In the midst of this crisis the Soviets unilaterally broke the moratorium on nuclear testing, staging a series of explosions yielding up to 50 megatons. Soviet technology had also perfected a smaller warhead for the new Soviet missiles now ready to be deployed, like the Minuteman, in hardened silos. Khrushchev, his nation still behind in strategic nuclear firepower, tried to redress the balance by insinuating 42 medium-range missiles into Cuba, whence they could reach most of the continental United States. He apparently hoped that these missiles, once in place, could then serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations leading to a neutralized Germany, which in turn might help Moscow persuade the Chinese to cease their own nuclear program. Instead, the ploy brought the world to the brink of war. On October 14, 1962, U-2 spy planes photographed the missile sites under construction in Cuba. Two days later Kennedy convened a secret crisis-management committee that leaned at first toward a surgical air strike to destroy the sites. The President, however, opted for a less risky response: a naval quarantine to prevent Soviet freighters from reaching Cuba and an ultimatum demanding that the bases be dismantled and the missiles removed. On October 18, Soviet Ambassador Andrey Gromyko met with Kennedy and denied that the U.S.S.R. had any offensive intentions with respect to Cuba. On October 22 the President informed the nation of the crisis and called on Khrushchev to pull back from “this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.” For two days the world waited anxiously, and on the 24th Soviet ships in transit abruptly changed course away from Cuba. On the 26th Khrushchev sent Kennedy a message offering to withdraw the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge never to invade Cuba. The next day a harsher message arrived with a new demand that the United States withdraw its own missiles from Turkey. Those antiquated Jupiters, deployed in the early post-Sputnik scare, were already due for removal, but Kennedy would not do so under Soviet threat. Hence Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested a ploy: simply reply to Khrushchev’s first note as if the second had never been sent. On the 28th the Soviets agreed to dismantle the Cuban bases in return for a no-invasion pledge. Several months later the United States quietly removed its missiles from Turkey.
The Cuban missile crisis seemed at the time a clear victory for Kennedy and the United States and was widely attributed to American superiority in nuclear weapons. In fact, neither side showed the slightest willingness even to bluff a nuclear strike, and it was probably the overwhelming U.S. superiority in conventional naval and air power in its home waters that left the U.S.S.R. no option but retreat. Nor was the crisis an unmitigated American victory. Kennedy’s pledge never to overthrow Castro by force meant that the United States would have to tolerate whatever mischief he, backed by $300,000,000 a year in Soviet aid, might contrive in the future. To be sure, Kennedy warned that the United States would never tolerate any expansion of Communism in the hemisphere. (This pledge was underwritten by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 when he sent U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic to prevent a leftist takeover, but such interventionism only reminded Latin Americans of past “Yankee imperialism” and gave credence to Castro’s anti-American propaganda.) The existence of a Communist base in the Caribbean, therefore, was to be a source of unending vexation for future American presidents. What is more, the Cuban missile crisis hardened Soviet determination never again to be humiliated by military inferiority. Khrushchev and his successors accordingly began the largest peacetime military buildup in history, which, by the 1970s, accorded the Soviet Union parity with the United States in nuclear forces and the ability to project naval power into every ocean of the world.
On the other hand, the Cuban missile crisis marked the final frustration of Khrushchev’s efforts to force a German peace treaty and prevent the deployment of nuclear weapons on German or Chinese soil. Peking, of course, had supported the Soviets’ bid to place missiles in Cuba and had taken the opportunity to attack India (see below China, India, and Pakistan), and the precipitous Soviet retreat prompted Chinese charges of “capitulationism.” The Chinese nuclear program proceeded apace, with the People’s Republic exploding its first atomic device in 1964. Never again would the Soviet leadership hope to control the foreign policy of the other Communist giant.
Renewed U.S.–Soviet cooperation
U.S.–Soviet relations, by contrast, markedly improved after the sobering visit to the brink of war. Hopes for a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty ran afoul of the U.S.S.R.’s customary refusal to permit on-site inspection to monitor underground tests, but a partial Test-Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, Britain, and the U.S.S.R. on August 5, 1963, prohibiting nuclear explosions in the air, under the sea, and in outer space. The superpowers also established a direct communications link between Washington and Moscow for use in crisis situations. Other powers anxious to join the nuclear club, notably China and France, refused to adhere to the Test-Ban Treaty. Instead, the Chinese denounced Soviet collaboration with “the leader of world imperialism.” Mao resurrected all of China’s territorial claims against the Soviet Union dating from tsarist Russian imperialism and advocated partition of the Soviet empire. The Soviets, in turn, branded Mao with their most hateful current epithet: he was “another Stalin.”
President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and Khrushchev was removed from power by the Politburo in October 1964, a victim of his own failures in foreign policy and agriculture and of the Communist Party’s resistance to his attempted reforms. The bilateral effort to pursue arms control survived under President Johnson and under Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin. The Outer Space Treaty ratified in 1967 banned nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in the Earth’s orbit and on the Moon. A U.S.–Soviet draft Non-proliferation Treaty was also adopted by the UN in June 1968. (Once again, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel refused to sign.) None of the arms-control instruments of the 1960s, however, put a cap on the arms race or restrained the signatories from doing anything in the strategic area they had a desire to do anyway. The superpowers were able to modernize their arsenals through underground nuclear testing; outer space was an awkward and vulnerable place to deploy warheads in any case; and neither superpower had an interest in seeing nuclear weapons spread to more countries. Rather, American nuclear policy aimed, at least in the short run, at ensuring the continued stability of U.S.–Soviet deterrence, lately dubbed “mutual assured destruction.” Adopting the views of the strategist Bernard Brodie, McNamara concluded early on that the Soviets must eventually catch up and that a state of parity was the best that could be achieved in the nuclear age. Soon each side would be capable of obliterating the other in a retaliatory strike, even after a sneak attack. At that point, any attempt by either side to achieve an illusory superiority would only destabilize the balance and tempt one or the other into launching a first strike. Whether the Soviets ever shared this doctrine of deterrence is dubious. Marshal Sokolovsky’s volumes on military strategy in the 1960s, while granting that nuclear war would be an unprecedented disaster for all, still committed the U.S.S.R. to a war-winning capability.
China, meanwhile, succumbed to another series of Maoist actions that completed that country’s drift into chaos and isolation. In February 1966, Mao gave the nod to the young and fanatical Red Guards to make, by force, a Cultural Revolution. Violence swallowed up schools, factories, bureaucracies, cultural institutions, and everything that smacked of foreign or traditional Chinese influence. Countless victims suffered internal exile, public humiliation, forced “self-criticism,” or death, while attacks on foreign embassies and denunciations of the superpower “condominium” persuaded Americans and Soviets alike that the Chinese were, for the moment at least, the major threat to world peace.
By the late 1960s, therefore, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union underwent a marked thawing. At the same time, however, the Soviets and Americans alike had to acknowledge a growing lack of control over their once coherent Cold War camps.
The Europe of the fatherlands
Great Britain and decolonization
The Suez crisis of 1956, followed by Soviet space successes and rocket-rattling after 1957, dealt serious blows to the morale of western Europe. Given the potential of the war scares over Berlin to fracture NATO, the United States had to reassure its allies and try to satisfy their demands for greater influence in alliance policy. American efforts largely succeeded in the case of Britain, an ally much depleted in power and will. American policy largely failed in the case of France, an ally stronger and more stable than at any time since 1940.
Since World War II, Britain had tried to maintain the appearance of a global power, developing its own nuclear weapons, deploying conventional forces around the world, and keeping hold of its African colonies. Churchill, returned to office in the early 1950s, had vowed never to “preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Likewise, the British held aloof from the continental experiments with integration and saw their role rather as the vertex of three great world systems: the English-speaking peoples, the British Commonwealth, and the old European Great Powers. All this came to a sudden end when a combination of factors—sluggish economic performance by the world’s oldest industrial power, growing pressure to decolonize, demands for greater social expenditures at home, and the superpowers’ leap into the missile age—convinced London that it could no longer afford to keep up appearances in foreign policy. A defense White Paper of 1957 signalled a shift away from conventional armed forces toward reliance on a cheap, national nuclear deterrent. Sputnik then convinced the British government to cancel its own ballistic-missile program and rely on its special relationship with the United States to procure modern weapons. Eisenhower agreed to sell the Skybolt air-launched missile to Britain by way of healing the wounds inflicted by Suez and shoring up NATO after Sputnik. When McNamara subsequently cut the Skybolt program in his campaign to streamline the Pentagon, the British government was acutely embarrassed. Kennedy met with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at Nassau in December 1962 and offered Polaris submarines instead. It was hoped at the time that the British deterrent would be subsumed in a multilateral NATO force. The Conservative government also made the hard decision in 1963 to seek admission to the Common Market, only to be vetoed by the French. Not until 1973 was Britain’s application, together with those of Ireland and Denmark, approved and the European Communities broadened.
The period 1957–62 was also the climax of decolonization. As early as 1946–47, when Britain was granting independence to India and states of the Middle East, the Attlee government sponsored the Cohen–Caine plan for a new approach to West Africa as well. It aimed at preparing tropical Africa for self-rule by gradually transferring local authority from tribal chiefs to members of the Western-educated elite. Accordingly, the Colonial Office drafted elaborate constitutions, most of which had little relevance to real conditions in primitive countries that had no natural boundaries, no ethnic unity or sense of nationalism, and no civic tradition. When the Gold Coast (Ghana) elected the radical leader Kwame Nkrumah, who then demanded immediate independence and got it in 1957, the British felt unable to deny similar grants to neighboring colonies. Britain had, in fact, when the matter was faced squarely, little desire to hang on, given the exorbitant financial and political costs of late imperialism. In 1959 the Cabinet quietly decided to withdraw from Africa as soon as it won reelection. Macmillan then announced the new policy in Cape Town on February 3, 1960, when he spoke of “the winds of change” sweeping across the continent. Nigeria, Togo, and Dahomey (Benin) became sovereign states in 1960, Tanganyika (Tanzania), Uganda, and Kenya in East Africa between 1961 and 1963, and Malaŵi and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the south in 1964. White residents of Southern Rhodesia, however, declared their own independence in defiance of London and the UN. The Republic of South Africa and the surviving Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique made those portions of southern Africa the last refuges of white rule on the continent.
Most new African states had little more to support their pretensions to nationhood than a paper constitution, a flag, and a London-backed currency. The leaderships blamed African underdevelopment on past exploitation rather than on objective conditions, thus rejecting the American and European development theories that saw political stability as possible only within the context of economic growth. Nkrumah lectured to his Pan-African Congress in 1963 that “the social and economic development of Africa will come only within the political kingdom, not the other way around.” Indeed, Africa’s politicians invariably styled themselves as charismatic leaders whose political and even spiritual guidance was the prerequisite for progress. Nkrumah himself seized all power in Ghana and made himself a quasi-divine figure until the army overthrew him in 1966. Togo’s government fell to a military coup in 1963, and mutinies broke out in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. In the latter country, Julius Nyerere, much admired in Europe and the United States, declared a one-party dictatorship based on his ideology of ujamaa (familyhood) and courted aid from Communist China. Other leaders contrived similar ideologies to justify personal rule. By 1967 Black Africa had suffered 64 attempted coups d’état, many born of tribal hatreds, and most Africans had fewer political rights than under colonial rule.
With the exception of Congo (Brazzaville), Cold War rivalries were absent from Africa in the 1960s, while the African regimes themselves wisely declared the inviolability of their boundaries lest the artificial lines drawn by the colonial powers provoke endless warfare. When Igbo tribes-people seceded from Nigeria in 1967 and formed the rebel state of Biafra, only four African nations supported their cause. Nigeria suppressed the secession in a bloody civil war. Decolonization nonetheless had a profound effect on international relations through the medium of the UN. The three dozen or so new African states combined with those of Asia and the Soviet bloc to form a permanent majority made up mostly of one-party dictatorships nevertheless claiming moral superiority over the Western “imperialists.” Thus, the founders’ dreams that the UN might become a “parliament of the world” and bulwark of democracy and human rights were undermined by the very process of what, with one or another degree of irony, was called “liberation.” Instead, the UN degenerated into a forum for polemics and a playground for intrigue.
