And by “real” I mean was there a real and actual threat of the Soviet Union launching a basically little provoked nuclear attack against the USA, or the USA doing the same? It seems well insane, and totally out of proportion to the actual friction and squabbles between the two countries.
Was it saber rattling that got a bit out of hand? A proxy for actual war via er “missile sizing”?
Mutually assured destruction was of course in play from day one, each knew that if they pushed the button they were basically condemning their own nation to untold suffering as well. I’m not asking whether there was conflict between the two countries, but whether the threat of nuclear attack was real.
To me this basically seems like having a neighbor who you have small quarrels with occasionally, so you get a machine gun to go kill his entire family. Knowing he has a lot of violent relatives who if you do this will come rape and kill your entire family. What would anyone have to gain?
You might want to look into the Cuban Missile Crisis or from 1983, Operation Able Archer, both of which nearly started nuclear war. I seem to recall another early 80s incident where a Soviet officer refused to launch when the protocols required it, possibly a computer glitch. We’ve come close to extinction of civilization at least 3 times.
Nuclear arms were developed in the shadow of World Wars I and II, which were not small quarrels. The goal was to deter another ruinously vast conventional war with the threat of an even more ruinously vast nuclear war. To that end, nuclear armament has arguably been very successful.
After the atrocities committed by Stalin and Mao, there was the view in the US that Commies were capable of virtually anything, including sacrificing a large part of their own populations in order to advance their ideals (or their own hegemony). The mass famines prompted by government policies, human wave attacks by the Chinese in the Korean war, all contributed to the idea that the Reds would stop at nothing.
On the other side, the US had already demonstrated its willingness to annihilate entire cities with nukes in the interest of victory over their enemies. Stalin and Mao were paranoid, it’s true, but in their own minds they had good cause to fear an attack by the West.
The real threat was probably not so much a carefully calculated first strike, but a minor incident that would escalate rapidly, or an accidental intrusion that would provoke a counterattack. These kinds of scenarios were depicted in Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove.
Certainly. Both sides genuinely feared the other - a simple mistake could have done it. If the wrong person have become President or Premier they could have done it.
I recall after the collapse of the USSR the Russians admitting that they’d seriously considered a nuclear first strike upon the election of Ronald Reagan, because they thought there was a good chance that with his religious beliefs that he’d launch one at them. Not all that unreasonable a fear given his association with pro-nuclear war Jerry Falwell and Reagan’s apocalyptic musings about Russian and Chine being “Gog” and “Magog”.
The destruction of the unbelievers, the protection of the One True Way.
If I’m not mistaken the crisis wasn’t the start of the nuclear annihilation threats, just another escalation though.
Was total war between the USA and Soviet Union considered inevitable basically? That is about the only scenario where some of the CW posturing makes sense.
The whole point of the policy of “containment” set forth by George Kennan in his Mr. X article was that the Soviets would not push expansion if confronted by firm opposition at every single instance. He was correct. However, many in the US hierarchy did not understand the doctrine of “containment” or even seem to know about it, viewing all the confrontations as an inevitable escalation to war rather than acts of containment.
By many people, yes. With a lot of historical backing; arms races between hostile powers normally end in a war. We’re just lucky that neither side went over the edge and kicked off nuclear armageddon.
I think the situation is both you and you’re neighbor know that it would be the end of you both if one of you started firing your machine guns so you don’t plan to no matter how much you hate your neighbor, but in the middle of the night another neighbor kid sets off a couple of M-80s, and one of you open fire thinking you’re under attack.
No, it was considered completely impossible, because it would be so destructive. That’s why all the posturing and the small proxy wars, because both sides knew that in the end there was no real risk that they could escalate into a full-on confrontation.
(Certainly, as others have pointed out, there were a couple of occasions where the two sides came especially close).
In some accounts of the Cuban crisis it was not until after it was over that Kennedy asked the Generals what would have happened if he had launched a first strike. It’s said he was upset to learn he would have murdered 20-30 million innocents. Never underestimate the stupidity of politicians (especially those who are alleged to be liberal constitutional scholars). As Gen. Bull Turgidson said, more or less, nuclear war is too complicated to be left to the politicians.
Well, maybe many people, but not most people. Even Krushchev, no shrinking flower himself, created the doctrine of peaceful coexistence, where socialist and capitalist countries were not inevitably going to go to war. Instead, socialism would win out through societal change (I’m avoiding the word “revolution” here) rather than by armies.
Mao rejected that, of course, and actively wanted conflict with the West to further revolutionary zeal across the Third World.
It is also worth noting that the period from the mid-to-late 1960s through the election of Reagan was a relatively positive time in US-Soviet relations. Setting aside that whole Vietnam thing, the progress made in arms control treaties during that time was very significant. Then In 1979 things got quite a bit more tense, to the point that some historians call the era that began with the Afghanistan invasion and the election of Reagan to be “the Second Cold War.”
I could buy that the threat hadn’t been real if, after the collapse of the USSR, we learned that they’d only had a handful of nukes and were elaborately bluffing about holding thousands.
But it turns out they were holding thousands, so… phew.
A very good documentary on Operation Able Archer is “1983: The Brink of Apocalypse.” This is a YouTube link so it is broken into 8 parts. I highly recommend viewing this documentary. You may be able to find it in it’s entirety somewhere else. It illustrates how the lack of communication between the USSR and the US almost led to nuclear war. The Soviets had a predictive set of indicators that if most were fulfilled would tell them that a first strike by the US was pending. The war game exercise by NATO forces, code named Able Archer, met most of the conditions.
After this event, Ronald Reagan was truly surprised that the Soviets thought he was going to attack and took a more conciliatory approach to them.
Here is Cecil’s column on the event:
It was a truly scary event, that the general public was not aware of and led to dialog and eventual reductions in hostilities. The trigger was not very far from being pulled.
This is a bit hard to believe. I was 12 at the time, and though had no idea of how many would die (and 20 million seems low) everyone knew that it would not be a good thing. IIRC during the crisis there was some call, from LeMay, I believe, for a first strike, and Kennedy vetoed that idea really quickly.
The fear was what would have happened if Nixon were president and was feeling paranoid. I personally think he would have been okay, but some might have been more susceptible to pleading by hawkish advisers than others.
I guess another way to phrase this is that presumably each side had some sort of protocol before launching a nuclear first strike… some number of steps that have to happen before a strike an be launched. Are the details of those protocols now publicly known, and if so, is it known when either of them proceeded the furthest?
Doesn’t that announcement by Reagan seem like an invitation to kill us all NOW? “Hey, we’re gonna build this thing that makes it impossible for you to nuke us within a few years. Better launch them MIRV-tipped bitches now!”