John Lewis Gaddis
THE COLD WAR
333pp. Penguin. £20.
0 713 99912 8
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin
THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVE II
The KGB and the world
677pp. Allen Lane. £30.
0 713 99359 6
There is no justification for Cold War nostalgia. The sanguinary threats of truculent preachers, pious murderers and elected fanatics and the variegated violence du jour of fanatical Islam are all small potatoes as compared to the peril of nuclear obliteration that attended entire decades of the Cold War. And to think of the unthinkable, even if Islam’s true believers were to acquire one or two nuclear weapons and use them too, there would still remain almost a world of difference between the detonation of a bomb or even two by wild-eyed fanatics deluded by promises of black-eyed virgins, and of 20,000, 25,000 or 30,000 megaton-yield weapons systematically delivered on target by disciplined military professionals dutifully obeying verified release orders. In the absence of any national hatred to speak of, between Americans and Russians, British and Russians, or the French and whoever, it was a credibly contrived implacability, along with the undoubted lethality of nuclear weapons, that gave us a Cold War of devastating reciprocal threats instead of the bloody battles of real, non-nuclear wars between the greatest powers.
As peace-keepers, nuclear weapons had four great merits. First, their destructive capacity exceeded the culminating level of military utility. In accordance with the paradoxical logic of strategy, they were just too effective to be useful, except for reciprocal dissuasion. Second, all attempts to rehabilitate nuclear weapons for battlefield use by reducing their energy yield were negated by the ease with which any resulting tactical gains could be negated by counter-attacks with weapons of slightly higher yield. Third, that same ease of escalation also dissuaded non-nuclear combat between the nuclear powers, because of its ultimate futility: any results won without them could readily be overturned by nuclear weapons. Finally, nuclear weapons prohibited the optimism without which few wars have ever been started. If they were used, outcomes only remained unpredictable at the margins, while it was entirely certain that there would be catastrophic consequences. That unprecedented certainty induced unprecedented caution on the part of everyone concerned, even Stalin and Mao, monsters in human form who calmly encompassed the deaths of millions and tens of millions of their fellow citizens, but who behaved as cautiously as ordinary political leaders of middling sensuality when it came to nuclear weapons.
It all meant that the Cold War had to be waged by means other than direct combat. Peripheral wars with third parties in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and wherever British forces were engaged after 1952, could loom large in every other way, and cost much in blood, treasure and political cohesion, but could not be decisive. It is not on peripheral fronts that wars are decided, not even a Cold War. Still less could the outcome be decided by wars between assisted third parties, so the fighting of each side’s allies or clients was only locally decisive.
Military preparations of all kinds nevertheless continued right through the Cold War, and vigorously at times, but it was always the lesser part devoted to the innovation, enhancement and diversification of nuclear forces that consistently attracted more of the attention, and most of the criticism. For one thing, because nuclear weapons and their ancillaries were individually very expensive, the opponents of nuclear forces kept complaining about their cost, even though in all countries that had them it was still the non-nuclear forces that consumed more resources by far, around four-fifths of the total in most cases.
But mostly the opponents denigrated what they called “the arms race”, endlessly repeating that it was futile to add nuclear forces when the ones already in place were already more than sufficiently destructive (“overkill”) – not recognizing that it was the least dangerous way of assuaging insecurity during the Cold War. Instead of trying to seize additional intervening territory to better secure themselves as the great powers of history had always done, during the Cold War the leaders of both the Soviet Union and the United States reacted to insecurity by launching the acquisition of more and/or better nuclear forces. As compared to the invasions of neutrals that often lead to the outbreak of wider wars, the addition of nuclear weapons to arsenals already excessive was a harmless procedure.
Yet many critics insisted most inconsistently that introducing new nuclear weapons was both futile and also somehow dangerous for humanity. That was not merely illogical but also ignored collateral aspects of innovation that cumulatively reduced the danger to humanity in important ways: from the late 1950s, whenever new nuclear weapons replaced old ones, greater accuracy allowed smaller and less destructive energy yields, while safeguards against accidents and unauthorized use were improved.
More logical critics who recognized that additional nuclear weapons could be either futile or dangerous but not both, advanced more refined stability arguments to oppose the addition or innovation of nuclear weapons, arguing that this or that weapon specifically threatened the equilibrium of mutual deterrence. Highly accurate ballistic missiles could do that, by attacking missile silos, but so could ballistic-missile defences, by intercepting retaliatory attacks, therefore potentially giving a free pass to a previous first strike. Stability arguments did not have much purchase either, and if ballistic-missile defences never reached completion the reason was that their effectiveness was dubious – if the one weapon out of a hundred that gets through is nuclear, it may serve no purpose to intercept the other ninety-nine.
While the strategic-nuclear competition thus served to tranquillize both sides, obviously it could not be decisive either, and so it was that the Cold War had to be fought in earnest by other means: subversion and propaganda in Europe especially, but more universally and with far greater consequence, by economic competition.
Both sides had their strengths in subversion and propaganda till the end, but to a great degree each side could count on obdurately instinctive supporters in the other camp who could not be moved by any form of suasion, and reason least of all. The most critical sector of the entire battle rear of the Warsaw Pact was inhabited by Poles who could never be truly loyal to Russians, no matter what uniform they wore and what ideology they officially espoused. Likewise, the United States had to contend with a historic anti-Americanism directly derived from anti-modernism that was shared by some especially reactionary right-wingers, as well as the old, new and extreme Left. Alongside the devotees of Communism, the Soviet Union thus also acquired supporters who were more truly anti-American than pro-Soviet, hence their attitudes did not change at all when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Orphaned by their successive loss of ideal homelands in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and even Albania, the irreducible anti-Americans of both extreme Right and extreme Left are now reduced to a contorted embrace of the likes of Hamas, the Iraq insurgents under the al-Qaeda label, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thus in Italy, the Partito dei Communisti Italiani, which is large enough to be represented in both houses of parliament, gives a very high priority in its election platform to “Palestine”, “Iraq” and “Iran”, ie the furious and absolute condem
nation of American policies in regard to all three, while the small Partito Marxista-Leninista Italiano, whose flag is decorated with the profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, assiduously supports the Islamic Republic of Iran where it would be a capital offence to display that flag.
But this is now little more than political folklore, and so it was for much of the Cold War, because, in spite of some transitory hopes and alarms, no amount of propaganda or subversion could change the boundaries between the two camps.
So finally it came down to an economic competition. It is not that military power could be disregarded but rather that it was so well provided on each side that a highly desirable stability of mutual deterrence was maintained throughout. Again that was the gift of nuclear weapons, because there was much instability, unpredictability and destabilizing asymmetry in the non-nuclear forces of each side.
There were also huge asymmetries in the economic competition that ultimately decided the outcome of the Cold War, but the Soviet Union was certainly not bereft. For a long time, many not unreasonable people believed in the logic of the Soviet command economy: with the abolition of wasteful capitalist practices such as advertising, with a generation of restraint in consumption, and with the cumulative reinvestment of surpluses, a highly capitalized and therefore highly productive economy could finally be redirected to produce the consumer goods and services of an unprecedented, universal prosperity. Many economists who recognized the fallacies involved nevertheless continued to believe at least until the later 1960s that Soviet central planning was rather effective, and with good reason: in spite of vast military expenditures, themselves efficient enough to sustain vast and rapidly modernizing military forces, it supplied a huge civilian reconstruction effort that by the 1960s was providing one-family apartments for all, in place of sordid communal housing, and which in the 1970s was on the path of providing each family with its car as well, and perhaps two. It was certainly not a capacity to produce economic inputs that the Soviet Union was lacking: in the 1980s it produced per capita more electricity than Italy, more steel than the United States, more fertilizer than Japan, more tractors than West Germany, and more cement than France.
And yet by then the Soviet standard of living was almost incomparably lower than those of France, Italy, Japan, West Germany or the United States. Statisticians quarrelled over the numbers in trying to come up with numerical comparisons but in truth statistics were entirely meaningless: a number representing per-capita income means nothing if patience or ingenuity are needed to obtain a pound of butter, or a decent pair of shoes.
The too obvious explanation of the huge gap between impressive production figures and the poverty of everyday life was the huge cost of Soviet military ambitions. Much steel did go into the making of tanks and warships, and cement too was consumed in huge amounts to build gigantic underground command centres, as well as more mundane airfields, missile silos, and more. But what about the tractors and fertilizer, in both of which the Soviet Union outproduced on a per-capita basis not only West Germany and Japan but also the United States, France and Italy? Neither were claimed by the military for their own use in any significant quantities, yet all those tractors and all that fertilizer did not finally produce enough grain for home consumption, let alone the export surpluses that France and the United States dump on world markets. By the highest estimates, the military used up some 30 per cent of the Soviet Union’s gross domestic product, but the gap between basic inputs and outputs actually useful to the Soviet population was very much greater.
One explanation, originally offered as a theoretical proposition even before Soviet central planning had really started, was that central planners who might choose more or less rationally among steel and concrete and other such few commodities, could not possibly guess accurately which polymer of hundreds should be produced, or rather which polymers in which proportion, and also everything else, from computers to green hats and brown shoes (I really did once see in Leningrad a shop largely stocked with unwanted green shoes). Only the ups and downs of market prices can do that, by sending instantaneous and unchallengeable signals to both producers and consumers.
