Hostages to Deterrence

...author, "High Noon in the Cold War" Our most prolific Cold War scholar has distilled the great drama "for a new generation of readers" to whom it was not "current events" and produced a notably brief, elegant narrative...

...Gaddis is content to record that the Cold War, though often peripherally hot and bloody, let most of humanity survive a violent century until "ordinary people" tore holes in the Berlin Wall and Hungarian barbed wire, and found their Soviet masters too exhausted to shoot...

...In a bargain struck at the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the West demanded the tolerance of domestic dissent in return for acceptance of Soviet sway in the East, a deal that soon stimulated a clamor for human rights and gradually legitimized opposition to Soviet rule...

...And paradox upon paradox, that system was eroded even more by the Soviet-American effort to codify and perpetuate detente...

...The stance held most importantly during those six frightening days in 1962 when Presi dent John F. Kennedy threw a partial blockade around Cuba to challenge Soviet Prime Minister Nikita S. Khrushchev's furtive deployment of nuclear missiles on the island...

...Nor does he explore how the Cold War created its own new crises—like the black market in nuclear weaponry, and the vicious graduates of the proxy wars in Cambodia and Afghanistan...

...Mutually assured destruction, like its acronym, was MAD yet effective...

...The stage was set now for the "actors" Gaddis celebrates as having struck crucial blows against the bipolar balance...

...the support of ugly but friendly dictators...

...Nonaligned" countries like India and Egypt learned to sway between the superpowers and to extract economic and military aid...

...This may be a vain hope now that more and more nations long to define themselves and their interests through the possession of nuclear weapons...

...We are all, after all, still hostage...

...In Gaddis' sophisticated construct, the nuclear balance next had the paradoxical result of shifting political power from the strong to the weak...

...Ronald Reagan, for seeing past complexity to simplicities that spooked the Kremlin leaders and won the cooperation of Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who recognized the practical as well as moral force of democratization and free choice...

...Deng Xiaoping, for brushing aside Communism's prohibitions on free enterprise...

...Eventually, France's President Charles de Gaulle and China's Chairman Mao Zedong set out "to dismantle the alliances that had nurtured their states and embraced their regimes...

...Having suffered disproportionate losses, the Soviet Union saw its security requiring nothing less than the political domination of all Europe, while the democratic West favored a European balance that left democracy and capitalism at least half a loaf...

...Their goal was nothing less than to break out of the bipolar Cold War international system...

...He also does not really examine the East's economic failures—the inability of command economies designed by industrial planners to adapt to consumer markets...

...Moving from the victors' disillusionments after World War II to the threats of nuclear calamity, he concludes with a triumph of hope—a hope produced not simply by our survival but by the possibility that "military strength, a defining characteristic of'power" itself for the past five centuries, [has] ceased to be that...

...The firm desire of both leaders to avoid a military clash throughout that crisis was actually greater, in my judgment, than Gaddis credits...

...Khrushchev went to his grave clinging to the defense-of-Castro pretext because that softened his humiliation in retreat after Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba...

...Equally persuaded that none of their objectives justified atomic war, the superpowers suffered reciprocal disappointments and provocations without letting their big warheads fly...

...Pace, Henry Kissinger...

...BE that as it may, Gaddis proceeds to calculate the moral price of the evolving balance of missile power, which held the populations of both nations hostage to deterrence...

...It surely was the pre-eminent political fact of the four decades that found the Soviet Union and United States staring into the abyss and choosing to let their diplomacies and economies, rather than armies, resolve their rivalry...

...Margaret Thatcher, for reviving the reputation of capitalism in Western Europe...

...the ever present risks of annihilation—came to be seen as necessary, thennormal, even desirable: "A kind of moral anesthesia settled in, leaving the stability of the Soviet-American relationship to be valued over its fairness because the alternative was too frightening to contemplate...

...It took visionaries—saboteurs of the status quo," he says, "to expose disparities between what people believed and the systems under which the Cold War had obliged them to live...

...Which is why East and West, no one was ready for the postwar crises of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, immigration, terrorism, disease, and degradation of the global environment...

...Like most Cold War veterans, Gaddis is projecting our experience that nuclear capability can be its own best deterrent...

...Perhaps that is because we disagree about Khrushchev's motives...

...Only George E Kennan dared long ago to predict the Soviet demise (his biography is Gaddis' next project), but virtually no other Cold Warrior expected to live to see the collapse...

...HE mentions, but never explains, how the revolutions in travel and communication prepared the way...

...In marking the start of the Cold War, Gaddis leaps swiftly past the conventional polemics of revisionists who blame the Soviets and Americans in equal measure, or even the United States most of all...

...And what began as regrettable compromises—the artificial divisions of Germany, Korea, Vietnam...

...These imaginative leaders wielded real power in the 1980s, Gaddis recalls, and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union without ever fully understanding that its empire and ideology and therefore the Cold War itself "was a sandpile ready to slide...

...Gaddis now thinks that sending missiles to Cuba was an aggressive, even "romantic" Khrushchev ploy to defend Fidel Castro's revolution and to promote Communism in Latin America...

...Even weak allies gained leverage, as Gaddis wittily observes: "By being on the verge of collapse—and, as time went on, by simply appearing to be—West and East Germans could raise the specter of a former enemy falling under the control of a future enemy anytime they wanted to do so...

...How they stumbled to that choice, and to the wholly unexpected Soviet denouement, is the plot Gaddis pursues with deft detail and revealing anecdote...

...It emphatically—and thus far effectively—"reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used...

...He gives special credit to Pope John Paul II and Solidarity's Lech Walesa for rattling the authorities throughout Poland...

...On the way out of his tale, and a bit unfairly, Gaddis thumbs his nose at the "strategists of deterrence" who had expected a "long peace" comparable to those over which Metternich and Bismarck presided in the 19th century...

...Breezily summarizing his lifelong researches, John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale, uncovers distinctive themes in an otherwise familiar story...

...The Russians, for their part, soon broke the West's nuclear bomb monopoly and turned American concerns into fears, even hysteria, by cheering the Communists' triumph in China and attack on South Korea...

...I remain convinced that protecting Castro was a mere pretext to disguise Khrushchev's appalling deficiency in long-range missiles...

...Unable to quickly acquire weapons to threaten American targets from Soviet territory, he sought to narrow his missile gap by basing some medium-range rockets in Cuba...

...Hostility between the World War II allies was inevitable, he argues, because incompatible systems pursued incompatible ends once their military victory came into view...

...This well-plowed phase leads to the shrewd observation that President Harry S. Truman's refusal to use atomic weapons against the North Koreans and Chinese was more than a gutsy domestic decision...

...So the American response became "containment": aid to Greece and Turkey, the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, the NATO military alliance, etc...