Why, then, did the Cold War continue? Why did the Americans and their allies fail to confront a dysfunctional adversary and claim victory? The best answer is that this crisis within an ideology coincided with a quantum leap in the lethality of weaponry. By the early 1960s, tolerating a Cold War stalemate - even if one side lacked the legitimacy the other side thrived on - seemed safer than trying to end it.
The United States tested its first thermonuclear weapon in November 1952, but the Soviet Union quickly followed with one of its own in August 1953. Hydrogen bombs were at least a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it quickly became clear that their mass use might render the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. For only the second time in modern military history - the first was the nonuse of poison gas in World War II - competing war plans came up against a common ecological constraint.
This danger discouraged the exploitation ofvulnerabilities. The United States did nothing to assist the rebellious East Germans, Poles, or Hungarians - despite the fact that it had earlier aided the rebellious Yugoslavs. It assumed that the Soviet Union would fight to retain its sphere of influence in Europe, if necessary with nuclear weapons, and that the results would be catastrophic. It insisted that it would do the same to defend its NATO allies, and especially the exposed Anglo-American-French outpost in West Berlin. As a consequence, the political asymmetry that dominated postwar Europe - the legitimacy of democratic capitalism and the illegitimacy of Marxism-Leninism - did nothing to change its political boundaries, which remained frozen through the end of the 1980s.
There lingered, however, the lurking sense that there must be some way to extract advantages from nuclear weapons without actually using them. President Dwight D. Eisenhower thought that threats to use these devices might lower the costs of containment while deterring Soviet and Chinese challenges outside of Europe, but the results were unimpressive. Meanwhile, Khrushchev seized upon a rare Soviet technological "first" - the launching of an earth satellite in October 1957 - to claim that the USSR had surged ahead of the United States in strategic rocketry and to attempt to extract concessions from this feat. That strategy failed even more thoroughly than Eisenhower’s, though, because the Soviet Union had not in fact surged ahead, a fact the Americans soon confirmed from secret reconnaissance flights and later satellite photography.
The nuclear-arms race, then, reinforced the Cold War status quo, a fact made dramatically evident in 1962 when Khrushchev undertook one more effort to change it. In a risky attempt to redress the strategic balance - and to defend Fidel Castro’s revolution - he sent medium - and intermediate-range missiles equipped with nuclear warheads to Cuba. He thereby brought the world as close as it came during the Cold War to a nuclear war, but in the end the crisis changed little. Khrushchev withdrew his missiles, the Americans promised not to invade Cuba, and the Soviet-American rivalry went on as before - except in one respect. The confrontation had been sufficiently alarming that Soviet and American leaders agreed tacitly not to use nuclear weapons again to try to break the Cold War stalemate. That was one promise they kept.
World History
