by Tony Judt
Truman’s decision was prompted by the Soviet Union’s successful test in August 1949 of a Soviet atomic bomb. The gap between American and Soviet nuclear capability was shrinking: the first successful US thermonuclear test was carried out on the Pacific atoll of Elugelab on November 1st 1952; the first such Soviet test, at Semipalatinsk, was announced just ten months later, on August 12th 1953. American battlefield nuclear weapons first began arriving in West Germany the following month; the next January Dulles announced Eisenhower’s ‘New Look’ policy. NATO was to be ‘nuclearised’: the threat to use tactical nuclear weapons on the European battlefield was to become part of the Alliance’s defense strategy. In order for the Soviet Union to believe that the West might really fire them, the distinction between nuclear and conventional arms was to be abolished. As Dulles explained to a NATO Council meeting in April 1954: ‘The US considers that the ability to use atomic weapons is essential for the defense of the NATO area in the face of the present threat. In short, such weapons must now be treated as in fact having become conventional.’
The coincidence of NATO’s nuclearization with the stabilization of the Continent was no accident. From the Soviet point of view as well, conventional warfare in central and Western Europe was of diminishing strategic interest. Moscow too was stockpiling nuclear weapons—starting with just 5 in 1950 it had built some 1,700 by the end of the decade. But the chief Soviet emphasis was on developing the means to deliver them not on the European battlefield but across oceans, to compensate for American plans to base nuclear weapons in Germany, just a few hundred miles from Russia itself.
The notorious ‘missile gap’ of which John F. Kennedy spoke when campaigning for the US presidency in 1960 was a myth, a successful exercise in Soviet propaganda; the same was true of widespread contemporary accounts of Soviet educational and technical superiority. Two decades before German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made the observation, Khrushchev and some of his senior colleagues already understood intuitively that the empire they ruled over was basically ‘Upper Volta with missiles’. But the USSR certainly was expending great efforts on the development of its ballistic capabilities. The first successful Soviet test of an intercontinental ballistic missile came in August 1957, five months ahead of the Americans. The subsequent launching of Sputnik on October 4th 1957 showed what it could do (to American horror85).
Ballistic weapons—intercontinental missiles capable of delivering nuclear war-heads from the Soviet hinterland to American targets—had considerable appeal for Nikita Khrushchev in particular. They were cheaper than conventional weapons. They allowed Khrushchev to maintain good relations with heavy industry and the military while diverting resources to consumer goods production. And they had the curious consequence, as both sides would come to appreciate, of making a major war much less likely than hitherto. Nuclear weapons made both Moscow and Washington more belligerent in form—it was important to seem ready and willing to use them—but far more restrained in practice.
For the Americans they had an added appeal. The US was still trying to find a way to extricate itself from the European entanglement into which it had slipped despite its leaders’ best intentions. The nuclearization of Europe would be a way of managing this. It would no longer be necessary to envisage a huge American military presence indefinitely stationed in the heart of Europe—statesmen and military strategists alike looked forward to the day when Europe would be able to defend itself virtually alone, backed only by the firm promise of massive American nuclear retaliation in the event of a Soviet attack. As Eisenhower had reiterated in 1953, the US presence in Europe was only ever supposed to be a ‘stopgap operation to bring confidence and security to our friends overseas.’
There are various reasons why the Americans were never able to realize their plans for quitting Europe. Towards the end of the 1950s the US was pressing the case for a European nuclear deterrent, under collective European command. But neither the British nor the French were happy with the idea. This was not because their governments were opposed in principle to nuclear weapons. The British exploded their first plutonium bomb in the Australian desert in August 1952; fourteen months later the first British atomic bomb was delivered to the Royal Air Force. For military and economic reasons the British governments of the time were quite keen to switch from a strategy of continental defense to one of nuclear deterrence: indeed, British urgings had played a role in persuading Eisenhower to come up with his ‘New Look’ strategy, and the British offered no objection to the stationing of nuclear-capable US bombers on British soil.86
The French also had an atomic weapons program, approved by Mendès-France in December 1954, although the first independent French bomb was not successfully exploded until February 1960. However, neither the British nor the French were willing to relinquish control of nuclear weapons to a European defense entity; the French especially were suspicious of any hint that the Americans might allow Germans access to a nuclear trigger. The Americans reluctantly conceded that their presence in Europe was indispensable—which was just what their European allies wanted to hear.8
A second issue binding the Americans to Europe was the problem of Berlin. Thanks to the defeat of the blockade in 1948-49, the former capital of Germany remainedsomething of an open city; East and West Berlin were linked by phone lines and transport networks criss-crossing the various zones of occupation. It was also the only transit route from East Europe into the West. Germans fleeing west could come to East Berlin from anywhere in the German Democratic Republic, make their way from the Russian Zone of occupation into the Western Zones and thence along the road and rail corridor linking West Berlin to the rest of the Federal Republic. Once there, they were automatically entitled to citizenship in West Germany.
The journey was not entirely risk free, and refugees could bring only what they could carry; but neither consideration inhibited younger East Germans from undertaking it. Between the spring of 1949 and August 1961 somewhere between 2.8 and 3 million East Germans went through Berlin to the West, around 16 percent of the country’s population. Many of them were educated, professional men and women—East Germany’s future; but the numbers also included thousands of farmers who fled rural collectivization in 1952, and workers who abandoned the regime after the violent repression of June 1953.
Berlin’s curious status was thus a standing embarrassment and public-relations disaster for East Germany’s Communist regime. As the Soviet Ambassador to the GDR tactfully advised Moscow in December 1959: ‘The presence in Berlin of an open and, to speak to the point, uncontrolled border between the socialist and the capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which, unfortunately, does not always turn out in favour of Democratic Berlin.’ The situation in Berlin had its uses for Moscow, of course, as for others—the city had become the primary listening post and spy center of the Cold War; some 70 different agencies were operating there by 1961, and it was in Berlin that Soviet espionage agencies scored some of their greatest successes.
However, now that the Soviet leaders had accepted the division of Germany and elevated the eastern zone into a fully fledged sovereign state, they could not continue indefinitely to ignore the steady haemorrhage of its human resources. Nevertheless, when Moscow did once again direct international attention to Berlin and generate a three-year international crisis over the city’s status, it was not out of consideration for the wounded sensibilities of the East German rulers. By 1958 the Soviet Union was once again worried that the Americans might be planning to arm their West German clients, this time with nuclear weapons. This, as we have seen, was not an entirely unreasonable fear—it was, after all, shared by some West Europeans. And so Khrushchev set out to use Berlin—a city to whose fate the Russians were otherwise indifferent—as a lever to block the nuclearization of Bonn, about which they felt very strongly indeed.
The first move in the ‘Berlin crisis’ came on November 10th 1958, when Khrushchev made a publi
c speech in Moscow, addressed to the Western powers:
The imperialists have turned the German question into an abiding source of international tension. The ruling circles of Western Germany are doing everything to whip up military passions against the German Democratic Republic . . . Speeches by Chancellor Adenauer and Defense Minister Strauss, the atomic arming of the Bundeswehr and various military exercises all speak of a definite trend in the policy of the ruling circles of West Germany . . . The time has obviously arrived for the signatories of the Potsdam Agreement to give up the remnants of the occupation regime in Berlin and thereby make it possible to create a normal situation in the capital of the German Democratic Republic. The Soviet Union, for its part, would hand over to the sovereign German Democratic Republic the functions in Berlin that are still exercised by Soviet agencies.
The ostensible objective of Khrushchev’s offensive, which took on a greater urgency when the Soviet leader demanded two weeks later that the West make up its mind to withdraw from Berlin within six months, was to get the Americans to abandon Berlin and allow it to become a ‘free city’. If they did so, the credibility of their general commitment to the defense of Western Europe would be seriously dented, and neutralist, anti-nuclear sentiment in West Germany and elsewhere would probably grow. But even if the Western powers insisted on staying put in Berlin, the USSR might be able to exchange its consent to this for a firm Western commitment to deny Bonn any nuclear weapons.
When Western leaders refused any concessions over Berlin, claiming that the Soviet Union itself had broken its Potsdam undertakings by integrating East Berlin fully into the government and institutions of the East German state before any final Treaty had been agreed, Khrushchev tried again. Following an unsuccessful series of foreign ministers’ discussions in Geneva in the summer of 1959, he repeated his demands, first in 1960 and then again in June 1961. The Western military presence in Berlin must end. Otherwise the Soviet Union would unilaterally withdraw from Berlin, conclude a separate Peace Treaty with the GDR and leave the West to negotiate the fate of its zones of occupation with an independent East German state. From November 1958 through the summer of 1961 the crisis over Berlin simmered, diplomatic nerves frayed and the exodus of East Germans grew to a flood.
Khrushchev’s June 1961 ultimatum was delivered at a summit meeting with John F. Kennedy, the new American President, held in Vienna. The last such summit meeting, between Khrushchev and Eisenhower in May 1960, had been abandoned when the Soviets shot down US Air Force pilot Gary Powers in his U2 plane and the Americans reluctantly conceded that they had indeed been conducting high-altitude espionage (having first denied all knowledge of the matter). In his talks with Kennedy, Khrushchev threatened to ‘liquidate’ Western rights in Berlin if there was no settlement there by the end of the year.
In public Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, took a hard line, insisting that the West would never abandon its commitments. Washington was standing by its rights under the Potsdam accords and increasing the national defense budget specifically to buttress the US military presence in Germany. But off the record the US was much more accommodating. The Americans—unlike their West German clients—accepted the reality of an East German state, and understood Soviet anxiety over the aggressive tone of recent speeches by Adenauer and, especially, his Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. Something had to be done to move the German situation forward—as Eisenhower said to Macmillan on March 28th 1960, the West couldn’t ‘really afford to stand on a dime for the next fifty years.’ In a similar spirit, Kennedy assured Khrushchev at Vienna that the United States did not ‘wish to act in a way that would deprive the Soviet Union of its ties in Eastern Europe’: a veiled acknowledgement that what the Russians had, they could hold, including the eastern zone of Germany and the former German territories now in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.87
Shortly after Kennedy returned to Washington, the East German authorities began imposing travel restrictions on would-be emigrants. In direct response, the US President publicly re-asserted the Western commitment to West Berlin—thereby implicitly conceding that the city’s eastern half was in the Soviet sphere of influence. The rate of exodus through Berlin grew faster than ever: 30,415 people left for the West in July; by the first week of August 1961 a further 21,828 had followed, half of them under twenty-five years of age. At this rate the German Democratic Republic would soon be empty.
Khrushchev’s response was to cut the Gordian knot of Berlin. After the Allied foreign ministers, meeting in Paris on August 6th, rejected yet another Soviet note threatening a separate Peace Treaty with the GDR if a settlement was not reached, Moscow authorized the East Germans to draw a line, literally, separating the two sides once and for all. On August 19th 1961 the East Berlin authorities set soldiers and workmen to the task of building a partition across the city. Within three days a rough wall had been erected, sufficient to foreclose casual movement between the two halves of Berlin. Over the ensuing weeks it was raised and strengthened. Searchlights, barbed wire and guard posts were added; the doors and windows of buildings abutting the wall were first blocked off, and then bricked up. Streets and squares were cut in half and all communications across the divided city were subjected to close policing or else broken off altogether. Berlin had its Wall.
Officially the West was horrified. For three days in October 1961 Soviet and American tanks confronted one another across the checkpoint separating their respective zones—one of the last remaining links between them—as the East German authorities tested the Western powers’ willingness to affirm and assert their continuing right of access to the eastern zone in keeping with the original Four-Power Agreement. Faced with the intransigence of the local American military commander—who refused to recognize any East German right to impede Allied movements—the Soviets reluctantly granted the point; for the next thirty years all four occupying powers remained in place, although both sides conceded de facto administration of their respective zones of control to the local German authorities.
Behind the scenes many Western leaders were secretly relieved at the appearance of the Wall. For three years Berlin had threatened to be the flashpoint for an international confrontation, just as it had been in 1948. Kennedy and other Western leaders privately agreed that a wall across Berlin was a far better outcome than a war—whatever was said in public, few Western politicians could seriously imagine asking their soldiers to ‘die for Berlin’. As Dean Rusk (Kennedy’s Secretary of State) quietly observed, the Wall had its uses: ‘the probability is that in realistic terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier.’
The outcome of the Berlin crisis showed that the two Great Powers had more in common than they sometimes appreciated. If Moscow undertook not to raise again the question of Allied status in Berlin, Washington would accept the reality of East German government there and would resist West German pressure for nuclear weapons. Both sides had an interest in stability in central Europe; but more to the point, the US and the USSR were both tired of responding to the demands and complaints of their respective German clients. The first decade of the Cold War had given German politicians on either side of the divide unparalleled leverage over their patrons in Washington and Moscow. Afraid of losing credibility with ‘their’ Germans, the Great Powers had allowed Adenauer and Ulbricht to blackmail them into ‘hanging tough’.
Moscow, which as we have seen had never set out to establish a client state in the eastern zone of occupied Germany, but had settled for it as a second best, devoted inordinate effort to shoring up a weak and unloved Communist regime in Berlin. The East German Communists in their turn were always half-afraid that their Soviet patrons would sell them out.88 The Wall thus offered them some reassurance, although they were disappointed by Khrushchev’s refusal to keep pressing for a Peace Treaty once the barrier had gone up. As for Bonn, the longstanding fear there was that the ‘Amis’ (Americans) would just get up and walk away. Washington had always bent over backwards to reassure
Bonn that it had America’s unswerving support, but after the Wall went up and the Americans conspicuously acquiesced, West German anxiety only increased. Hence the reiterated post-Wall promises from Washington that the US would never quit their zone—the background to Kennedy’s famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (sic) declaration in June 1963. With 250,000 troops in Europe by 1963, the Americans like the Russians were clearly there for the duration.
The Wall ended Berlin’s career as the crisis zone of world and European affairs. Although it took ten years to reach formal agreement on issues of access, after November1961 Berlin ceased to matter and West Berlin began its steady descent into political irrelevance. Even the Russians lost interest in it. Curiously, this was not immediately clear to the West. When the Cuba crisis broke out the following year, Kennedy and his advisers were convinced that Khrushchev was engaged in a complex, Machiavellian ploy to achieve his longstanding German objectives. The lessons of 1948-50 had been learned too well.
Just as Truman and Acheson had seen the Korean incursion as a possible prelude to a Soviet probe across the divided frontier of Germany, so Kennedy and his colleagues saw in the missile emplacements in Cuba a Soviet device to blackmail a vulnerable America into giving way in Berlin. Hardly an hour passed during the first ten days of the Cuba crisis without American leaders reverting to the subject of West Berlin, and the need to ‘neutralize’ Khrushchev’s anticipated countermove in the divided city. As Kennedy explained on October 22nd 1962 to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: ‘I need not point out to you the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin.’
The problem was that Kennedy had taken recent Soviet bluster and propaganda all too seriously and built his understanding of US-Soviet relations around the Berlin question. This dramatically ratcheted up the apparent significance of the Cuban crisis, leading Kennedy to inform his closest advisers, on October 19th: ‘I don’t think we’ve got any satisfactory alternatives . . . Our problem is not merely Cuba but it is also Berlin. And when we recognize the importance of Berlin to Europe, and recognize the importance of our allies to us, that’s what has made this thing be a dilemma for these days. Otherwise, our answer would be quite easy.’ Three days earlier, as the Cuba crisis began, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had summarized his own interpretation of the Soviet actions: ‘I think also that Berlin is very much involved in this. For the first time, I’m beginning really to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin.’