How limited was the influence of arms talks became clear as the Soviet Union began aggressively backing Third World Marxist movements, often with gifts of sophisticated conventional weapons. The Soviets induced Cuba to send soldiers to fight “wars of national liberation” in Africa. These actions revived a policy that strategists called “linkage.” More and more, American politicians and diplomats called for linking strategic arms negotiations to the increasingly bellicose geopolitical conduct of the Soviet Union. Total Soviet warheads surpassed America’s in 1978, with America’s number declining and the Soviets’ count climbing (to a peak in 1986). After the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, ardent arms controllers found that their position—that nuclear arms control is of unique and overriding importance and can be divorced from other considerations—had become politically untenable. “Linkage” became enshrined as a bedrock principle of superpower relations.
President Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative restored missile defense as a legitimate option to limit the destructiveness of a nuclear attack. In 1987, the U.S. and USSR signed the first true arms-reduction treaty, eliminating their intermediate- and medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles (those that can reach targets roughly 600 to 3,500 miles away). The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, symbolizing liberation of Eastern Europe from Moscow’s jackboot. Just before the breakup of the Soviet Union on the last day of 1991, the superpowers negotiated the first major strategic nuclear-warhead-reduction accord—that is, one involving long-range weapons such as ICBMs. The next year, the U.S. unilaterally ended warhead modernization.
But as the U.S. was making this momentous decision—and as superpower arsenals were plunging, from a peak of 12,000 deployed nuclear warheads in 1992 to 2,200 by 2002—there was a parallel acceleration in what is known in strategic parlance as nuclear proliferation. India (which had in 1974 set off what it called a “peaceful” nuclear explosion) in May 1998 tested a series of nuclear weapons beneath the sands of the Thar Desert near Pakistan. Pakistan followed a fortnight later with its own series of tests within a mountain in the foothills of its west Afghan border, becoming the first nuclear-armed Islamic nation. Nearby, Iran continued its clandestine nuclear weapons program begun in the 1980s. So did North Korea.
In the middle of this period of nuclear proliferation came the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, whose success raised plausible fears that terrorists could someday strike America using weapons of mass destruction. Such fears were only heightened by North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006 (at an underground location not far from its northernmost coast), while Iran continued its march towards nuclear weapons capability. Enemy states like these, recognizing no restraints on what they do, are fertile soil for nuclear proliferation. Spreading nuclear-weapon-capable technology—for example, to Libya and Syria—has been the hallmark of Pakistan and North Korea.
Proliferation, however, can sometimes be staved off. The crumbling of the former Soviet Union posed a great danger, as new and not necessarily stable states found themselves the possessors of Soviet weapons stored within their borders. But a massive and largely successful effort over the past 20 years brought all far-flung ex-Soviet weapons back to Russia. Remarkably, this time of upheaval saw no known theft of nuclear-weapons-grade material.
Thus the nonstop all-out arms race so often portrayed is sharply at odds with the more complex history of nuclear policy since 1945. What began as an all-out superpower technology race morphed into a protracted period of superpower bargaining, and finally was superseded by proliferating smaller powers, most of them hostile to the West.
The emerging era in which less stable powers obtain nuclear weapons will create an international environment more dangerous than that of the Cold War. This danger will be especially acute if the traditional calculus of deterrence fails to impress a new breed of leaders, who may prefer a fanatical calculus to more traditional approaches. By learning how events unfolded in the past and which choices made by leaders were sound versus faulty, perhaps we can minimize the risk of nuclear catastrophe in the future.
3.
RUSSIA: LINKING ARMS CONTROL TO AN ADVERSARY’S CONDUCT
We do not want war any more than the West does, but we are less interested than the West in peace, and therein lies the strength of our position.
THE COLD WAR SAW SUPERPOWER COMPETITION TAKE CENTER stage. At the heart of this epic struggle were two features: Soviet “adventurism” in aggressively pushing to extend Moscow’s sphere of geopolitical influence and deployment of massive strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals. Adventurism saw Moscow attempt to choke off West Berlin in 1948 then succeed in sundering Berlin in 1961. It would authorize its North Korean client state to wage a war of conquest against South Korea, and later support North Vietnam’s successful conquest of the South. It would crush serial rebellions in Eastern Europe, including an especially brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. It would also support Marxist movements in the Third World, as well as a wave of transnational terror directed against the West. The Soviet drive for Third World dominance culminated in the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
The U.S. was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s push. Massive demobilization had left America’s armed forces denuded and under-prepared. America’s military roster plummeted from 12 million under arms in June 1945 to 1.5 million two years later. Symptomatic of this sudden shift was a 1948 exercise called the Dayton Raid: the Air Force conducted a test, ordering its strategic bombers to electronically “bomb” Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio. Taking off from Omaha, Nebraska, was every single strategic bomber in the U.S. inventory. Not a single plane successfully completed its mission.
The Soviet Union’s conduct during the Cold War teaches the First Lesson of nuclear-age history: ARMS CONTROL CANNOT BE VIEWED IN ISOLATION, BUT RATHER MUST BE CONSIDERED ALONG WITH AN ADVERSARY’S CONDUCT. Had the United States made arms control the paramount good, it would have given tacit approval to Soviet policies very much counter to America’s interests.
Superpowers and “Super” Bomb: The Arms Race Begins
WHEN THE new president, Harry Truman, told Joseph Stalin about the successful first atomic test in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, he thought he was breaking news to the Soviet dictator. But strategic arms competition was already underway between the two ostensible allies even before World War II ended. Spies—including Ted Hall, an American, and Klaus Fuchs, a German who had recently escaped to Britain—had brought Stalin the precise details of the Manhattan Project. During the chaos at the end of the war, captured German scientists also aided the Russian program. The Russians kidnapped scientists they found in their sector and kept them in Russia for six years before allowing them to return to Germany in 1952. America, too, got help from German scientists (most notably, chief German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who led the American space program through the 1969 moon landing).
The Soviet goal was not just to have an atomic bomb. Fuchs and others had alerted the Soviets that the Americans mulled over a program to build an even mightier bomb, known around Los Alamos as the “Super.” In fact, no program was begun, as all effort at Los Alamos was directed towards finishing the atomic bomb project as soon as possible, so as to hasten the end of the war.