The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  In the Middle East, to be sure, the Soviet tide was decisively turned back. The Western powers rejected Stalin’s demands for Turkish territory and control of the Black Sea Straits – another traditional Russian imperial objective – and insisted on his withdrawal from Iran, referring the matter to the new United Nations Security Council and deploying the American 6th Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. Here was proof that the ‘strategy of containment’ recommended by the diplomat George Kennan could work; it was not proof, however, that the atomic monopoly would make it work. The period up until 1956 saw a reassertion of British and French influence and a new assertion of American power through Saudi Arabia and Israel. Likewise in Turkey and Greece the American assistance that counted was conventional (and financial) more than nuclear.

  In Central Europe and Asia, on the other hand, the Soviet flood continued in full spate. True, Stalin did not succeed in getting his handson all of Germany, as he had hoped. The generosity of the 1947 European Recovery Plan, named the Marshall Plan after Truman’s Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, was sufficient to begin the transformation of the post-war occupation zones into enduring political blocs. The 1948–9 Berlin blockade was a failure too, but again it was aid that the American planes transported eastwards, not atomic bombs(though Truman himself believed that only the Bomb had deterred the Russians from ‘taking over Europe’). In Czechoslovakia, however, hopes for democracy were dashed by a Soviet-backed coup in February 1948. This was the beginning of a series of coups in Central and Eastern Europe, the effect of which was to confer monopolies of power on ruthlessly Stalinized Communist Parties. Moreover, there seemed every reason to fear a Communist takeover in some West European countries. In December 1945 the Italian Communists had 1.8 million members and gained 19 per cent of the popular vote in free elections. The French Communist party had nearly a million members. In November 1947, at the instigation of Stalin’s Comin form, two million workers struck throughout France. Similar strikes paralysed Italy. In Asia, meanwhile, the Soviet triumph was very nearly complete. As early as July 1946, Truman declared that Korea was ‘an ideological battleground upon which our entire success in Asia may depend’, but for a time in 1947 it seemed as if the United States was about to withdraw from the peninsula altogether. In January 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson indicated that he did not regard South Korea as vital to American security.

  Yet the American mood began to change after the Russians refused to allow free, UN-supervised elections to go ahead in their zone of occupation. When, with Stalin’s blessing, North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the United States went to war, with the authority of a United Nations Security Council resolution. Armed conflict had resumed, with the potential to escalate once again into world war. Why?

  The answer lay in China, where more than twenty years of intermittent civil war had finally ended with Communist victory. Shanghai had fallen to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in May 1949; on October 1 Mao had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC); on December 10 Chiang Kai-shek fled mainland China for the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). Mao had already made it abundantly clear that he intended to align China with the Soviet Union and in December 1949 set off for Moscow to pledge his allegiance to Stalin – in return, it should be added, for the Manchurian ports, which Stalin felt unable to deny his fellow revolutionary. After no less than two months in the Soviet capital, Mao returned with a treaty of mutual defence. Indeed, it is not too much to describe the PRC as Moscow’s biggest satellite throughout the first decade of its existence. Characteristically insouciant even in the face of catastrophe, Chiang repaired to the Taiwanese resort of Sun Moon Lake and went fishing. Retreat was not defeat to Chiang; it was a way of life, a strategy in a very, very long game. His confident assumption was that within a matter of years there would be a Third World War between the United States and Communism, after which he would be able to return to his rightful place. He was very nearly right. Having lost the Manchurian ports, Stalin had been inclined to give the green light to the North Korean invasion. Resolved to avoid an ‘Eastern Munich’, Truman’s first action in response to the invasion was to send the US 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait and to put the glory-hungry General MacArthur in charge of defending South Korea. He did more than this, outflanking the North Koreans at Inchon and sweeping across the 38th parallel with reckless indifference to the international consequences. On November 26, 1950, the Chinese launched a brilliantly executed though hardly unforeseeable offensive across the Yalu River (the Korean-Manchurian border), driving MacArthur’s forces back in the utmost disorder. At this point, many people in the West felt justified in asking: Who had really won the Second World War? Four days after the Chinese intervention, Truman pointedly refused to rule out the use of atomic weapons ‘to meet the military situation’. Was this the beginning of a Third World War?

  To win the Second World War, the Western powers had allied themselves with a despot who was every bit as brutal a tyrant as Hitler. They had adopted tactics that they themselves had said were depraved, killing prisoners and bombing civilians. This is not, let it be repeated, to suggest a simple moral equivalence between Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The Axis cities would never have been bombed if the Axis powers had not launched their war of aggression. And the Axis powers might have killed even more innocent people than they did, had it not been for the determination of the Allied powers to prevail by any means, fair or foul. Yet it is to acknowledge that the victory of 1945 was a tainted victory – if indeed it was a victory at all. It is also to advance the hypothesis that the underlying war between West and East no more ended in 1945 than it had begun in 1939. For the Korean War was more than a mere Asian aftershock; it was waged at its outset with the same destructive intensity that had characterized the final phase of the previous war. In the space of three years it claimed up to three million lives. Eighteen countries sent troops to fight in it. But, as in the Second World War, the majority of casualties were civilians; as in the Second World War, air raids – which levelled both Pyongyang and Seoul – were the principal cause of death. The challenge is to understand what stopped this war from escalating, as previous regional conflicts had, into yet another world war.

  Epilogue

  The Descent of the West

  The time has gone forever when the Western powers were able to conquer a country in the East merely by mounting several cannons along the coast.

  Peng Dehuai, Chinese supreme commander in the Korean War, September 1953

  We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in effect have encouraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness. This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists. After all hasn’t man been a savage from the beginning of time [?] so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our people.

  Viron Vaky, US diplomat in Guatemala, March 1968

  CHICKENS

  When did the War of the World end? Perhaps the best answer is July 27, 1953, when the armistice was signed that ended the Korean War. Why did that conflict peter out, rather than escalate into a global conflict between the superpowers? One tempting explanation is that the exponential increase in destructive power that began with the first atomic test raised the stakes too high to permit a full-scale conflict. Truman had already revealed himself to be deeply reluctant to use atomic weapons again after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘The human animal… must change now,’ he had written in 1946, ‘or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphere-less planet will succeed him.’ On this point, he and Stalin were at one. ‘Atomic weapons’, the latter remarked in 1949, ‘can hardly be used without spelling the end of
the world.’

  Despite the huge advantage enjoyed by the United States over the Soviet Union at the time of the Korean War – the Americans had 369 operational bombs, the Soviets no more than five – Truman declined to drop the Bomb on Chinese targets. With the American decision to develop a thermonuclear super-bomb, the likelihood of a nuclear exchange diminished still further, for the move from fission to fusion raised the stakes by several orders of magnitude. One H-bomb tested on March 1, 1954, had a yield of 15 megatons, 750 times the size of Little Boy, the Hiroshima A-bomb. A single weapon could now devastate three or four hundred square miles and generate lethal quantities of radioactive fallout. Both sides understood that a full-scale thermonuclear exchange could ‘create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life’. In a Soviet first strike, the Pentagon estimated in 1953, around three million Americans would die. By 1956 they had raised the projected number of casualties to 65 per cent of the entire US population. The paradox was that only by embracing this reality could both sides be deterred from launching such a first strike. Missiles should be targeted at cities; there should be no option for a limited nuclear war. This was the logic of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’.

  Yet the world came so desperately close to nuclear war on at least one occasion that this technological-strategic explanation, for all its elegance, is ultimately unconvincing. Moreover, it is clear that senior political and military figures in the United States regarded the use of both A-bombs and H-bombs as far from unimaginable. Among those who argued for a ‘preventive war’ against the Soviet Union in the late 1940s were the Democratic Senator Brien McMahon, and the architect of ‘containment’, George Kennan. Also eager to ‘break up Russia’s five A-bomb nests’ were – among others – General Orvil Anderson, commanding officer of the US Air War College, General George Kenney, first commander of the Strategic Air Command and his successor, the incinerator of Tokyo, Curtis LeMay. Even after the ending of the American monopoly, many people thirsted to use the Bomb again. MacArthur was eager to drop A-bombs on Chinese forces in Korea in early 1951; in this he had the sympathy of the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. Their views were overruled mainly because the American position in Europe looked too vulnerable to a Soviet attack and because the Labour government in Britain, still Washington’s most important ally, was vehemently opposed; that did not preclude atomic strikes in, say, 1952 or 1953, when Europe was less militarily and politically precarious. Truman himself seriously contemplated using a nuclear ultimatum to break the Korean deadlock. Eisenhower also considered using atomic weapons ‘on a sufficiently large scale’ to bring the conflict to an end. Doing so would not have been unpopular. Asked if they favoured ‘using atomic artillery shells against communist forces… if truce talks break down’, 56 per cent of Americans polled said yes. Nuclear strikes were also considered when China attacked the Quemoy-Matsu islands in the Taiwan Strait. Eisenhower took extremely seriously the argument for an American first strike; that was the basis for the exercise known as Project Solarium. In his view, the strain of maintaining nuclear forces sufficiently massive* to deter a Soviet first strike might prove intolerable: ‘In such circumstances, we would be forced to consider whether or not our duty to future generations did not require us to initiate war at the most propitious moment.’ As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Arthur Radford approved the Air Force’s strategy for such a preventive war. Henry Kissinger made his reputation as a public intellectual by arguing, in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), that a limited nuclear war was conceivable. As late as 1959 Eisenhower was still asking himself whether the United States should ‘start fighting now’ rather than ‘waiting to go quietly down the drain’.

  In the view of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, both superpowers were attracted to the idea of breaking the nuclear stalemate in a way that was almost adolescent in its recklessness:

  ‘Brinkmanship’ is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practised by some youthful degenerates. This sport… is played by choosing a long straight road… and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends… As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent.

  The analogy of a teenage game was highly appropriate. Strategists like John von Neumann and Hermann Kahn were helping to develop a new academic discipline – ‘game theory’ – which they believed held the key to superpower relations in the nuclear age. Mathematical models like the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ were developed to illustrate why brinkmanship made sense. But the game Russell was reminded of was the simple and lethal game played by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause – ‘Chicken’:

  If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts ‘Chicken!’ and the one who has swerved becomes an object of contempt… The game may be played [by eminent statesmen] without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later… the moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of ‘Chicken!’ from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.

  The eve of destruction very nearly came on Saturday, October 27, 1962. The American Defense Secretary Robert McNamara remembered stepping outside the White House to savour the livid sunset: ‘To look and to smell it,’ he recalled, ‘because I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see.’ In Moscow at precisely that moment, Fyodor Burlatsky, a senior Kremlin adviser, telephoned his wife. He told her to ‘drop everything and get out of Moscow’.

  The cause of the crisis was the island of Cuba. At the beginning of 1959 Fidel Castro’s guerrillas had seized power in Cuba, informally an American dependency since the time of Theodore Roosevelt. A charismatic nationalist, Castro had been féted by the American media when he had visited the United States that spring, not least at Harvard University. But the rapid penetration of the new Cuban regime by the Soviet Union had precipitated a quite different reaction in Washington. In March 1961, less than two months after his inauguration, President John F. Kennedy had authorized an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles, armed and organized by the CIA. Inadequately supported from the air, its failure at the Bay of Pigs had been abject and a smarting Kennedy had reverted to a policy of dirty tricks aimed at destabilizing and perhaps even assassinating Castro. Castro had seized the moment to take Cuba into the Soviet bloc in return for copious quantities of arms.

  Nikita Khrushchev, the coal miner’s son who had emerged as First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party after Stalin’s death in 1953, saw the Cuban Revolution as Christmas for world Communism. Repeatedly during the subsequent crisis, he insisted that his motivation was simply to defend Cuba and its experiment with Marxism. In reality, he had seized on the idea of using the island as a kind of missile launching-pad, which would, at a stroke, narrow the gap in nuclear capability between the United States and the Soviet Union. That gap was still wide. The ratio of American to Soviet deliverable nuclear warheads was between eight and seventeen to one in favour of the United States. The Americans had six times as many long-range missiles as the Soviets; few if any of the Soviet missiles were in bombproof silos. The United States also had three times as many long-range bombers. The Soviets knew that their intercontinental ballistic missiles were anything but reliable, but from Cuba – just ninety miles from the coast of Florida – even intermediate range missiles could strike at the United States. Khrushchev’s military advisers recommended sending forty missiles: twenty-four R-12s (with a range of 1,050 miles) and sixteen R-14s, which had double that range. Both carried one-megaton warheads. At a stroke, Khrushchev would double the number of missiles capable of reaching the United States. Now Washington would be a potential target, to say nothing of the Americans’ own long-range missile silos in the Mid-West and air bases in the South – the key objectives of any Soviet first strike. To justify this action, Khrushchev only had to look out from his Black Sea holiday house at Pitsunda towards Turkey. There the Americans had r
ecently stationed fifteen Jupiter missiles. ‘What do you see?’ he would ask visitors, handing them binoculars. ‘I see US missiles in Turkey, aimed at my dacha.’ The Cuban missiles would give the Americans ‘a little of their own medicine’. ‘It’s been a long time since you could spank us like a little boy,’ he had gleefully told Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who happened to be visiting the Soviet Union that September. ‘Now we can swat your ass.’

  To ship so many missiles and over 50,000 men some 7,000 miles at the height of the hurricane season was a bold gambit. Even more astonishing was how long it took the Americans to cotton on to ‘Operation Anadyr’. Because US aerial surveillance of Soviet naval activities and of Cuba itself had been stepped down, Kennedy did not hear that a U-2 spy plane had spotted missiles near Havana until the morning of Tuesday, October 16. Even two days later, the Soviets were still denying it. On being quizzed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko acted, in Khrushchev’s gleeful words, ‘like a gypsy who’s been caught stealing a horse: It’s not me, and it’s not my horse’. According to the myth perpetuated by Kennedy’s acolytes, what followed was a triumph of hardball diplomacy. In the phrase of Dean Rusk which has adorned a thousand textbooks, Kennedy and Khrushchev were ‘eyeball to eyeball’ over Cuba and ‘the other fellow… blinked’. This was far from the truth. On the contrary, Kennedy and his key advisers (assembled on what became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ‘ExComm’) were thrown into confusion by the audacity of the Soviet move. Already, the CIA reported, up to eight medium-range missiles could be fired from Cuba. Within six to eight weeks, the two longer-range missile sites would be ready too. Once all the missiles were installed, it was estimated, only 15 percent of US strategic forces would survive Soviet attack. ‘[It’s] just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of medium range ballistic missiles in Turkey,’ fumed Kennedy. ‘Well, we did, Mr President,’ someone reminded him. Kennedy’s next thought was to order air strikes against the missile sites. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not guarantee that all the missiles would be destroyed in such a raid, leaving the possibility open of Soviet retaliation. Instead, Kennedy adopted a twin-track approach. He decided to impose a naval blockade to halt further Soviet shipments of military hardware to Cuba. At the same time, he issued an ultimatum demanding that the Soviets withdraw their missiles; this was broadcast on television. In case this ultimatum was rejected, he ordered the preparation of an invasion force of 90,000 ground troops.