Sleepwalking With the Bomb Read Online Free PDF Page B

Soviet Union posed a great danger, as new and not necessarily stable states found themselves the possessors of Soviet weapons stored within their borders. But a massive and largely successful effort over the past 20 years brought all far-flung ex-Soviet weapons back to Russia. Remarkably, this time of upheaval saw no known theft of nuclear-weapons-grade material.
    Thus the nonstop all-out arms race so often portrayed is sharply at odds with the more complex history of nuclear policy since 1945. What began as an all-out superpower technology race morphed into a protracted period of superpower bargaining, and finally was superseded by proliferating smaller powers, most of them hostile to the West.
    The emerging era in which less stable powers obtain nuclear weapons will create an international environment more dangerous than that of the Cold War. This danger will be especially acute if the traditional calculus of deterrence fails to impress a new breed of leaders, who may prefer a fanatical calculus to more traditional approaches. By learning how events unfolded in the past and which choices made by leaders were sound versus faulty, perhaps we can minimize the risk of nuclear catastrophe in the future.
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    2. In an 80-day period in 1944, 2,300 V-1s hit London. In their best day, the British defenders—using ground-based anti-aircraft guns and pursuit planes like the Spitfire—shot down all but four 4 of 101 incoming V-1s. As the strategist Bernard Brodie later observed of that day’s tally, “But if those four had been atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good.” Of 4,300 V-2s launched at London, 1,200 landed within the 30-mile target area.

3.
R USSIA: L INKING A RMS C ONTROL TO AN A DVERSARY’S C ONDUCT
    We do not want war any more than the West does, but we are less interested than the West in peace, and therein lies the strength of our position.
    J OSEPH S TALIN, WHO HAD JUST ANNEXED E ASTERN E UROPE BY FORCE, TO A MERICA’S AMBASSADOR TO R USSIA , W ALTER B EDELL S MITH, IN 1949
    T HE C OLD W AR SAW SUPERPOWER COMPETITION TAKE CENTER stage. At the heart of this epic struggle were two features: Soviet “adventurism” in aggressively pushing to extend Moscow’s sphere of geopolitical influence and deployment of massive strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals. Adventurism saw Moscow attempt to choke off West Berlin in 1948 then succeed in sundering Berlin in 1961. It would authorize its North Korean client state to wage a war of conquest against South Korea, and later support North Vietnam’s successful conquest of the South. It would crush serial rebellions in Eastern Europe, including an especially brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. It would also support Marxist movements in the Third World, as well as a wave of transnational terror directed against the West. The Soviet drive for Third World dominance culminated in the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
    The U.S. was caught flat-footed by Moscow’s push. Massive demobilization had left America’s armed forces denuded and under-prepared. America’s military roster plummeted from 12 million under arms in June 1945 to 1.5 million two years later. Symptomatic of this sudden shift was a 1948 exercise called the Dayton Raid: the Air Force conducted a test, ordering its strategic bombers to electronically “bomb” Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio. Taking off from Omaha, Nebraska, was every single strategic bomber in the U.S. inventory. Not a single plane successfully completed its mission.
    The Soviet Union’s conduct during the Cold War teaches the First Lesson of nuclear-age history: A RMS CONTROL CANNOT BE VIEWED IN ISOLATION, BUT RATHER MUST BE CONSIDERED ALONG WITH AN ADVERSARY’S CONDUCT . Had the United States made arms control the paramount good, it would have given tacit approval to Soviet policies very much counter to America’s interests.
Superpowers and “Super” Bomb: The