The Nuclear Arms race between the USA and the USSR

        Yet the momentum, “mad” in its pace, was also “mad” in its concept. The irony remains that for all that nuclear weapons were capable of, for all the vast numbers that were built in the Cold War, not one of them have been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the start, the sheer scale of atomic destruction meant that the US monopoly meant nothing to the Soviet Union because no potential crisis was worth enough to justify the deployment of atomic or nuclear weapons. According to Adam Ulam “Like a miser with a treasure, so America hugged the evanescent atom monopoly to its bosom, equally unable to exploit it or to exchange it for something useful.” Moreover, as Stalin once asked, would the US really use the atomic bomb to resolve a crisis in faraway Greece or Iran? The answer was no – the destructive power of nuclear weapons rendered them unusable. Certainly, Eisenhower refused the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam, fearing that it would lead to uncontrolled nuclear war, while Khrushchev backed away from firing ICBMs at the US at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thus the only use for nuclear weapons was the psychological impact behind them – having nuclear weapons meant the possibility of destruction, even though each side knew they would never be fired except in an all-out war. Indeed, this was what the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD) rested on – the terror generated by nuclear weapons, not the threat of the weapons themselves.

The nuclear arms race thus acquired a highly distinctive trait: both sides built weapons not for use but for display, hoping that more weapons would lead to a greater measure of terror sufficient to cow the other into conceding terms in other areas. The huge cost of this “mad momentum” – US$5.5 trillion for the entire Cold War – ostensibly seemed to prove its worth in the face of the preservation of US national security. Yet nuclear weapons, for all their destructive power, were essentially a deterrent, not an offensive weapon. Once the US nuclear monopoly had been broken by the Soviet Union, no country could consider using nuclear weaponry against another because of the deterrent posed by another country. Indeed, before the world had a chance to experience the horrors of nuclear war, it was stopped by the horrors of anticipated nuclear war. In short, the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union served the purposes of ultimate deterrence: by trying to outdo the other, the superpowers maintained the balance of world peace within nuclear weapons. Though this might not have been recognized officially, it was always in the minds of the leadership of the superpowers. Advances which threatened to upset deterrence – MIRVs and ABMs – were quickly limited or banned. It is worth noting that while until the INF Treaty of 1991 the superpowers were unable to agree on nuclear arms reduction, ABMs had already been restricted by SALT 1 twenty years before. Clearly, while the superpowers tried their best to gain an edge over each other, they were conscious of the delicate deterrence that nuclear weapons provided.

We now arrive at the strategic and political balance between the superpowers. While nuclear weapons were an important part of the Cold War, they were still only a part, and more often than not the general trends of the arms race were harnessed to the aims of the superpowers. Certainly, the differing strategic attitudes of the superpowers helped to explain the fluctuations of the nuclear arms race. While the US still had a nuclear monopoly; it sought to enhance that monopoly and protect it, resulting in the Baruch Plan of 1946 being proposed to the UN. The Soviets, on the other hand, were trying to break the monopoly, which led to their rejection of the Plan due to the fact that it would only have secured the position of the US as the sole nuclear power. With the breaking of the US nuclear monopoly in 1949, the US response was to maintain their nuclear superiority, which led to the formation of NSC-68 and a massive expansion of the US strategic nuclear arsenal. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, viewed the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as an indication that nuclear parity had to be reached with the US, leading to a tremendous buildup in the 1960s. As the US became increasingly bogged down in the Vietnam War, what Nixon called “essential equivalence” was reached by the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The attitude of the superpowers lay thus: the US, having been forced to recognize parity after a period of superiority, wanted to restore their advantage while the Soviet Union, having reached equality after a sustained period of inferiority, was anxious to protect the new status quo. Yet with the crippling costs of the Vietnam War, the US was amenable to arms control agreements that would prevent a Soviet ascendancy in terms of nuclear weapons. This, combined with the rise of détente, explains the period of arms control in the 1970s, with groundbreaking treaties such as SALT 1 and the ABM Treaty signed. Thus the differing attitudes of the superpowers contributed to the pace of the arms race, both in terms of expansion and control.

Politically, different leaders stamped their mark on the nuclear arms race by their individual policies. Eisenhower, being the main proponent of massive retaliation, pushed for more nuclear weapons against conventional weaponry; in the words of John Mason “The way out… was to rely overwhelmingly on strategic nuclear power. In the phrase of the day, this policy would provide ‘a bigger bang for the buck’” Kennedy and Johnson, while pursuing flexible response, opted for a strengthening of conventional forces, which came at the time where Khrushchev and Brezhnev were pushing for an expansion in Soviet nuclear power. The result, of course, was essential equivalence, which Nixon and Brezhnev continued to respect until the breakdown of détente. Once Reagan started the “New Cold War”, the US began a fresh round of armament buildup, which forced the Soviet Union to respond in kind until Gorbachev stepped in, realizing the Soviet economy was being bled white by the costs of the nuclear arms race. Thus though the tension and fear supplied by nuclear arms did heighten and continue the arms race, the role of the leaders in its fluctuation was just as important.

The role of each side reacting to the other in the nuclear arms race was a crucial part of what made such weaponry undergo a “mad momentum”. Yet one crucial feature of the nuclear arms race was the difference between what each side perceived of the other and what the actual situation was. Certainly, mutual over-estimation of each side’s capabilities led to a climate in which the prevailing mood was to increase one’s own arsenal based on the assumption that the opposing side was superior. This thus led to a reaction on the part of the opposing side, on the assumption the other side was building up to gain a measure of superiority. As such, the nuclear arms race thus spiraled upwards due to the mistaken perceptions of both superpowers: it was the reaction to moves that they thought they saw on the part of the other, not what was necessarily the case.

One example can be seen in the case of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations: prominent members of the government such as Stuart Symington and George M. Humphrey lobbied intensively for a US nuclear buildup, fearing that the Soviet Union was overtaking them. According to William Burr, “With Eisenhower's decision to assign the highest national priority to a working ballistic missile force, the "Missile Age" truly took shape. It was during the 1955-1968 period that the United States undertook its heaviest and most sustained nuclear force buildup and developed the "overkill" capability that would alarm the world for decades to come.” Yet this nuclear buildup was not necessary – the Soviet Union was lagging far behind in the nuclear arms race even before and for a period after NSC-68 had been published. As S.J Ball wrote, the ratio of US to Soviet nuclear weapons stood at a staggering 18:1 even at the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of the 220 warheads the Soviets possessed, only 20 of them were capable of targeting the US from existing Soviet bases. In fact, the US nuclear arms buildup probably made the Soviet Union think about building up itself, in response to the moves of the US, thus leading to the momentum and continuation of the arms race. In this sense, the reaction to perceived action overrode the reaction to real action, amplifying and enlarging the scope of nuclear weaponry.

One final facet of the nuclear arms was the magnitude of destruction and its implication on superpower policy. Given the fact that the superpowers were in an age where, in Mason’s words “one US bomber carried more destructive power than all the explosives which had been set off in the world’s history hitherto” the ceiling for destruction – where total destruction of the world upon usage of nuclear weapons was assured – would have been reached fairly quickly; certainly, the 1954 figure of 346.7 megatons mentioned above would have sufficed. As such, nuclear weapons essentially lost their offensive capability once the ceiling of destruction was reached – five hundred warheads would have had the same impact as five thousand. Yet the nuclear arms race continued, due in part to the desire of the superpowers to have insurance against a first strike. This phenomenon of illusionary advantage, where additional nuclear weapons served no further destructive purpose except to put up numbers on paper, left a question to be answered: If nuclear weapons had no further purpose, then why build them to such a high ceiling? The answer lay in the political sphere of the Cold War. Any advantage constituted an extra point in political negotiations, and nuclear inferiority meant the potential for the other side to survive a first strike and launch a counter-assault. This fear of anticipated nuclear war, as mentioned above, was enough to force strategic and political concessions as seen in the Berlin Blockade and Cuban Crisis. Thus we see how the nuclear arms race came to be subsumed under the Cold War: the momentum for the arms race had to be sustained in order to achieve other objectives which only indirectly required their presence.

In conclusion, the nuclear arms race was fuelled by misinformation and suspicion as much as it was fuelled by any desire to gain nuclear superiority. In the atmosphere of the Cold War, national security was uppermost in the mind of the superpowers, and nuclear weapons provided that frame of security. Once the superpowers had built enough weapons to exceed the potential for destruction, the nuclear arms race became a race of who had more in order to force the other into submission. As such, the threat of nuclear war, combined with a misguided perception of the opposing side’s actions, fuelled the “mad momentum” that was to characterize the arms race and lead to the ever-spiraling numbers of nuclear weapons available to the superpowers.