Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (52 page)

But, if the bomb had not existed, would East-West relations have taken a different course? The assumption that weapons systems were the root cause of conflict in the Cold War became fashionable with those who advocated nuclear disarmament.
¹²
This assumption is in essence no different from the belief before and after 1914 that the arms race between the Great Powers explained the origins of the First World War. To prove or disprove the point we need to look at what evidence there is of Soviet attitudes to the bomb, because the proponents of the centrality of the bomb in further developments imply that Soviet policy was purely reactive and that the Russians were responding to fear generated by the United States.

In fact, Soviet attitudes were characterised more by self-confidence than by fear. There are clear indications that Stalin did not consider the atomic bomb decisive in war and therefore decisive as a bargaining counter in diplomatic negotiation. Indeed, he was to a degree contemptuous of the United States because in his view it did not possess the will to greatness essential to global supremacy.

The first piece of evidence is a statement by Deputy Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who disagreed so fundamentally with the new thrust of Soviet policy that he broke all the rules by granting indiscreet unattributable briefings to Western journalists and diplomats alike. In June 1946 the American journalist Hottelet asked Litvinov about the US atomic monopoly and the Soviet attitude to the international control of atomic energy. Litvinov ‘said that Russia would not agree to atomic control, that it did not attach undue importance to the bomb and that it would not necessarily be afraid of atomic war’. He added that the leadership banked on the belief that the country’s ‘immense area and manpower, resources and dispersed industry safeguarded it to a large extent’.
¹³
In September Stalin himself told Werth of the
Sunday Times
that he did ‘not consider the atomic bomb such a serious force that some political figures are inclined to. Atomic bombs are designed to terrify those with weak nerves, but they cannot decide the outcome of war since there are simply not enough atomic bombs.’
¹⁴
This was later repeated by Molotov in his recollections recorded by Chuyev: ‘And they [the Americans] understood that they were for the time being in no condition to unleash a war; they had all in all one or two bombs’.
¹⁵
This was an unusual assertion by Stalin since it acknowledged the secrets of the American nuclear stockpile (or, rather, the absence of one) accessible to Soviet intelligence (for more on this, see below). There was doubtless an element of bravado in all this. If the Americans had any intention of blackmailing the Russians through the threat of atomic bombs, it was essential to convince them that the threat would carry little weight. But Litvinov was not acting under Stalin’s orders; quite the contrary, he was seen as having betrayed the country, as Molotov subsequently testified. ‘Litvinov was completely hostile to us,’ he recalled. ‘We intercepted the record of his conversations with an American correspondent ... Total betrayal.’
¹⁶

The calm assessment of the bomb, as Litvinov had already indicated, reflected a view of warfare based on Russia’s inherent strengths and the West’s evident weakness. If the West were unwilling to send land forces into Russia to defeat Soviet forces and occupy the country, it could not make the ultimate threat a reality; and if it could not do that, why should the Russians take any of these threats seriously? In an interview with Elliott Roosevelt on 21 December 1946 Stalin expressed the confident opinion that he did

For final confirmation, which came after the Russians detonated their first atomic device at the end of August 1949, consider Stalin’s comments, made in July 1952 with the Korean War still in progress, to the pro-Soviet Italian socialist Nenni: ‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘there are those in the United States who talk of war, but without being in a position to undertake one; America has the technical but not the human potential for war; it has the air force, it has the atomic bomb but where is it going to find the soldiers needed to launch a third war?’ He added: ‘It is not enough for America to destroy Moscow, just as it is not enough for us to destroy New York. Armies are required to occupy Moscow and to occupy New York.’
¹⁸
Finally, former US Secretary of State Byrnes acknowledged in reference to the bomb that the Russians ‘don’t scare’.
¹⁹

The Marshall Plan for European reconstruction - which represented the first clear indication that the United States meant business in containing Soviet expansionism in Europe - came into being in July 1947. The Soviet reaction was, at least publicly, somewhat hysterical and Stalin pushed the East European Communist Parties into the creation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to enforce conformity that September. In addition a wave of strikes and militant demonstrations hit the streets of Western Europe. Yet as late as November Soviet leaders reassured the Italian socialist Nenni that they did not consider war ‘imminent or near. The United States is not in a position to provoke one. It is conducting a cold war, of nerves, with the aim of “blackmail”. The Soviet Union will not allow itself to be intimidated and will persist in its policy.’
²⁰
And one Soviet diplomat said of the Americans in France: ‘in a few years they will be chucked out of here’ (‘ils seront fichus d‘ici quelques années’).
²¹

The confident Soviet assessments of the threat posed by nuclear weapons - which most certainly changed to a more sober appreciation after the death of Stalin - were matched by similar expressions of self-confidence generally. This sense of relative invulnerability will seem barely credible to many today given our knowledge of the devastation wrought on Russia by Axis forces and the loss of some twenty-eight million lives in the war. But the calculation of the balance of power made in Moscow rested not least upon the presumed superiority of the socialist means of production over those of capitalism and upon the view that the United States lacked the will to war. Moreover, if the US were engulfed in a new depression - which many in Moscow fully expected - then that will would be undermined still further to the point where Washington would in all probability retreat into isolation as it had done after 1929.

What emerges is not that Stalin and his subordinates had no fears of the United States - though they feared the United States far less than the democracies hoped and believed - but that any such fears were severely curtailed by the assessment that the most significant weapon in the American arsenal was of very limited value, that there were structural problems in the capitalist world economy that would inevitably cause a further collapse, that US relations with the British Empire in decline were uneasy at the best of times and that the Americans ultimately did not have the kind of resolution Stalin saw in Churchill’s eyes. Although apparently reckless in alienating the Western Powers - in crushing anti-Communist opposition in East-Central Europe, in sustaining massive forces in the Eastern zone of Germany, in making territorial demands on Turkey (1945), in attempting to sustain a Communist regime in Northern Iran (1945-6), in taking over Czechoslovakia (1948) and in launching a blockade of West Berlin - Stalin was in reality taking only calculated risks. His was a policy of bluff.

Stalin’s relatively sanguine assessment of the limits of American military potential was partly the result of his understanding of the less than overwhelming nature of nuclear weapons but partly also derived from intelligence assessments. These gave him knowledge of the absence of a nuclear stockpile, and of the fact that the B-29 aircraft which were flown to Britain in the summer of 1948 to bolster the military posture of the West were not genuinely nuclear-capable. This brings us to one of the most publicised stories of the Cold War. What would have been different had Stalin possessed no such information? Would he have acted more cautiously, even assuming his reservations considering the effectiveness of the bomb?

The answer depends upon how one reads the motivation for Soviet expansionism after the end of the war. As it is usually presented, we are faced with two alternatives: either Stalin was embarking on a conscious path of expansion at the risk of war or he was acting defensively in keeping his likely adversaries at bay. Litvinov, who may be taken as the most accurate contemporary analyst of Stalin’s and Molotov’s policy because he saw it emerge from within, interpreted it as a mixture of both, but a mixture explosive enough to cause a war if pre-emptive action were not taken to remedy the situation. Litvinov told Hottelet that the Soviet Union had returned to ‘the outmoded concept of security in terms of territory - the more you’ve got the safer you are’ and that if the democracies gave way under pressure, ’It would lead to the West being faced, after a more or less short time, with the next series of demands.‘ And as to what lay behind this policy: ‘As far as I am concerned,’ he said, ‘the root cause is the ideological conception prevailing here that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable.’ This was said in June 1946.
²²
When in further conversations along similar lines Roberts, the British deputy head of mission, suggested that the Kremlin could not want war, ‘Litvinov has agreed but has usually added: “Neither did Hitler, but events become too strong for those who should control them, if they set the wrong course.”’
²³
This seems convincing enough. However, what really counts is how essential Stalin deemed that expansion to be, whether for defensive or offensive purposes. Every indication is that the atomic bomb made no appreciable impact either way. Stalin was set on a course of action that was fixed before the bomb appeared on the scene. The momentary concern in July and August of 1945 when the weapon was tested and then dropped on the Japanese gave way to resolute defiance, if not indifference.

But how much of Stalin’s sang-froid can be attributed to the fact that he had intimate knowledge of not only Western capabilities but also their intentions? The access the Russians had is very striking. To give just one instance: in the archives of the Comintern you can find such items as a report from Fitin, head of the First Directorate (foreign intelligence) of the NKGB, to General Secretary of the Comintern Dimitrov, giving the details of the names and addresses of British Communists whom the Special Branch of Scotland Yard intended to watch in the coming weeks. More important for our purposes is the group of five spies: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross. Between them they had access to all the key secrets of state in foreign, defence and intelligence policies. In the British section, department three of the First Directorate of the NKGB (forerunner of the KGB), throughout the war the focus was on ‘atomic research, the war economy and Britain’s relations with other countries’,
²⁴
not necessarily always in that order of importance. Philby worked in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), reaching the level of deputy head; Burgess’s various appointments included a brief period in the Ministry of Information and at the Foreign Office (latterly as secretary to Minister of State McNeil); Maclean was also in the Foreign Office (since 1935) and ultimately defected having become head of the American Department; Blunt worked in MI5; and Cairncross in the Cabinet Office, the Code and Cypher School and later the Treasury. Philby, Burgess and Maclean also served at one time or another in the British embassy in Washington during the early Cold War.
²⁵
What happened to such information is described by Yuri Modin:

Through these channels the Kremlin ‘knew absolutely everything about the technical and political aspects of atomic bomb development’.
²⁷

They, of course, knew a good deal more than that. In October Philby was appointed head of the anti-Communist branch - Section 9 - of SIS. NKGB headquarters considered this an achievement ‘hard to overestimate’.
²⁸
Indeed, in February 1945 Philby reported that the head of SIS, Menzies, had sent a directive ‘regarding the development of active work by “The Hotel” [SIS] against Soviet institutions on territory taken by the Red Army’
²⁹
No less important was secret political intelligence. During the Allied conferences from 1945 to 1949, Molotov knew what the Allies were saying about Soviet policy behind his back. We know that when Secretary of State Marshall announced his plan for European recovery in June 1947, Molotov felt strongly that the Soviet Union should take up the offer and that as a result he led a delegation to Paris to negotiate Moscow’s participation.
³⁰
But, after only a short time, they walked out, dragging the East Europeans along with them. Information had come in about Foreign Secretary Bevin’s discussions with Clayton, the US Secretary to the Treasury, to the effect that the West would use the Plan to extract necessary political concessions from the Russians in Eastern Europe.
³¹
We also know that when he first arrived in Paris Molotov is reported to have flown into a rage because there were no ‘documents’ (that is, British and American secret communications) - only to be told that neither London nor Washington had yet heard from their delegations in Paris!
³²