[77:33]

And what they offer is a guarantee to both superpowers that if the other superpower should launch a preemptive attack against them then they will have sufficient strategic offensive power located aboard submarines to be able to retaliate against the attacker with overwhelming force.

[77:53]

And this is vital to the accomplishment of the stability of the bipolar nuclear system. Because only once both superpowers are in that, you know, situation of having enough and a sufficiently diverse arsenal of nuclear weapons to be able to survive a prospective preemptive attack with enough power to retaliate against the aggressor will the nuclear system become in a word stable.

Cold War Stability and the Arsenals of the Superpowers

[78:19]

When does this moment of stability arrive? Well, Americans in the late 1950s fear the prospect of preemptive attack. Sputnik↗ as we talked about is launched in 1950. It seems to signal that the Soviets are stealing ahead in the nuclear arms race.

[78:38]

John F. Kennedy running for the presidency in 1960 talks about a missile gap which he accuses the Eisenhower administration of having permitted to develop. Kennedy warns that the United States is falling so far behind -- so far behind that it might invite a Soviet sneak attack against it.

[78:54]

The truth in fact, and this is where we will conclude for today, is very different. There is a missile gap in the early 1960s but it runs in the favor of the United States.

[79:06]

Despite Soviet success in space rocketry, in launching Sputnik into orbit in 1957, it is the United States that leads in the effort to construct intercontinental ballistic missiles during the late 1950s.

[79:22]

What this chart shows you in gray is the missile gap between the two powers in terms of the balance of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Above the line the balance runs in the favor of the Soviet Union, in the favor of the United States, below the line it runs in favor of the Soviet Union.

[79:39]

Until the late 1960s the United States enjoys a substantial margin of advantage in the missile race. In the arms race writ large, this is an arms race that includes not just nuclear tipped missiles but also bombers and submarines, the United States has an even more impressive margin of advantage.

American Advantage in Missile Strength Over the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile Crisis

[79:58]

The real missile gap, at the beginning of the 1960s, runs in favor of the United States -- not in favor of the Soviet Union. This is not something that Kennedy is willing to admit, running for the presidency, because berating Eisenhower over an alleged missile gap that runs in the other direction is an easy way to win votes. You make your opponent look weak and you promise to do better. This is politics.

[80:21]

For Khrushchev the missile gap, the real missile gap, is a strategic liability. How is it to be closed? The United States has so many more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union in the early 1960s that there appears to be a sufficient margin perhaps of superiority that the United States could conceivably attack the Soviet Union and gain advantage by doing so.

[80:46]

So what is Khrushchev to do? You know we should ponder that between now and Thursday when we'll talk about the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the sort of larger development of Cold War politics in the 1960s.

---