The Cold War (65 page)

For his part, Nixon wrote later that he had expected to feel relief and satisfaction when the war ended, but instead was surprised to find himself with feelings of “sadness, apprehension, and impatience.” Kissinger was struck by Nixon's being “so lonely in his hour of triumph.”

Beyond the letdown he always felt after a crisis, Nixon had reasons for his negative feelings. In the weeks that followed, he often and vehemently maintained he had achieved peace with honor, but that claim was difficult to sustain. Seven years earlier, when pressed by reporters to explain what kind of settlement he would accept in Vietnam, he had held up the Korean armistice of 1953 as his model. What he finally accepted was far short of that goal.

The Korean settlement had left 60,000 American troops in South Korea; the Vietnam settlement left no American troops in South Vietnam. The Korean settlement left no Communist troops in South Korea; the Vietnam settlement left 150,000 Communist troops in South Vietnam. The Korean settlement had established the 38th Parallel as a dividing line, and it was so heavily fortified on both sides that twenty years later, almost no living thing had crossed it; the Vietnam settlement called the 17th Parallel a border, but the NVA controlled both sides of it and moved back and forth without interference. The Korean settlement had left President Syngman Rhee firmly in control of his country, to the point that the Communist Party was banned; the Vietnam settlement forced President Thieu to accept Communist membership on the National Council of Concord and Reconciliation.

Small wonder that Thieu regarded the settlement as little short of a surrender, and feared that the cease-fire would last only until the Americans got their POWs back and brought their armed forces home. Small wonder, too, that he worried about his future, as his army was woefully inferior to Rhee's army (not to mention the NVA).

Thieu did have one asset to match Rhee's: a promise from the American president that if the Communists broke the agreement, the United States would come to his aid. But in South Vietnam, in the spring of 1975, that promise proved to be worthless, because by then Nixon had resigned to avoid impeachment. In some part the resignation was brought on by the Christmas bombing. Kissinger's “peace is at hand” promise, followed by Nixon's triumphant reelection, and then by the bombing, created feelings of bitterness and betrayal and led many Democrats to want to punish Nixon. Nixon gave them their excuse with Watergate.

Nixon's defenders assert that had it not been for Watergate, the North Vietnamese would not have dared to launch their offensive in 1975. Or, if they had, that Nixon would have responded with the fury he showed in the spring of 1972, and the American bombing support would have made it possible for the South Vietnamese to turn back the invaders once again.

Nixon's detractors call this scenario nonsense. They assert that all he ever wanted or expected from the cease-fire was a “decent interval” before the NVA overran Saigon. That decent interval was until Nixon had successfully completed his second term. They argue further that Congress was never going to give Nixon the funds to resume bombing in Vietnam and that he knew it, even as he made his promises to Thieu.

No one can know what might have been. Everyone knows what happened.

JOHN F. GUILMARTIN, JR.

From the beginning of the Cold War to its end, technology held the whip hand. Of all the unprecedented, indeed dramatic, advances in weaponry, John F. Guilmartin, Jr., writes here, “None had a more profound strategic impact than the intercontinental ballistic missile, icon of the Cold War and central pillar of mutual deterrence.” The very nature of the East–West confrontation came to be shaped by the ICBM and its potential visit of apocalypse on both sides. Never in history has a weapon influenced statecraft and strategy so thoroughly. It was like a real-life replay of
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
. Inventions had not only taken over; they threatened to get out of hand. Men may have prevailed in the end, but the margin was terrifyingly small.

As if in recognition of technology's dominance, the Cold War became the era of the acronym: the ICBM; its little sisters, the IRBM (intermedi-ate-range) and the SLBM (submarine-launched); the missile tip with several warheads, MIRV (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles); ABMs (antiballistic missiles); PALs (permissive action links), the remote-controlled digital codes that could unlock and activate a nuclear weapon; TELs (mobile transporter-erector-launchers); SIOP (single integrated operation plan), which identified
all
Soviet and Chinese targets to be attacked, enabling the simultaneous use of every available nuclear weapon; SDI (strategic defense initiative), the “star wars” chimera that is still with us; and, of course, that most tellingly sinister acronym of all, MAD (mutual assured destruction).

“Like the early fathers of the church” (the writer John Newhouse's phrase), the brethren of the nuclear priesthood squabbled over positions that might have seemed the stuff of theology had not their implications
been so real. The disputants did not just conjure hell; they held the keys to it. Should there be more emphasis on first-strike or secondstrike capability? Should the defense of cities be put on a par with the protection of missile sites and airbases? How much accumulation of nuclear weaponry was too much? Presumably, the same sort of arguments went on in the Soviet Union. Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, stopped further work after viewing the effects of the first air-dropped hydrogen bomb in 1955. “That was such a terrible, monstrous sight! That weapon must not be allowed ever to be used.” Not long before, however, that Bolshevik warhorse Viacheslav Molotov, had taken a different tack: “A Communist should not speak about the ‘destruction of the human race’ but about the need to prepare and mobilize all forces for the destruction of the bourgeoisie.” He went on to say that if one believed that “in the event of war all must perish … then why should we build socialism, why worry about tomorrow? It would be better to supply everyone with coffins now.” The Molotovs were clearly winning out.

Meanwhile, the clock of terror had begun to accelerate. It took under fifteen years to go from the first atomic bomb in 1945 to ICBMs that could carry a nuclear charge from one continent to another. Some chronology will provide useful background to Professor Guilmartin's article. By August 1949, soon after the Berlin crisis ended, the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb. November 1952 saw the first successful American hydrogen bomb, tested on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok. Nine months later, the Soviets responded with a thermonuclear device of their own. Stalin had died in the interval, and now the Soviets, who had a substantial lead in rocketry, were rushing to launch an ICBM. (If the U.S. was behind, it was partly through choice. The Americans emphasized SAC—another of those ominous acronyms—and the delivery of nuclear bombs by aircraft; the U.S. had 1,309 long-range bombers by 1955.) Shortly after Stalin's demise, Nikita Khrushchev, the lapsed shepherd, recorded his first incredulous sight of one of the rockets designed by Sergei Korolyov, a former gulag inmate, at a private viewing for the Soviet leadership:

The fact that he had as yet no long-range nuclear weapons did not prevent Khrushchev from a noisy rattling of destructive potential. During the Suez crisis of late October 1956—at the same time Soviet tanks were overrunning Hungary—he threatened Great Britain and France with rocket-borne nuclear destruction if they didn't pull out of Egypt. (Eisenhower quietly ordered his two allies to do the same thing, but it was Khrushchev's bluff that, by frightening the world, earned the most publicity and emboldened him to push his gambler's luck.) It wasn't until the next summer that one of Korolyov's rockets, history's first ICBM, flew four thousand miles to a target in the Pacific. In October, using the same type of rocket that had powered their ICBM, the Soviets lofted S
putnik
(“fellow traveler”), the first satellite to orbit the earth. This had to be counted as Khrushchev's masterstroke, perhaps the greatest publicity stunt of the entire Cold War.

A month later, on November 7, 1957, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets added to their S
putnik
triumph by sending a dog into orbit, the first living creature from our world in space. (Unfortunately for Laika, the little terrier of distinction, her rocketmasters had been too rushed to provide for reentry.) These Soviet space enterprises were not just astounding feats of technology; they also carried the fear of nuclear holocaust to American skies. Quite suddenly, there were no places on earth that seemed safe any longer. As Khrushchev proclaimed in November 1959, “We now have stockpiled so many rockets, so many atomic and hydrogen warheads, that if we were attacked, we could wipe from the face of the earth all our probable opponents.”

But neither the Soviet nuclear present nor its future was quite that rosy.

To be sure, more triumphs would follow: the first man in space—Yuri Gagarin lifted off just three days before the Bay of Pigs Cuban disaster in April 1961—and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, both again ferried
by the same rocket that could transport a nuclear warhead to North America. But the United States, shaken by S
putnik,
had already caught up to the Soviet Union in ICBM production, and even edged ahead. As the Americans knew from their own new satellite spy cameras, the Soviet's total arsenal of functional ICBMs was, by the summer of 1960, just four, all based at a single swampy and unprotected site south of Archangel.

In the fall of 1962, Khrushchev would make one final gamble: the importation of missiles to Cuba. By bringing IRBMs and MRBMs (mediumrange) into the island off the U.S. coast, he was, in effect, converting them to ICBMs: The IRBMs could reach in an arc from Newfoundland to San Francisco. One can argue how much Kennedy gave him in return, but the humiliating fact remains: The missiles were removed. “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again,” the Soviet deputy foreign minister Vasily Kuznetsov remarked to a U.S. diplomat. His grim promise would come true before very long. By the end of the 1960s, the Soviets could boast 1,487 ICBMs, over 400 more than the Americans.

The most frightening phase of the Cold War may actually have been over. But few at the time saw it that way.

JOHN F. GUILMARTIN, JR., is a professor of history at Ohio State University, where he teaches military history and naval history; he is a leading authority on the development of military technology. He did two combat tours flying long-range air force rescue helicopters during the Vietnam War.

S
CHOLARS, SOLDIERS, AND STATESMEN
have long debated the nature of the relationship between technology and war, particularly the interaction between strategy and developments in weaponry and transportation. Does technology drive tactics, and thus strategy? Or, rather, do strategic imperatives dictate the pace at which key technologies are developed and fielded? Were railroads, high-explosive artillery shells, and the machine gun to blame for the slaughter in the trenches of 1914–18? Or did the fault lie with flawed strategic and operational concepts? Was the airplane to blame for the rain of destruction unleashed on European and Japanese cities in 1939–45, or were flawed or skewed strategies responsible? The history of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and its relationship to the Cold War provides a rare opportunity to test the technology-versus-strategy hypothesis, for technology was clearly a major driving factor in the way the Cold War played out, and the ICBM was clearly the driving technology in the strategic, operational, tactical, and technological matrix that set the strategic rhythms of the conflict. The political and military trajectory of the Cold War might be likened to that of a speeding car, racing toward an uncertain destination. The geopolitical realities of national location and natural resources formed the car's body; the inescapable tension between Marxist-Leninist command economics and supply and demand provided the engine; Soviet hegemonic ambitions (and suspicions) and fear of them in the West, particularly America, were the fuel; diplo-macy—hopefully—provided the brakes. Technology was in the driver's seat.

Dramatic advances in weaponry, many of them frightening in their strategic and moral implications, were a central feature of the Cold War, beginning with the awful reality of the atomic bomb: intercontinental jet bombers, radarguided surface-to-air missiles, infrared and radar air-to-air homing missiles, supersonic
fighters, nuclear submarines, over-the-horizon radar, massive arrays of sensitive sonar detectors on the ocean bottom, spy satellites, cruise missiles, and sophisticated encryption and code-breaking computers. The list could be extended indefinitely. But of all these unprecedented technologies, none had a more profound strategic impact than the intercontinental ballistic missile, icon of the Cold War and central pillar of mutual deterrence. The very thought of an offensive capability, securely based in the inner recesses of the homeland, that could reach out across oceans and continents to vaporize enemy cities and bases less than an hour after launch was so mind-boggling as to utterly change the way statesmen, military leaders, and, above all, ordinary citizens and politicians thought of war. When Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian philosopher of war, entertained as his limiting case the possibility of war as a single, unrestrained act of total violence, he rejected the notion as incredible. The intercontinental ballistic missile, armed with a nuclear or thermonuclear warhead, threatened to make him a prophet.