For those of us who lived through the early 1980s – a period of great international tension between East and West, with a hawkish Reagan administration and a fearful Soviet leadership – nuclear war did not seem unthinkable.
In November 1983, the sick and suspicious Soviet leader, Yurii Andropov, had come to believe that Ronald Reagan’s arms build-up and the “Star Wars” project for space-based ballistic missile defence meant the US was planning a nuclear first strike. So, when a Nato command exercise, Able Archer, which involved practising the release of nuclear weapons, took place, the Soviets reacted by placing their forces on high states of alert to pre-empt an attack or retaliate. A 1990 report concluded that US hawkishness in 1983 “placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger”.
David Holloway, a Stanford University-based but Dublin-born historian of the nuclear age, is more cautious about how dangerous this was, but points to it as one of many times in the Cold War era when misperception of the other side’s intentions could have led to disaster.
As he explains, the contradiction of nuclear weapons was that they made the threshold for going to war higher for leaders, but the consequences of an all-out conflict would be much more catastrophic, and the nuclear doctrines of the US and the Soviets, such as launch-on-warning in the event of detection of incoming missiles, left plenty of room for error and miscalculation. By 1960, with the development of the hydrogen bomb, estimates suggested 600 million people would die in a nuclear exchange.
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It remains one of the most extraordinary breakthroughs in the history of science that the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938, in a simple laboratory experiment in Germany, had, within months, led physicists to realise its potential to make a superbomb. The British government’s MAUD Committee (July 1941) concluded that a uranium-235 bomb was feasible, though it severely underestimated its explosive power. Indeed, this committee’s report, when shared with the Americans in 1942, and not Albert Einstein’s better-known 1939 letter to President Roosevelt warning about the possibility of Hitler acquiring the weapon first, was the decisive spur to the Manhattan Project, an unprecedented US mobilisation of science and industry to make the 20-kiloton fission bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Soviets exploded their first bomb in 1949. While they had high-level spies in the Manhattan Project who provided much information, Holloway, whose chief expertise is on Soviet nuclear policy, estimates that only one or two years were saved by espionage. Britain followed in 1952, slowed by the withdrawal of US nuclear co-operation and a lack of money. In less than a decade, hydrogen bombs, based on nuclear fusion, in the megaton (one million tons of TNT) range were being tested by both the Americans (1952), the Soviets (1955) and the British (1957).
While the Americans had quickly lost their monopoly, they produced extraordinary quantities (22,229 by 1960) of nuclear bombs, warheads and shells. The Soviets had a tenth of this total, though they had caught up by the end of the 1960s, when at least 90 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons were held by the superpowers, with all other nations’ stockpiles being much smaller in comparison. Breakthroughs in the means of delivering the weapons – bombers and land- and submarine-launched missiles with ranges of thousands of miles – were introduced by one side but quickly adopted by the other.
Much thought went into how to use these weapons. Until the Soviet bomb test, US military planners saw little to distinguish atomic from conventional bombs. Indeed, Stalin seemed blase about them, though not as blase as Mao Zedong, who seemed utterly unconcerned about the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, unnerving Soviet leaders. By the mid-1950s, much to the disquiet of many, the Eisenhower administration relied on a strategy of immediate massive retaliation in the event of a Soviet attack on western Europe, which would have involved the simultaneous dropping of thousands of nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, literally a nation-killing attack. As Soviet means of hitting back improved, this became less credible.
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Massive retaliation gave way to flexible response in the 1960s, but this seemed to countenance fighting a nuclear war. Using tactical nuclear weapons in Europe as warning shots, for instance, would devastate the Continent, and it was doubtful that escalation could be controlled once the nuclear threshold had been crossed.
There is no mention of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Dr Strangelove, or The Day After, which helped shape and scare public opinion. The coverage of anti-nuclear movements is brief
The US secretary of defence at the time, Robert McNamara, came around to believing assured destruction was the best way of preventing war. Nuclear planners, particularly the surprising number on both sides who believed they could prevail in a war, continued to live in a chilling atomic la-la land. Few political leaders believed these weapons were usable, but they, especially Nikita Khrushchev and John Foster Dulles, also had an alarming habit of taking the world to the brink, particularly up to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
The Americans and Nato never disavowed a first use of nuclear weapons to frustrate a conventional attack, while the Soviets spoke of pre-emption, which in practice was the same thing. Detente in the 1970s placed the first limits on nuclear arsenals and ballistic missile defences, but its collapse in the 1980s, due to maladroit Soviet policies which revived the US political right, presaged a last and unnerving bout of tension. Remarkably, Reagan, who used strident hawkish anti-Soviet rhetoric but was also an idealist who wanted to abolish nuclear arms, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who came around to the same view, brought the Cold War and the nuclear arms race to a close.
Holloway lucidly covers all of this in great detail, along with discussions of the smaller nuclear powers, why some who could make bombs chose not to, and others who chose to, along with concepts of deterrence, brinkmanship, attempts at disarmament, the great crises such as Berlin and Cuba, and lesser-known ones such as the Sino-Soviet war scare of 1969, mistaken early warning alerts and the 1983 Able Archer crisis.
He does neglect nuclear culture: there is no mention of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Dr Strangelove, or The Day After, which helped shape and scare public opinion. The coverage of anti-nuclear movements is brief. The tone is serious; there is no acknowledgment of the fundamental absurdity of the whole thing. Holloway also stops with the end of the Cold War and says little about our present nuclear dilemmas. Nonetheless, this work will no doubt become the indispensable guide to the history of nuclear weapons from 1945 to 1990. It is also a salutary warning about the dangers of carelessness, miscalculation and misperception in the conduct of international affairs, and how important sound judgment, as well as luck, are in preventing Armageddon.
Copies should be posted to Presidents Putin, Xi, and Trump.
Robert McNamara teaches international history at Ulster University
