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

What of "the Cold War" per se - the larger, overarching dynamic? Recall that the issue is not whether the usual tensions between great powers would or would not have existed. The issue is whether the relationship would have had to explode into the extremely militarized form it took.

Recently declassified archival materials from both sides should destroy the traditional assumption that the Soviet army at the end of World War II offensively threatened Western Europe. In 1945, roughly half the Soviet army's transport was horse-drawn, and it would remain so until 1950.

Moreover, Soviet troops demobilized massively and dramatically in the early postwar period. Soviet documents suggest that Stalin's army shrank from 11,365,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947.

While there is debate about how widely such information was known or heeded by top U.S. officials, a number of scholars have recently cited evidence suggesting that U.S. policymakers fully understood that the Soviet Union had neither the intention nor the capability to launch a ground invasion of Western Europe. In December 1945, for instance, the State Department circulated an intelligence estimate concluding that for at least five years "the United States need not be acutely concerned about the current intentions of the Soviet Union and has considerable latitude in determining policy toward the USSR." A Joint Chiefs of Staff report at the end of 1948 estimated the Soviets might be able to marshal only some 800,000 troops for an attack force. Two years later, the CIA used the same figure in its intelligence estimate. Similarly, documents recapped in Frank Kofsky's recent Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 provide devastating proof that American military intelligence estimates consistently concluded that the Soviets could not and did not want to wage war. One illustration is a high-level briefing given directly to Truman in late 1948:

"The Russians have dismantled hundreds of miles of railroads in Germany and sent the rails and ties back to Russia. There remains, at the present time ... only a single track railroad running Eastward out of the Berlin area and upon which the Russians must largely depend for their logistical support."

This same railroad fine changes from a standard gage going Eastward, to a Russian wide gage in Poland, which further complicates the problem of moving supplies and equipment forward.

George Kennan, for one, "never believed that they the Soviets have seen it as in their interests to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed."

Credible documentation has also emerged from the Russian archives that Stalin repeatedly rejected North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung's requests for support of an invasion of South Korea. As one scholar, Kathryn Weathersby, has explained in a recent working paper, Stalin reluctantly "approved the plan only after having been assured that the United States would not intervene." Even then he apparently did so because Kim Il-Sung would otherwise have pursued the war anyway with support from the communist Chinese. As Weathersby concludes, "it was Soviet weakness that drove Stalin to support the attack on South Korea, not the unrestrained expansionism imagined by the authors of NSC-68."

Moreover, Bruce Cumings's sweeping, two-volume history, The Origins of the Korean War, demonstrates that the U.S. command in South Korea knew at the time that South Korean irregular army units had been provoking the North Koreans for months. A once clear-cut case of communist aggression is now seen by most knowledgeable historians as a complicated civil war that dated back at least to 1945.

The Russian archives also show that often neither Stalin nor his successors could control the regimes in Eastern Europe, Cuba, China, North Korea, or North Vietnam. "It's a big myth that Moscow directed a unified monolith of socialist states," argues Deborah Kaple of Columbia University's Harriman Institute. Newly uncovered documents, for instance, make it clear that the Sino-soviet split existed almost from the day Mao Tse-tung seized power. And other recent archival discoveries suggest that East Germany's Walter Ulbricht largely initiated the Berlin crisis of 1958-1961, forcing a reluctant Khrushchev to engage in brinkmanship diplomacy.

All of these events suggest a broadly defensive post-world War II Soviet foreign policy that on occasion accommodated American security interests.

The monolithic enemy of Cold War fame, many now agree, existed mainly in the imaginations of America's ardent anticommunist cold warriors. At the very least, these events suggest Stalin appeared willing to cut a deal with Washington in the critical early postwar years.

This analysis does not suggest that the American-Soviet relationships could have been a tranquil sea of cooperation. But the unusual and dangerous over-militarization of foreign policy during the Cold War demands an explanation on its own terms - and the atomic bomb is the first item in that lexicon.

This essay has not attempted to untangle the many factors that led to the end of the Cold War. One related issue, however, may be noted: The advent of nuclear weapons (and the U.S. nuclear monopoly in particular) upset the balance of power in general and especially in Europe, where from the Soviet point of view the critical issue was Germany. However, once the Soviet Union had its own nuclear weapons and a credible way to deliver them - and Germany had no such weapons - then the implicit balance of power in general and in Europe, too, was essentially restored, albeit at a higher level.

Before that time the Soviets kept Germany relatively weak by occupation, reparations, and tight control of the invasion routes. After the Soviet Union had secured nuclear weapons (and once the implications were digested and fought out by policy elites), Soviet policy could relax all three prongs of its earlier strategy. Old military and foreign policy apparatchiks did not easily abandon traditional assumptions, as the crackdown in Czechoslovakia in 1968 suggests. The preconditions for ending the Cold War, however, were established only after the basic power relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was rebalanced.

Might history have taken a different course? Many high-level Western policymakers believed an accommodation with the Soviet Union was a reasonable possibility in the early postwar years. The United States was also in a position to encourage Soviet cooperation with the lure of desperately needed long-term economic aid. Indeed, had the United States lacked a nuclear weapons monopoly - and given the rapid pace of U.S.

demobilization and Congress's rejection of universal military training - such an approach might well have been the only acceptable option from the U.S. point of view.

All of this, of course, is "counter-factual" history. As the late philosopher Morris Cohen observed in 1942, however, "we cannot grasp the full significance of what happened unless we have some idea of what the situation would have been otherwise." But in a sense all history is implicidy counter-factual - including, above all, the counter-factual orthodox theory that had the United States not taken a tough stand after World War II, there would have been no "long peace" and disaster would inevitably have befallen the Continent, the world, and the United States.

In A Preponderance of Power, Melvyn Leffler concludes that because of its enormous strength the United States must also bear a preponderance of responsibility for the Cold War. That important judgment, like Stimson's rejected 1945 plea for an immediate, direct, and private effort to cut short what became the nuclear era, brings into focus the question of just how wise were the "wise men" who crafted America's Cold War policies at the moment when the two great tracks of twentieth-century scientific and global political development converged. At the very least, they failed to find a way to avoid one of history's most costly and dangerous - indeed, literally world-threatening - struggles.

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