The Centrality of the Bomb
by Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird
Foreign Policy (Spring 1994) No. 94: 3 -20.

The problem was obviously not quite the same from the Soviet point of view.

In the first place, the new weapon itself now posed a threat. Generalized fear provoked by the new weapon was only one aspect of the problem: In the fall of 1945 and spring of 1946, American policy moved slowly but steadily away from Roosevelt's approach to Germany. Partly as a result of French obstruction on the Allied Control Council, partly out of understandable fear of economic chaos and political disorder, and partly-but not at the outset-out of frustration with Soviet policy, U.S. policy shifted from industrial disarmament to rebuilding German economic power. A major turning point was probably the decision to stop reparation shipments in May 1946-dramatically followed by the tough speech Byrnes gave that September in Stuttgart.

That shift occurred at the same time that policymakers began to play up the bomb as a strategic factor. The U.S. stockpile of assembled weapons was actually quite small, but the potential of the nuclear monopoly was also obviously extraordinary-as was advertised by the atomic tests in June 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Code-named Operation Cross-roads," the blasts took place at the same time Byrnes and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov were again trying to reach agreement over Germany. Pravda took note of the mushroom cloud over Bikini and accused Washington of plotting an atomic war. And as the arsenal grew (50 weapons were available by 1948), the Truman administration steadily found the courage to act more forcefully and unilaterally in Germany.

Reams have been written about the extreme Russian security fears of the German threat. Stalin, in Nikita Khrushchev's judgment, "lived in terror of an enemy attack." The Soviet premier observed in April 1945 that Germany "will recover, and very quickly"-but apparently he initially believed that quickly" meant as many as 10 or 15 years. Sometime at the end of 1947, as Michael McGwire observes in a recent study, "Stalin shifted focus . . . to the more immediate threat of war within 5-6 years against a capitalist coalition led by the Anglo-Saxon powers."

Recently released Soviet documents offer additional insight. Soviet ambassador to the United States Nikolai Novikov, for instance, painted a deeply disturbing picture of American intentions toward the Soviet Union in 1946. Citing the U.S. "establishment of a system of naval and air bases stretching far beyond the boundaries of the United States" and the creation of ever newer types of weapons," Molotov believed that Washington was preparing for war. In the heart of Europe, he

"emphasized, America was 'considering the possibility terminating the Allied occupation of German territory before the main tasks of the occupation - the demilitarization and democratization of Germany-have been implemented. This would create the prerequisites for the revival of an imperialist Germany, which the United States plans to use in a future war on its side.' "

U.S. leaders fully understood Russian fears of Germany. Ambassador Averell Harriman, for instance, later recalled that "Stalin was afraid of Germany, Khrushchev was afraid of Germany, the present people Brezhnev are afraid of Germany-and I am afraid of Germany.. The Soviets have a feeling that the Germans can arouse a situation which will involve us and that will lead to a disaster."

Obviously, the critical turning point came with the decision to partition Germany and rearm West Germany. American leaders recognized that the Soviets would view even the restoration of significant German economic power as a threat-and that this would have painful repercussions in Eastern Europe. At a cabinet meeting in late 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall predicted that because of U.S. actions in Germany the Soviets would have to "clamp down completely" on Czechoslovakia, and that when they did, it would be a purely defensive move."

Was Marshall's basic insight into a critical dynamic feature of the early Cold War correct? Was Soviet policy in Central and Eastern Europe primarily defensive and a reaction to American policy toward Germany? It is difficult to know, of course, but others also recognized the point early on. In his opinion columns at the time, Walter Lippmann, for instance, regularly pointed out the obvious connection between what happened in Germany and what happened in Eastern Europe. Unless the German problem were settled first, he urged, the Russians were unlikely ever to relax their hold on Eastern Europe. Lippmann believed that Byrnes's strategy of pressing forward on Eastern Europe without simultaneously promoting a reasonable settlement of the German issue was demanding too much. "We must not set up a German government in the two or three Western zones," Lippmann urged the Wall Street lawyer and future secretary of state John Foster Dulles in 1947. "We must not make a separate peace with it."

A steadily expanding body of research and documentary evidence suggests that Marshall's fundamental insight and Lippmann's early judgment offer the most Plausible explanation for one of the most dramatic and painful features of the Cold War - Stalin's clampdown on Eastern Europe. The Soviet archives have yet to divulge anything definitive about Stalin's intentions at the end of World War II. However, even Harriman, who is usually portrayed as a hardliner in early postwar dealings with Moscow, thought the Soviet dictator had no firm plan at the outset: "I had a feeling," Harriman observed, "that they were considering and weighing the pros and cons of cooperating with us in the post-war world and getting the benefit of our cooperation in reconstruction."

Recent scholarship has uncovered far more indications of ambivalence - and, indeed, a great deal more caution and cooperation - in Soviet policy during 1945 and 1946 than is commonly recognized. A number of developments helped produce judgments about the Soviet Union like Harriman's:

• General elections in Hungary in the fall of 1945 held under Soviet supervision resulted in the defeat of communist-supported groups.
  
• In September 1945, Moscow unilaterally withdrew troops from Norway, despite its long-standing claims on Bear Island and Spitzbergen.
  
• In the wake of the December 1945 Moscow agreements, the government in Romania was enlarged to include noncommunists, after which both the United States and Great Britain recognized it.
  
• The Soviet military also withdrew from Czechoslovakia at that time, and free elections produced a coalition government of communists and non-communists committed to keeping the country's doors open to both the East and the West.
  
• In the spring of 1946, Soviet troops left the Danish island of Bornholm.
  
• In accord with his "percentage agreement" with Winston Churchill, Stalin abandoned the Greek communists at a critical juncture in their civil war, leaving Greece within the Western sphere of influence.
  
• In Austria, the Soviet army supervised free elections in their occupation zone and, of course, withdrew after the signing of the Austrian Peace Treaty in 1955.
  
• The Soviets warned the French communist leader, Maurice Thorez, against attempting "to seize power by force since to do so would probably precipitate an international conflict from which the Soviet Union could hardly emerge victorious." (American intelligence obtained a report on that conversation in November 1946.)
  
• Despite a short delay, Soviet troops in 1946 did pull out of Iran - a country bordering the Soviet Union - after a brief and, in retrospect, rather modest international dispute.
  
• Perhaps most revealing, former Soviet officials who had defected to the West documented that important railway lines running from the Soviet Union through Eastern Europe were yanked up in the very early postwar period. The working assumption appeared to be that since there would be only a short occupation, Soviet forces should hurry to remove as much useful material as possible.
  
• Nor did Stalin pursue an aggressive policy in the Far East during the early years. Indeed, for a good period of time Stalin supported Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kaishek - much to the lasting chagrin of Chinese communist leaders. And Red Army troops departed Manchuria in May 1946.

Many historians now accept that substantial evidence exists that Stalin neither planned nor desired the Cold War. Finland and Austria - neutral but free states - serve as alternative models for border-area countries that the Soviet Union might have accepted had a different dynamic been established after World War II.

Of course, Soviet policy in Eastern Europe was to shift dramatically, especially after 1947 and 1948. Along with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan also appears to have been far more threatening to Stalin than was previously understood: It suggested the creation of a powerful "economic magnet" to draw Eastern Europe into the Western orbit.

Once it was clear that Germany was to be rebuilt and later rearmed, the crackdown in Eastern Europe became irrevocable.

1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5