by Ian Morris
Although two and a half million Indians volunteered to fight for the empire while only a few thousand joined the Japanese army (often so they could get out of prisoner-of-war camps), the London government nevertheless had no illusions about being able to keep control in the subcontinent after the war ended. It pulled out in indecent haste in 1947, and by 1971 Britain ruled virtually nothing east of Suez (or east of Dover, for that matter).
“Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” the former American secretary of state Dean Acheson famously remarked in 1962, but that was not entirely true. The ex-globocop in fact transitioned remarkably smoothly to being the main supporter of the new power that had taken its job, probably because Britain really had very few options. Less than a year after Hitler’s suicide, Churchill could already see that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the [European] continent.” The war had not been productive enough to install a new globocop, but it did set up two new hemispherical cops.
During the Five Hundred Years’ War, Europe had (almost) conquered the world, and now the Soviet Union and the United States had between them conquered Europe. They had divided the continent down the middle, solving the great strategic problem posed by a mighty Germany forever fearful of being crushed between the outer rim and the heartland by tearing the country in two. Seen in isolation, the First World War had been very much a counterproductive war, crippling the British globocop, but from the vantage point of 1945 it now looked more like the opening round in a longer productive war, which was moving toward replacing the nineteenth-century globocop with a much stronger twentieth-century version. Many thoughtful observers concluded that there would have to be one more great productive war, with the two hemispherical cops fighting it out until just one globocop remained standing.
But one thing stood in the way of this outcome: the bomb.
Splitting the atom had changed everything. The biggest artillery bombardments in the world wars had typically lobbed fifteen to twenty thousand tons of high explosives at enemy trenches over the course of several days, but the individual bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki concentrated these barrages into single blasts and also poisoned the survivors with lethal neutrons and gamma rays. With just two bombs, the United States killed more than 150,000 people. A war between two nations with large nuclear arsenals (in 1986, the peak year, the United States and the Soviet Union had seventy thousand warheads between them) was beyond anything that could be imagined. It would be truly counterproductive war, laying lands waste for thousands of years to come. Even Stalin found the thought unbearable.
The question, then, was what to do about it. One possibility was that the world would be scared straight: after looking into the abyss, it might finally beat its swords into plowshares. Albert Einstein wrote to The New York Times less than a month after Hiroshima and Nagasaki explaining that this was the only option. An earnest committee at the University of Chicago issued guidelines for a world government. Hope even flared that the United Nations, the League of Nations’ successor, would make war redundant.
But all these answers begged the same question: What happens when the nuclear giants fall out? The idea that the United Nations’ Atomic Energy Commission would control all atom bombs collapsed when the Americans and the Soviets could not agree on inspection protocols, and by 1947 confidence in the power of talk was disappearing. Soviets called the United Nations “not so much a world organization as an organization for the Americans”; American officials, watching the delegates’ antics, dismissed it as “the monkey house.”
Another possibility was that the world might be scared violent. Pushing the lesser-evil logic to its horrifying limits, some Americans pointed out that since they had not only atom bombs but also bombers that could reach enemy cities, while the Soviets had neither, it made sense to fight a one-sided nuclear war now rather than a much worse, two-sided one later. Churchill even contemplated a plan (called, quite rightly, Operation Unthinkable) to follow up nuclear attacks by having the recently surrendered German army reinvade Russia.
The flaw with this thinking was that during the four years that the United States had the world’s only atomic bombs, it did not have enough of them to defeat the Soviets. The Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated in 1948 that if they dropped all 133 of their bombs on Soviet cities, they would kill three million people—a horrifying number, but not enough to shatter a nation that had survived twenty-five million deaths during World War II. Not until 1952, when American physicists set off a thermonuclear (“hydrogen”) bomb with a blast equal to seven hundred Hiroshimas, was the United States in a position to kill tens of millions of communists, but by then—thanks as much to their spies as their scientists—the communists had a bomb of their own (Figure 5.12).
Figure 5.12. Changing the equation: Joe-1, the first Soviet atomic test, August 29, 1949
Never one to give up easily, the newly elected president, Dwight Eisenhower, told his National Security Council in 1953 that there was “no sense merely shuddering at the enemy’s capacity.” Rather, “we presently really have to face the question of whether or not we would really have to throw everything at once against the enemy.” One study he commissioned confirmed that “virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.” Another, however, pointed out that if Soviet bombers made one-way suicide flights—reasonable behavior for crews whose homes were now radiating ruins—they could drop a hundred atom bombs on American cities and kill about eleven million people.
There would be furious dogfights far above the North Pole, and many, perhaps most, of the Soviet bombers would be shot down. But these were still not odds Eisenhower wanted to gamble with, and when the Soviets unveiled genuine long-range bombers in 1954 and their own hydrogen bomb in 1955, the calculus became even less attractive. A fairly standard hydrogen bomb, with a blast equivalent to a million tons of TNT, would kill everyone and level every building within three miles. Up to six miles out, clothes would burst into flames, and people would be tossed through the air at lethal speeds. Eleven miles away, anyone caught in the open could get second-degree burns and radiation poisoning. By the late 1950s, the Soviets had hundreds of these bombs and the Americans had thousands.
Neither scared straight nor scared violent, Americans plumped in 1947 for a middle course, which came to be called containment. As they (rightly) saw it, the United States was an outer-rim power. It had taken the open-access order much further than nineteenth-century Britain by renouncing direct rule (other than its rule over the nearly 3.8 million square miles it had conquered within North America) altogether. In fact, most Americans thought of their country as an anti-empire, fighting imperialism in the name of freedom. But even so, as the historian Niall Ferguson has acutely observed in his books Colossus and Empire, the United States’ strategic situation after 1945 was strikingly like Britain’s a century earlier.
Like Britain, the United States ruled the seas (and now the skies too), maintained military bases around the world, and exercised overwhelming economic power. Because it was the leader of a constellation of allies, rather than the ruler of provinces or client kingdoms, it relied more on coups and cooperation with local militaries than on sending gunboats to keep its followers in line, even though this meant that the followers often had at least some freedom to pursue policies that Washington did not like. But the price of opposing the United States on serious matters—as Britain and France discovered when they invaded Egypt without permission in 1956—was higher than its allies were typically willing to pay. Everything was always up for negotiation, but on the whole, the allies did more or less what Washington wanted—which is why so many people, friends as well as foes, called the postwar world an American Empire.
Within this alliance/empire, peace fell hard and fast. In part, this was because the United States rarely allowed its allies the freedom to fight each other (which, given that most of the world’s democracies were in the American Empire, largely explains the
phenomenon known as democratic peace). But peace also triumphed within national boundaries. The war had done wonders for popular respect for government and revulsion against political violence. The immediate postwar decades were a golden age of law and order: just one Scandinavian in five thousand and one Briton in four thousand died violently between 1950 and 1974, and while the American homicide rate—one in seven hundred—remained higher than Europe’s, it had still fallen 50 percent since the 1930s. The 1950s might have been dull, but they were very, very safe.
They were also very, very prosperous. At a great gathering in the woods of New Hampshire in July 1944, Americans had laid the foundations of a new international economic order to replace the one that died between September 3, 1929, and September 3, 1939, and the United States began pouring cash into Europe’s devastated economies. Most went to wartime allies, but, with the free-trade principle taken beyond anything nineteenth-century Britain had tried, vast amounts also went to West Germany, Japan, and Italy. By 1951 the United States had given away $26 billion, equivalent to roughly 10 percent of its annual GDP.
“It was,” observes the strategist Robert Kagan, “the perfect capitalist solution to a problem that was strategic as well as economic.” Like Adam Smith’s butcher, brewer, and baker, the American Empire acted not out of benevolence but from regard for its own interest. The flood of capital into Europe stimulated effective demand for American food and goods, and after a short, sharp depression as economies shifted from war- to peacetime production, the American Empire enjoyed the biggest, most broadly shared economic boom in history (Figure 5.13). In Britain, where being allowed to buy eggs had caused such joy in 1950, by 1960 more than a quarter of all families owned a car, and by 1965 it was more than a third. Car ownership remained more than twice as common in the United States, but few Europeans were complaining.
Figure 5.13. Let the good times roll: the biggest economic boom in history begins, 1943–83 (eastern European data are generally unreliable before 1950).
Each world war had seen Leviathans extending their tentacles deep into civil society so they could mobilize their resources to win, taking responsibility for organizing everything from munitions production to hospitals and child-rearing. After 1918, most voters viewed all this as infringements on their freedoms, electing governments that rushed to shed the burdens of enforcing high tax rates and running their citizens’ lives. By 1945, though, many western Europeans (and some, though not quite as many, Americans) had come to see big government very differently—not as a form of oppression, but as a tool of freedom. Big government had won the war against Hitler, and now, perhaps, it could win wars against poverty and injustice. To the horror of many conservatives, voters started electing governments committed to national health services, social security, state-funded university education, state-owned industries, steeply progressive taxation, and legal protections for previously marginalized groups.
As empires went, most members of the American version concluded, this was not so bad.
Getting to Petrov
The American Empire had no need to push into the Eurasian heartland, but it did need to protect and expand free markets all around the inner rim, and especially in western Europe. Its policy of containment meant leaving the Soviets to get on with whatever they liked in their own heartland but contesting all communist advances into the inner rim. If the United States could not be a globocop, it could at least be a globobouncer.
From the heartland, predictably, containment looked like encirclement. Almost everywhere the Politburo looked, from Scandinavia to Japan, American allies locked them in, their wealth and freedom tempting inner-rim nations into America’s orbit, threatening the future of communism. Moscow’s ideologues did their best to compete in the war of ideas, and the various five-year plans generated economic growth that would have been impressive in any earlier age. But from the minute they conquered eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely heavily on force, much as the tsars had before them.
Repression made sense for a heartland power. Far from the great flows of oceanic trade and unable to generate as much prosperity as an outer-rim empire, the Soviets had a much harder time than the Americans or even the British before them in buying loyalty with higher living standards. At its peak in 1953 (the last year of Stalin’s life), the gulag system housed 2.5 million prisoners. Stalin had even briefly reopened the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, killing a further ten thousand or so people there. In two known cases, families had one child executed by Hitler and the other by Stalin.
Soviet statistics are notoriously unreliable, but, depressing as the thought is, communist police states do seem to have driven violent crime down to extremely low levels. However, they clearly also made the Soviet Empire’s subjects miserable, and the huge spending required to support all the machinery of repression distorted the economy. Soviet living standards did rise, roughly doubling between 1946 and 1960, but American income roughly tripled in the same period.
In addition to all these drawbacks, the resources lavished on the million Soviet troops needed to occupy eastern Europe created a distinctly threatening impression on the American side of the Iron Curtain, and with each superpower suspecting the other’s intentions (often with good cause), the inevitable outcome was constant conflicts of interest around the inner rim. In the twilight struggle that ensued, fought as much by spies and policemen as by insurgents and armies, the United States and the Soviet Union both discovered—to paraphrase Marx—that while they made their own strategies, they could not always do so in ways of their own choosing. Both superpowers had to work closely with allies, and the tail often seemed to be wagging the dog. Soviets complained that their East German clients dragged them into crises they did not want, and the first secretary-general of NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed on a Norwegian initiative in 1949—joked that the alliance was a cynical western European conspiracy “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
At the other end of Eurasia, the alliance politics were messier still. For years, Mao Zedong had been bombarding Moscow with requests for help in the Chinese civil war, and Kim Il Sung had been demanding permission to invade South Korea. Stalin, worried about provoking Washington, had stalled both men, but when Mao surprised everyone by hoisting the red flag over Beijing in 1949, Stalin found the temptation of expelling the United States from the Pacific inner rim altogether just too tempting. He approved the Korean War in 1950.
It took three years, three million dead, and American threats of atomic attacks on China to end the fighting. The United States had hung on in the inner rim, but at a terrible cost, and in 1954 Eisenhower rolled out a new, zero-tolerance version of containment called the New Look (a bizarre choice of name, borrowed from Christian Dior’s 1947 line of full-skirted fashions). Official explanations were studiedly vague, but it seemed to add up to massive nuclear retaliation against any attack, anywhere. Ground forces would be cut to a bare minimum, serving only as trip wires for nuclear weapons. NATO’s commander in Europe was blunt. We “are basing all our planning on using atomic and thermonuclear weapons in our defence,” he wrote. “With us it is no longer: ‘They may possibly be used.’ It is very definitely: ‘They will be used.’”
So long as the Soviets accepted that war would be suicidal for them but merely almost suicidal for the Americans, the New Look more or less returned the initiative to Washington, at least against Moscow and Beijing (which got the bomb in 1964). But thanks to the strange tail-wagging-the-dog logic of the nuclear standoff, weaker communist countries felt able to take more risks, knowing that the United States would rather lose its arguments with them than be seen as the vicious bully that had gone nuclear against a minnow. In 1954, Eisenhower had to acknowledge that he would not use nuclear weapons against Ho Chi Minh in Indochina.
The speed with which the nuclear revolution in military affairs unfolded made stable strategies almost impossible. In 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union had
both scooped up as many of Hitler’s rocket scientists as they could and set them to work designing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In 1957 the Soviets narrowly won the race (“Our Germans are better than their Germans,” the film The Right Stuff has Khrushchev boast), using one of their first working rockets to fire a 184-pound steel ball, the Sputnik, into orbit. Inside was a radio transmitter, which did nothing but beep, but that was enough to fill Americans with despair. “Listen now,” NBC warned, “for the sound that will forever separate the old from the new.”
But like nearly everything in this brave new world, the Soviet lead was short-lived. Two years later the United States also had working ICBMs, and in 1960 both sides mastered the art of launching them from submarines. This ruled out the possibility of a first strike killing enough of the enemy’s missiles to prevent him from shooting back and shifted the calculus again.
In the early 1960s, the United States still had a nine-to-one nuclear superiority over the Soviets (Figure 5.14), and the Department of Defense projected that an American first strike would be able to kill 100 million people, probably bringing down the Soviet Union. However, the report went on, a Soviet counterstrike against the bigger cities of the United States and its allies would kill 75 million Americans and 115 million Europeans, bringing down most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
Figure 5.14. Overkill: Soviet and American nuclear arsenals, 1945–83
The age of mutual assured destruction, with its almost too perfect acronym, MAD, had arrived. Massive retaliation now meant that the United States, as well as the Soviet Union, would be committing suicide, which naturally made the New Look rather less attractive. Unknown unknowns were returning. In 1961, wondering whether the newly installed president, John F. Kennedy, would really risk New York to save his stake in Berlin, the Soviets pushed harder than usual in the endless confrontation over that divided city. Fear clutched the world as politicians postured and threatened. Finally, the communists compromised and built a wall down the middle of the city, but the next year things got even worse. “Why not throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants?” Khrushchev asked, and sent Soviet missiles to Cuba. For thirteen heart-stopping days, the worst-case scenario seemed to have arrived. It was like the 1910s all over again, but this time with doomsday devices.