Andrei Sakharov stopped by Victor Adamsky's office at Sarov one day in 1961 to show him a story. It was Leo Szilard's short fiction “My Trial as a War Criminal,” one chapter of his book
Was that arms race necessary? By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well as weapons, it cost the United States $4 trillion — roughly the US national debt in 1994. Soviet costs were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that triggered the USSR's collapse. Cold warriors have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and educational neglect. The potlatch theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers took of omnicidal war. “One should always remember,” the British scientific adviser Solly Zuckerman wrote in 1988, “that thirty years ago Eisenhower, the one President who could challenge the Joint Chiefs on their own ground, saw the advantage of a comprehensive test ban without any provisions for verification.”
What nuclear strategists quaintly called “existential deterrence” — deterrence at the level of personal dread — set in almost from the beginning. Stalin was deterred from August 6, 1945, onward, which is why he moved so expeditiously to acquire nuclear arms of his own. Harry Truman was deterred by a troubled conscience as well as by a sense that to use nuclear weapons again, making their use credible, would be to reap the whirlwind someday. He said as much in his last State of the Union address shortly before leaving office in 1953:
For now we have entered the atomic age, and war has undergone a technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it used to be. War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only of our Stalinist opponents, but of our own society, our world as well as theirs…
The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past — and destroy the very structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men.
Four months later, the Soviet leaders who took power after Stalin's death discovered peaceful coexistence; Georgi Malenkov, in a Moscow address, declared that “a third world war would mean the destruction of world civilization… ” Nikita Khrushchev never forgot his initial encounter with existential deterrence at his first full briefing on nuclear weapons in September 1953:
When I was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee and learned all the facts about nuclear power, I couldn't sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons, and when I realized that, I was able to sleep again.
Syngman Rhee, the South Korean leader, traveled to Washington to see Dwight Eisenhower one day in July 1954, two years after the Korean War had been fought to armistice at great cost in lives and materiel. Rhee told Eisenhower he wanted to “unify” his country. “He said,” the notes of the conference report, “that his nation might propose to start some positive action at the front so that the United Nations forces would not have to remain there for a long time.” He taunted Eisenhower: “People may say that England, France and Italy are presently free. But that is not so. They are afraid. Now [the Communists] have won in Indochina, Vietnam is partitioned. Pretty soon Thailand will be gone and Soutfi America will come next. … How can you say that… we must sit still and let the Communists conquer and conquer and conquer? If we still believe that people amount to anything, we must never be afraid. If we are afraid, democracy will be conquered. Your efforts to save the world at peace will suddenly end.” John Foster Dulles intervened to mollify the Korean leader. By then Eisenhower had heard enough and answered Rhee with furious conviction:
There is no disposition in America at any time to belittle the Republic of Korea. But when you say that we should deliberately plunge into war, let me tell you that if war comes, it will be horrible. Atomic war will destroy civilization. It will destroy our cities. There will be millions of people dead. War today is unthinkable with the weapons which we have at our command. If the Kremlin and Washington ever lock up in a war, the results are too horrible to contemplate. I can't even imagine them. But we must keep strong… I assure you that we think about these things continuously and as seriously as you do. The kind of war that I am talking about, if carried out, would not save democracy. Civilization would be ruined, and those nations and persons that survived would have to have strong dictators over them just to feed the people who were left. That is why we are opposed to war.
(To which Rhee countered slyly: “Suppose we had a plan that would not risk world war but would provide the unification of Korea?”)
Niels Bohr had anticipated this new limit to war when he went to see Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1944 to propose that they begin arms-control discussions with Stalin before the bomb could be finished and used. A few years later, he summarized his understanding in a single sentence in a conversation with a friend: “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.” By 1954, Eisenhower had come independently to an identical conclusion, reported in the notes of a National Security Council meeting that year: “The President commented that, as so often, we had again gone around in a circle and come back to the same place. The problem of the Soviet Union was a new kind of problem, and the old rules simply didn't apply to our present situation.”
If all sides were deterred, why did the arms race continue? Business as usual, certainly. Khrushchev's memory of his first encounter with nuclear energy goes on: “But all the same we must be prepared. Our understanding is not sufficient answer to the arrogance of the imperialists.” The hawks on both sides bear much responsibility; their fears, fanatic and often paranoid, helped drive the accumulation of overkill. Even realists, believing they were erring on the side of caution, erred instead on the side of risk, arguing that the US had to arm not against what the Soviets
The truth is, the US was deterred throughout the Cold War at the lowest possible level of potential retaliation and so, evidently, was the Soviet Union. Robert McNamara, speaking in 1987 of the official US war plan at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, called it “totally unreasonable
Helmut Schmidt, the former West German chancellor, is credited with the critical step that led to the deployment of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe. He has now written that were nuclear war ever to erupt, he would expect German forces to break off the battle were even two warheads to explode on German territory. That — not the hundreds of weapons detonated in the prolonged abstract nuclear battles of the academic theorists — is the more likely nuclear reality…
