The race for nuclear arms

The postwar arms race began as early as 1943, when the Soviet Union began its atomic program and placed agents in the West to steal U.S. atomic secrets. When the U.S.S.R. rejected the Baruch Plan in 1946 and U.S.–Soviet relations deteriorated, a technological race became inevitable. The years of the U.S. monopoly, however, were a time of disillusionment for American leaders, who discovered that the atomic bomb was not the absolute weapon they had first envisioned. First, the atomic monopoly was something of a bluff. As late as 1948 the U.S. arsenal consisted of a mere handful of warheads and only 32 long-range bombers converted for their delivery. Second, the military was at a loss as to how to use the bomb. Not until war plan “Half Moon” (May 1948) did the Joint Chiefs envision an air offensive “designed to exploit the destructive and psychological power of atomic weapons.” Truman searched for an alternative, but balancing Soviet might in conventional forces with a buildup in kind would have meant turning the United States into a garrison state, an option far more expensive and damaging to civic values than nuclear weapons. A few critics, notably in the navy, asked how a democratic society could morally justify a strategy based on annihilation of civilian populations. The answer, which had been evolving since 1944, was that U.S. strategy aimed at deterring enemy attacks in the first place. “The only war you really win,” said General Hoyt Vandenberg, “is the war that never starts.”

Nuclear deterrence, however, was subject to at least three major problems. First, even a nuclear attack could not prevent the Soviet army from overrunning western Europe. Second, the nuclear threat was of no use in cases of civil war, insurgency, and other small-scale conflicts, a fact Stalin evidently relied on in several instances. Third, the U.S. monopoly was inevitably short-lived. By 1949 the Soviets had the atomic bomb, and the British joined the club in October 1952. The United States would be obliged to race indefinitely to maintain its technological superiority.

The first contest in that race was for the “superbomb,” a hydrogen, or fusion, bomb a thousand times more destructive than the atomic fission variety. Many scientists opposed this escalation. The dispute polarized the political and scientific communities. On the one hand it seemed as if the Cold War had created a climate of fear that no longer permitted principled dissent even on an issue involving human survival; on the other hand, it seemed as if the dissenters, inadvertently or not, were promoting the interests of the U.S.S.R. In January 1950, Truman gave his approval to the H-bomb project, and the first fusion bomb was tested successfully at Enewetak atoll in November 1952. No debate occurred in the Soviet Union, where scientists moved directly to fusion research and exploded their first bomb in August 1953.

In the meantime, Soviet agitprop agencies laboured abroad to weaken Western resolve. A prime target was NATO, which the Kremlin evidently viewed as a political threat (since its inferior order of battle was scarcely an offensive military threat). After 1950 the Soviets alternately wooed the western Europeans with assurances of goodwill and frightened them with assurances of their destruction if they continued to host American bases. Cominform parties and front organizations (such as the World Peace Council) denounced the Pentagon and U.S. “arms monopolies” and exploited fear and frustration to win over intellectuals and idealists. The Stockholm Appeal of 1950, initiated by the French Communist physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, gathered petitions allegedly signed by 273,470,566 persons (including the entire adult population of the U.S.S.R.). Similar movements organized marches and protests in Western countries against nuclear arms (no such manifestations occurred in the Soviet bloc).

Eisenhower’s defense policy brought a sharp increase in research and development of warheads and long-range bombers and the construction of air bases on the territory of allies circling the U.S.S.R. The H-bomb breakthrough, however, also triggered a race to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The United States entered the postwar era with an advantage in long-range rocketry, thanks to the suspension of the Soviet program during the war and the decision by the Germans’ V-2 rocket team, led by Wernher von Braun, to surrender to the U.S. Army. In the budget-cutting of the late 1940s, however, the Truman administration surmised that the United States, possessed of superior air power and foreign bases, did not need long-range guided missiles. The first atomic weapons, bulky and of limited yield, also suggested that no rocket large and accurate enough to destroy a target 6,000 miles distant was then possible, but the vastly greater yield of fusion bombs and the expectation of smaller warheads changed that calculation. The U.S. ICBM project received top priority in June 1954. The Soviets, by contrast, needed to find a means of threatening the United States from Soviet soil. As early as 1947, therefore, Stalin gave priority to ICBM development.

Arms control and defense

How could the arms race be headed off before the world became locked into what Churchill called “the balance of terror”? The UN Disarmament Commission became a tedious platform for the posturings of the superpowers, the Americans insisting on on-site inspection, the Soviets demanding “general and complete disarmament” and the elimination of foreign bases. Eisenhower hoped that Stalin’s death might help to break this deadlock. Churchill had been urging a summit conference ever since 1945, and once de-Stalinization and the Austrian State Treaty gave hints of Soviet flexibility, even Dulles acquiesced in a summit, which convened at Geneva in July 1955. The Soviets again called for a unified, neutral Germany, while the West insisted that it could come about only through free elections. On arms control, Eisenhower stunned the Soviets with his “open skies” proposal. The United States and the Soviet Union, he said, should exchange blueprints of all military installations and each allow the other side to conduct unhindered aerial reconnaissance. After some hesitation, Khrushchev denounced the plan as a capitalist espionage device. The Geneva summit marginally reduced tensions but led to no substantive agreements.

“Open skies” reflected the American fear of surprise attack. In 1954 a high-level “Surprise Attack Study” chaired by the scientist James Killian assured the President of a growing American superiority in nuclear weapons that would hold until the 1958–60 period but warned that the U.S.S.R. was ahead in long-range rocketry and would soon achieve its own secure nuclear deterrent. The panel recommended rapid development of ICBMs, construction of a distant early warning (DEW) radar line in the Canadian Arctic, strengthened air defenses, and measures to increase intelligence-gathering capabilities, both to verify arms control treaties and to avoid overreaction to Soviet advances. The Killian report gave birth to the U-2 spy plane, which began crisscrossing the U.S.S.R. above the range of Soviet air defense in 1956, and to a research program to develop reconnaissance satellites to observe the U.S.S.R. from outer space.

In 1955 both the United States and the Soviet Union announced programs to launch artificial Earth satellites during the upcoming International Geophysical Year (IGY). The Eisenhower administration, concerned that the satellite program not interfere with military missile programs or prejudice the legality of spy satellites to come, entrusted its IGY proposal to the small, nonmilitary Vanguard rocket. While Vanguard development crept ahead, the Soviet program won the first space race with Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. The Soviet achievement shocked the Western world, challenged the strategic assumptions of every power, and thus inaugurated a new phase in the continuing Cold War.