28d: Proxy Wars and the Arms Race

Both the West and the East committed tremendous amounts of resources to developing and building weapons. But the Soviet Union and the United States never went to war with each other. Instead they engaged in proxy wars. The United States was consumed by the "domino" theory, which held that the fall of one country to Communism might lead inexorably to another. The Communists came to fear the same phenomenon. Each side billed the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil; both Americans and Soviets who were considered "soft on the enemy" were driven in shame from public life.

The first of these proxy wars was the Korean War. Utterly surprised by the sudden North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950, South Korean forces were driven nearly off of the Korean peninsula. Instead of asking Congress for a declaration of war, President Truman decided to "contain" the Red offensive by setting up a UN peacekeeping force. By fall UN forces drove the North Koreans almost all the way back to the Red Chinese border by fall. Frightened by the presence of Western troops on their border, Red China entered the Korean War in October 1950. The UN forces soon retreated back to the 38th parallel, where two more years of bloody stalemate ensued. The cease-fire of July 27, 1953 made the draw official, although the struggle between the two Koreas continues to this day. The Soviets had chosen not to engage directly in this war, and the United States had refrained from using nuclear weapons. The Western Bloc returned the favor (so to speak) to the Soviets by not turning the Hungarian Revolution of November 1956 into a proxy war. The Hungarians' cause was undeniably noble, and the Soviet Union's brutal reprisals were wrong. But again, the US could not engage the Soviet Union in Central Europe with conventional forces, and did not want to be responsible for a nuclear war. Besides, the Suez Crisis was in full swing just then. The NATO powers could hardly justify rescuing Hungary while Britain and France were taking the Suez Canal back from Egypt. The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 effectively closed off the Western enclave of West Berlin; Russian and American tanks met at "Checkpoint Charlie," standing once more on the brink of World War Three. But once more both the Americans and the Soviets resisted the urge to engage.

On January 1, 1959, the rebel forces of Fidel Castro brought down the Cuban government. At first Castro claimed to be neither communist nor capitalist, but the Soviets soon brought him on board with their usual bags full of rubles. On April 17, 1961, Cuban exile forces acting at President John F. Kennedy's direction landed at the Bay of Pigs, hoping to bring down the Castro regime. The initial plans for this invasion, assumed that the Cuban masses yearned to rise up against Communist oppression. Actually, the previous Cuban regime had been so awful that Castro still looked pretty good. The fact that the invasion plans dated back to the Eisenhower Administration does not excuse Kennedy, who made the bad decision to go ahead with the stupid plan. The refugee force was annihilated before it had a chance to move inland. Kennedy's only options were escalating the war with American troops or admitting defeat. Fortunately, he chose the latter. The incident brought the US great embarrassment and made President Kennedy look like an immature fool.

The Soviets followed America's bad career move with an enormous mistake of their own: in May 1962 they secretly began installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. In all likelihood, this was Khrushchev's direct response to Kennedy's display of ineptitude at the Bay of Pigs. Although the US refused to believe the Soviets would take such a rash step, surveillance flights on October 14,1962 confirmed that Cuban missile sites were indeed being built. Although NATO had similar missiles in Turkey, near the Soviet border, the US prepared for war - including yet another invasion of Cuba (this time with American forces). Finally, common sense won out. Kennedy presented Khrushchev with an ultimatum to remove the missiles. This Khrushchev did, no doubt saving the world yet again from a third world war complete with mutually assured destruction. Khrushchev tried to portray the Soviet retreat as a victory. He claimed that the US had recognized Communist Cuba's legitimacy despite the Monroe Doctrine, by requiring only that the missiles (and not the Castro regime) be removed. But the USSR's military leaders and their hardline supporters didn't care about convoluted logic. They knew who had really come out on top in Cuba. Two years later, Khrushchev would be deposed from office and replaced by the glorious Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

From the Cuban Missile Crisis on, the Cold War took two basic forms: the war in Southeast Asia, which we will take up in the next lecture, and the arms race, which we will take up here.  By 1953, both the United States and the Soviet Union had detonated hydrogen bombs. In 1957 the Soviets came up with the ICBM, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which made possible the concept of "anytime, anywhere" nuclear war and MAD, or "mutually assured destruction." Kennedy and Khrushchev both knew exactly what was at stake in October 1962 - literally, the fate of the world.  Both sides worked feverishly to refine missile technology with multi-warhead and various mid-range missiles. Both sides also pumped huge amounts of money into the space race, which (despite the patriotic pride each nation took in its achievements) was essentially just another branch of the arms race. But in the long run, only the United States could afford such a level of military spending - and that, just barely.