Thirty years have now passed since the end of the Cold War, as symbolized by the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. The year 2020 also marks another anniversary: seventy-five years since the end of World War Two.
One of the noteworthy aspects of the past three-quarters of a century concerns something that did not happen. At the height of the Cold War, many observers thought a nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR was probable, and some considered a nuclear war virtually inevitable.
East meets West at the Elbe, April 1945.
Photo Credit: US Army
Why didn’t it occur? There may not be a historiographical consensus on the answer, but several factors likely were important. These include luck, intermittently skillful diplomacy, some informal rules of the superpower competition (more on this below), and the logic – twisted or compelling, depending on one’s point of view — of nuclear deterrence.
The impact of the memory of World War Two was also significant. In Retreat from Doomsday (1989), John Mueller argued that this collective memory alone would have prevented a third world war, even in the absence of nuclear weapons. The claim has some plausibility. Nonetheless, I’m inclined to believe that nuclear weapons affected not only how politicians and policymakers thought about the use of force but, in some cases, how they acted in particular situations.
The superpowers evolved what one scholar called “informal rules of order” that underlay their contest (S. Hoffmann, Primacy or World Order, 1978, p. 11). The U.S. and USSR fought wars by proxy in the Third World. When the superpowers did become involved more directly, such as the U.S. in Korea and Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan, they took care to avoid head-to-head confrontations. The same imperative can be seen at work elsewhere, for instance in the crisis, humanitarian and geopolitical, in 1971 over Bangladesh, where the superpowers lined up on different sides (the USSR with India, the U.S. with Pakistan and, by extension, China).
Thus, while the Cold War was sometimes hot on its peripheries, the superpowers avoided direct armed engagement with each other. At its center – i.e., in Europe – the Cold War involved propaganda, espionage, and threats more than the actual use of force, though the Soviet Union did employ the latter in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia (as the U.S. sometimes did in what was arguably a parallel sphere, namely Central America and the Caribbean).
Despite “informal rules of order,” and despite deterrence and “mutual assured destruction,” the superpowers each feared the other might behave in an unpredictable way. In this context a measure of uncertainty about the other side’s intentions and about the course of any encounter was, so to speak, a feature not a bug, or to be more precise, it was both. Both sides were tempted to explore the boundaries of what the other might allow, while also having to be conscious that if an episode escalated, tripwire reactions or mistakes could occur, foreclosing the possibility of turning back. As Thomas Schelling put it, relations between the superpowers could take on “the character of a competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve.” (Arms and Influence, p. 94) Tests of nerve are, of course, nerve-wracking, and this atmosphere of tension and apprehension helped make the Cold War, in Eric Hobsbawm’s memorable phrase, “a contest of nightmares.” (The Age of Extremes, pb. ed. 1996, p. 83)
The role of psychology, whether manifested in collective fears or policymakers’ inclinations, should not be underestimated. For instance, Hobsbawm contends that Reagan’s military build-up and aspects of his rhetoric were a response to “the subjective traumas of defeat, impotence and public ignominy which had lacerated the U.S. political establishment in the 1970s” (The Age of Extremes, p. 247). Throughout the Cold War, poses of toughness and masculinity were prized, at least in some quarters on the U.S. side. A cult of toughness is commonly associated with those who surrounded JFK (and Kennedy himself), but Nixon and Kissinger had their own version. As Kissinger remarked to Nixon at the height of the Bangladesh crisis, “at least we’re coming off like men” (quoted in S. Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, 2013, p. 256).
To return to the main theme, even though World War Three didn’t happen, historians will continue to read the large body of scholarly and polemical literature on nuclear strategy and nuclear weapons. For one thing, some of this writing bears on the history of social science, especially American social science. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Schelling’s observation that war “appears to be, and threatens to be, not so much a contest of military strength as a bargaining process” (Arms and Influence, p. 7) gave rise to entire research programs and academic careers. For another thing, historians are interested not only in what happened but in what might well have happened, or what came close to happening on at least a few occasions and didn’t. By considering these dogs that didn’t bark, historians arguably can gain some added confidence in their always provisional models of reality, as well as perhaps come closer to grasping that elusive thing, the spirit of an age.
References (works cited and/or consulted)
Stephen J. Cimbala, The Politics of Warfare: The Great Powers in the Twentieth
Century, Penn State U.P., 1997
Lawrence Freedman, “The First Two Generations of Nuclear Strategists,” in P.
Paret, G. Craig and F. Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy from
Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Princeton U.P., 1986
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914 – 1991,
Vintage Books pb. ed., 1996
Stanley Hoffmann, Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy since the
Cold War, McGraw-Hill, 1978
Jill Kastner, “Standing on the Brink: The Secret War Scare of 1983,” The Nation,
May 31, 2018
John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, Basic
Books, 1989
Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, Harvard
U.P., 2013
Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, Yale U.P., 1966
3 Thoughts on this Post
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We might think, on the other hand, of what did occur (and beyond the ‘superpowers’), in other words, the myriad (direct and sometimes somewhat indirect) historical consequences that followed the development of nuclear weapons and the logic of the Cold War, in due time as it were:
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Patrick,
Thank you for this. As your list indicates, there’s an extensive and very good literature on the nuclearization of the Indian subcontinent, among other topics.
Based on a quick runthrough, I might add Nina Tannenwald’s work to the list though it’s not about nuclear proliferation. Rather, it bears on the issue of nuclear non-use and thus relates to the post (though I didn’t happen to mention it).
Louis,
There is quite a bit of literature I left off the above list (it is largely representative, not exhaustive), including most of that on the ethical and moral arguments surrounding nuclear weapons, anti-nuclear movements, and the material dealing with South Africa’s decision to renounce its nuclear weapons program (it dismantled six nuclear bombs and one under construction) near the end of the apartheid regime (1989), for example (I am not certain as to what happen to it biological and chemical weapons program.).