The Lost Peace

by Robert Dallek

  The great majority of Americans had only limited concerns about foreign threats, particularly from Russia. True, 59 percent of the country thought that one nation or another would like to control the world; but only 26 percent of those who felt this way, or about 15 percent of Americans, thought that the Soviets were intent on projecting their power around the globe.

  This outlook existed despite the news on February 16, 1946, of a Canadian spy ring passing atomic secrets to Moscow. After American columnist Drew Pearson revealed that spies had been operating out of Russia’s Ottawa embassy, Canadian authorities arrested twenty-two Canadians, including scientists at Canada’s National Research Council, its atomic energy agency, implicated in the espionage. A few days later, the arrest in London of the British physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the atom bomb in Canada and the United States, increased fears that the Soviets would soon be able to match the West in building nuclear weapons.

  The revelations out of Canada and Britain may have influenced the results of a Gallup survey in March: three-quarters of Americans expressed support for congressional appropriations “to maintain a large force of secret service agents who would operate throughout the world to keep us informed of what other nations are doing.” When asked if they thought “Russia will cooperate with us in world affairs,” a majority of Americans said, “No.” Only 35 percent of the country now had any confidence that the Soviets wanted to work for international accord with the United States. Seventy-one percent disapproved of “the policy Russia is following in world affairs,” and two-thirds of the country rejected suggestions that it would be possible to cooperate with Britain and Russia in doing away with armaments and military training. More disturbing, 69 percent of Americans expected the United States to “find itself in another war … within the next 25 years.”

  One can only imagine how much better off Russia and the world would have been if Stalin and the Politburo had adopted a softer line toward the West. Soviet credibility with its former allies for the defeat of Nazism remained high. A cooperative posture would have generated support in the United States for aid to help Russian reconstruction and would surely have sat well with a majority of Russians yearning to improve their living standards. But the unyielding ideologues in the Kremlin could not acknowledge any limits to their ideas about class struggle and the long-term advantages of socialism over capitalism. The shortcomings of free enterprise had been fully exposed in the Great Depression, but its advantages had been made abundantly clear in America’s wartime industrial mobilization and production, which had helped supply the Soviet military. Having killed and imprisoned so many in the name of socialism, Stalin and his associates could not accept that they were committed to an economic and social system more deeply flawed than that of their competitors in the West.

  Nor could they conceive of relinquishing power. It would have been a repudiation of their life’s work. It is impossible to believe that Stalin or anyone close to him considered sacrificing his power for the sake of the national well-being. Like most politicians in most countries, they assumed that their hold on authority was essential for their nation’s future peace and prosperity. Saying they are wrong is not part of many politicians’ vocabulary.

  As the war ended in May 1945, Kennan tried to imagine a Russia maintaining good relations with the West; but he was not optimistic. He cabled the State Department that “the foreign resident, weary of both Russia’s wars and Russia’s winters, finds himself wanly wishing that the approaching political season might not be like the Russian summer: faint and fleeting.” But he saw it as all too likely: he expected the war’s end to bring not demobilization but the continued “building up of military power … an indispensable feature of the police state.” With the disintegration of traditional rival powers on her frontiers, he expected Russia to have an unprecedented position of control on the Eurasian landmass, its appetite for dominance having been fed by “the age-old sense of insecurity of a sedentary people reared on an exposed plain in the neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples.”

  Kennan saw no reason to dwell on the extraordinary opportunity for a genuine revolution in outlook that Russia’s newfound power afforded it—a chance to turn away from the militancy that seemed certain to provoke a corresponding aggressiveness in threatened rivals. His inability to imagine this rested on the conviction that “no one in Moscow believes that the Western world, once confronted with the life-size wolf of Soviet displeasure standing at the door and threatening to blow the house in, would be able to stand firm.”

  Kennan worried that Americans were failing to take the full measure of the Soviet threat. In his warning to the State Department in May 1945, he cautioned,

  The Kremlin is counting on certain psychological factors which it knows will work strongly in Russia’s favor. It knows that the American public has been taught to believe:

  a. That collaboration with Russia, as we envisage it, is entirely possible;

  b. That it depends only on the establishment of the proper personal relationships of cordiality and confidence with Russian leaders; and

  c. That if the United States does not find means to assure this collaboration … then the past war has been fought in vain, another war is inevitable, and civilization is faced with complete catastrophe.

  In mid-February, Kennan recalls, he was under a miserable siege from a “cold, fever, sinus, tooth trouble, and … the aftereffects of the sulfa drugs administered for the relief of these other miseries.” When a telegram arrived from Washington expressing puzzlement at Soviet resistance to participation in international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, created to advance postwar reconstruction and international harmony, it triggered pent-up frustrations with past Washington indifference to his warnings of Soviet hostility to the West. Tired of “talking to a stone,” as he later put it, he decided to lay it on the line: “They had asked for it. Now, by God they would have it,” he recalled in his memoirs.

  Determined to avoid oversimplification, Kennan violated conventional practice and composed an eight-thousand-word response that he later compared to “an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon,” a historian’s pronouncement on past and current Soviet behavior and its “implications … for American policy.” Twenty years later, he “read it over … with a horrified amusement,” saying, “much of it reads exactly like one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.”

  Kennan described an implacable clash of wills and wits with Moscow. The Soviets could not imagine “permanent peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist countries. Their objective was to seek out every advantage against Western adversaries by building military strength at home and promoting conflict between the democracies abroad and subverting their societies through all possible means. He saw no prospect of altering this “neurotic view of world affairs.” Diplomatic conversations were a charade on the Soviet side that afforded no opportunity for reasoned discourse. “We have here,” he asserted, “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

  To Kennan’s credit, he also explained that the Soviets were not “adventuristic” like Nazi Germany and ready to launch a military conflict, but cautious and calculating in their pursuit of imperial ambitions. Moreover, a cohesive, firm, and vigorous American response to Russia’s actions could inhibit their designs. He saw no need to go to war with them and cautioned against any loss of “courage and self-confidence … [in] our own methods and conceptions of human society…. The greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom
we are coping.”

  Sadly, as Kennan came to understand and later lamented, his message of restraint made much less of an impression than his sermonizing about the Soviet Communist danger. As he himself explained later, his telegram, or at least the most inflammatory parts of it, resonated powerfully in Washington and ultimately across the United States. “More important than the external nature of observable reality, when it comes to the determination of Washington’s view of the world, is the subjective state of readiness on the part of Washington officialdom to recognize this or that feature of it.” It raised the question for Kennan—one that was “to plague me increasingly over the course of the ensuing years—whether a government so constituted should deceive itself into believing that it is capable of conducting a mature, consistent, and discriminating foreign policy. Increasingly, with the years, my answer would tend to be in the negative.”

  The hysterical anticommunism of the 1950s sparked by Joseph McCarthy and other politically self-serving flag-wavers greatly distressed Kennan as undermining chances for détente with the Soviet Union after Stalin died in 1953. Even before that, as Washington and its West European allies in 1948–49 moved toward a military alliance—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—Kennan found himself at odds with “practically everyone else involved—either in our own government, in the Western European governments, or, for that matter, in the Benelux countries” (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg) on what he saw as “a militarized view of the Cold War.” He described attitudes in the United States especially “from the congressional side [as] harsh, boorish, shortsighted, and—for me—deeply discouraging.”

  As far as Kennan could tell, no military threat existed that required the creation of a multinational defense organization. To the contrary, a military buildup was certain to create “a general preoccupation with military affairs, to the detriment of economic recovery and of the necessity for seeking a peaceful solution to Europe’s difficulties.” Moreover, European assertions that only a military alliance could ease their anxieties about a U.S. commitment to defend them filled Kennan “with impatience. What in the world did they think we had been doing in Europe these last four or five years? Did they suppose we had labored to free Europe from the clutches of Hitler merely to abandon it to those of Stalin?”

  Kennan had it right. The creation of NATO provoked the organization of the Warsaw Pact and added a military standoff to the ideological, political, and economic tensions generated by the Cold War. It was another instance of an overreaction that increased the future costs to both sides of treasure and blood in limited wars and delayed possibilities of reaching a détente until the 1970s, when a balance of nuclear weapons made some kind of stand-down a logical alternative to the East-West arms race.

  Domestic dislocations—strikes, shortages, inflation—and international tensions, principally with Moscow but also over China and the Middle East, took a toll on Harry Truman’s public standing. During the first six months of 1946, the president’s approval ratings fell by 20 points, from 63 percent to 43 percent; disapproval of his performance jumped from 22 to 45 percent. In December 1945 Truman joked with reporters that Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman was wrong about war being hell; it was peace. Unlike Stalin, who could not imagine relinquishing power, Truman lamented his fate at having become president. The job, he complained, was like riding on the back of a tiger. He described the White House as the big white jail.

  Nevertheless, as Truman also said, he had the job and intended to do it to the best of his ability. Moreover, he was convinced that his Republican critics were less likely to preserve peace and prosperity than he was. He was particularly concerned about the dangers of another war in which nuclear weapons could outstrip the horrendous devastation of World War II.

  Like the president, millions of Americans shared concerns about a future in the shadow of atomic bombs. Numerous scientists and others worried that the proliferation of such weapons was a certainty unless wise leaders decided at once to forestall the development. Others took solace from the belief that modern science would find ways to defend against nuclear attacks, or that people everywhere would understand how impermissible the use of such destructive power would be. In October 1945, American nuclear scientists underscored the dangers to civilization in a five-point pronouncement on the need for international control of atomic energy: other nations would acquire the bomb; no effective defense would be possible against attacks; no country could assure its national security with a large enough arsenal to deter an opponent from an assault; an atomic war “would destroy ‘a large faction of civilization’ “; human survival would depend on international control of atomic weapons.

  By 1981, thirty-five years later, Kennan could only imagine the survival of civilization not by international control but by elimination of the monster bombs that had become commonplace in nuclear arsenals. Historical experience had taught that despite past restraint, the existence of such weapons had repeatedly raised the possibility of their use. In 1953 Dwight Eisenhower, who had implicitly pledged during the 1952 presidential campaign to end the Korean War, gave public hints of atomic attacks on China if it did not agree to an armistice in the fighting. Alongside General Douglas MacArthur, who urged direct threats of such bombings, Eisenhower was a model of restraint, as he was again during the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 when suggestions arose of using atomic bombs against the Viet Minh Communists.

  The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, which triggered a heightened defense alert in the United States and brought the world to the brink of a nuclear exchange, gave fresh meaning to the dangers of nuclear war. After the crisis ended, President John Kennedy, commenting to an aide on air force general Curtis LeMay’s pressure for an air strike that would have likely provoked a Soviet missile response, said, “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

  The 1964 presidential election, which pitted Republican senator Barry Goldwater against President Lyndon B. Johnson, sent another wave of fear through the world: Goldwater joked that we should consider lobbing the bomb into the men’s room of the Kremlin, and the Johnson campaign responded with the “daisy girl” ad, suggesting that Goldwater might destroy every youngster’s future by reckless use of nuclear weapons. Bumper stickers declaring, “In Your Heart, You Know He Might,” “In Your Gut You Know He’s Nuts,” and “Stamp Out Peace—Vote Goldwater” reflected the conviction that, as president, Goldwater might trigger a nuclear conflict.

  Once Johnson involved the country in the Vietnam War, the temptation to rely on a nuclear attack became a part of the conversation during Johnson’s presidency. As the war settled into a stalemate and Johnson lost credibility with the public, Texas governor John Connally advised him to consider using a tactical nuclear weapon. When Johnson resisted, Connally wondered about having these weapons if we could not use them to win a war.

  Despite doubts that nuclear missiles could be a rational alternative in any conflict, the conviction that they could deter an attack by an adversary fueled their expanded development. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the nuclear arms race gave birth to submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), missiles capable of carrying several bombs aimed at separate targets, SS9s, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and antiballistic missile systems (ABMs), meant to counter the ICBMs by guarding missile sites. National security officials conceded that the expansion of these nuclear arsenals provided no advantage to one side or the other, and, as one critic said, the only function these weapons could serve was “to make the rubble bounce.” After all, it was accepted wisdom that just one sixteen-megaton nuclear bomb exploded one mile above Manhattan would turn everything from the tip of the island to 110th Street, the northern reaches of Central Park, into molten ash. And the
United States had over thirty thousand of these weapons.

  A second Cold War nuclear alert in 1973, eleven years after the Cuban crisis, further underscored the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. When the Soviets threatened to parachute forces into the Sinai Desert during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt to rescue Egypt’s Third Army, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and General Al Haig, President Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, forced Moscow to back down by raising the country’s nuclear alert or Defense Condition from DEFCON IV to DEFCON III, “the highest stage of readiness for essentially peacetime conditions.” Because Nixon, who was under great stress during the Watergate scandal and threats of impeachment, was sedated or drunk during this crisis, Kissinger and Haig made the decision in conjunction with five other national security officials, all of whom were unelected presidential appointees. Only the rational good sense of Eisenhower in 1953–54, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, Johnson in 1967, and the Soviets responding to the Kissinger-Haig alert in 1973 averted a nuclear holocaust.

  Because the danger of a nuclear conflict was never far from the thinking of scientists and public officials in postwar America, discussions of how to contain the danger formed a significant part of the national dialogue in 1945–46. Sixty-five years after the bomb became a part of every nation’s consciousness, people around the world take nuclear weapons for granted, believing that somehow we will not see another mushroom cloud. True, governments fret over proliferation, and U.S. officials in particular, especially after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, sound repeated warnings about the dangers of rogue states or radical groups acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction.