5. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 94-114

Book II: Inheriting a Different World, 17. Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Sleet, Nor Fog; 18. Stalin Gets His Bomb; 19. The Consequences of Delusion; 20. Good Intentions Gone Awry

_____

When the Americans, British, and French started talking about creating a West German state, with a view to rehabilitating the country's economy and controlling any militaristic tendencies, the Soviets panicked. The French were initially opposed also, but were won over by the American promise to keep U.S. troops stationed in Germany for an indefinite period. The first step was currency reform, scrapping the now-worthless Reichsmark and creating a new Deutschmark. When the new currency was introduced in June 1948, Stalin moved to blockade all ground transportation into Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor in Germany, called on Curtis LeMay, "that Cromwellian wielder of bombers who had leveled Japan's cities, now a lieutenant general commanding the U.S. Air Force in Europe," to mount an airlift into Berlin. Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, who had been in charge of flying supplies over the Himalayas from India to China in World War II, was put in charge of the airlift.

Bernard Schriever also credits the foresight of Hap Arnold, who had pushed hard for an all-weather air force, and especially for the radar that made it possible to fly supplies into Berlin even in the worst winter weather. "By December, the airlift was supplying 4,500 tons a day, 500 tons more than the city's minimum requirement, the biggest portion bulky coal for heating." The Berlin airlift, which lasted until Stalin lifted the blockade and re-opened land routes in May 1949, was a huge success, not least as an anti-communist propaganda triumph. In the same month that the blockade ended, the Federal Republic of Germany was created, with its capital at Bonn.


On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. The scientists in charge of the project, Igor Kurchatov and Iulii Khariton, were generously rewarded by Stalin. (The story was told that the greatest rewards went to the ones who would have been shot first if the bomb had failed.) Meanwhile, work had begun on a hydrogen bomb as early as 1948. One of the participants was the physicist Andrei Sakharov, who "believed that our work was absolutely necessary as a means of achieving a balance in the world." Sakharov would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in promoting civil liberties in the Soviet Union, despite persecution by the government.


Stalin for some reason did not announce the success of his scientists. A U.S. Air Force B-29 detected higher radiation levels in the atmosphere in September 1949, confirming the nuclear test. In January 1950, Truman ordered that work be started on a hydrogen bomb, which was detonated on November 1, 1952. The Soviet H-bomb followed in November 1955, after a preliminary test of an intermediate thermonuclear device had been successful in August 1953.


In 1949, George Kennan, who had originally argued that the Soviet Union had expansionist aims, expressed second thoughts about military efforts at containment, preferring political and economic methods. He clashed with Acheson, who replaced him on the state department's Policy and Planning Staff with Paul Nitze, who argued that the Soviet Union was "inescapably militant" and that the United States was being "mortally challenged." He predicted that by 1954 the Soviets would have 200 atomic bombs and the capability of delivering them in a surprise attack. And he called on Truman to add about $50 billion to the defense budget, which Truman had been trying to cut to keep inflation in check. Truman signed off on Nitze's report on the Soviet threat and the need for a complementary U.S. military and civil defense buildup, but he backed off on the budget request.

To comprehend the real postwar world, one had to understand that while it was bipolar in terms of the two major powers, within the Communist sphere, as within the non-Communist one, there were national leaders with their own agendas who were prepared to act on those agendas regardless of what Moscow or Washington thought. The clue that the Communist sphere was also a complicated world, a world of varying shades of gray rather than black, was the phenomenon of national Communism, which appeared as early as 1948 when Tito of Yugoslavia openly broke with Stalin and went his own way.

But Tito was regarded in Washington as an "aberration." The Nitzean view of an "international Communist conspiracy" dominated American politics from Truman through LBJ, even though such blatant fissures in the "conspiracy" as the split between the Soviet Union and China suggested that it was illusory. Even Acheson recognized that there were tensions between the Soviets and Mao Tse-tung, and made some diplomatic efforts toward Mao, partly because it was obvious that the United States had wasted millions of dollars supporting the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime. But the right-wing Republicans put a stop to Acheson's efforts by charging that he had "lost China." The result of this continued delusion about the monolithic nature of communism was the Vietnam War: "Given these American delusions, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese national leader in Hanoi, had no chance of being recognized in Washington for what he was, an Asian version of Tito."

Information provided by spies like Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall had speeded up the Soviet Union's development of a bomb, though the Soviet scientists would have succeeded in creating one anyway. Even in the midst of the intense anti-communist hysteria provoked by the Soviet bomb and the Korean War, Hall had managed to escape conviction. He had come under suspicion and had been questioned in 1951, however. He received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Chicago in 1950, but he had become more interested in biophysics. He went to work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York and became recognized as a specialist in X-ray technology. In 1962 he went to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and spent twenty-two years there, retiring in 1984. Meanwhile, his brother, Ed, was working with Bennie Schriever on rocket engines, having received the highest security clearances. Ted Hall's espionage was not disclosed until the Venona documents were published in 1995 and 1996. Before his death from cancer in 1999, Hall told two journalists that he had no regrets about what he had done. "I still think that brash youth had the right end of the stick. I am no longer that person; but I am by no means ashamed of him."

But Hall's work, and that of his fellow spies, may have led to the Korean War. Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel by Truman and Stalin after World War II. But because the United States decided that Korea was of "little strategic interest" to it in Asia, it had withdrawn its troops from South Korea in 1949. This emboldened Kim Il Sung to invade the south, with the armaments provided by the Soviet Union and with the backing of Mao. This action seemed to give credence to Nitze's view of the Soviet menace, so Truman ordered MacArthur and his occupation troops in Japan into South Korea. The war lasted three years, and MacArthur would have invaded China if Truman hadn't called him back.

Possession of the bomb gave Stalin the confidence to back Kim in his invasion of the south. Sheehan argues that his previously demonstrated insecurity when the United States still held a monopoly on the bomb suggests that he wouldn't have supported Kim's invasion. And in fact, when Truman intervened, "a surprised Stalin abandoned Kim. He told the Politburo he was prepared to accept a U.S.-occupied North Korea rather than risk war with the United States." He left the job up to the Chinese. Ted Hall argued that by helping give the Soviets the bomb, he had prevented the United States from using it in China during the civil war that led to Mao's conquest of the mainland. But by helping Stalin acquire it sooner than he might have, Hall may have also emboldened Stalin. He also helped Truman get the military buildup budget he wanted.

The Korean War was a strategic disaster for Stalin. The Truman administration took advantage of it to array Western Europe against him.... Worse, by giving Kim Il Sung permission to strike south, Stalin, who was to die in March 1953, had brought to fruition one of his own nightmares. He had made so many West Europeans fearful they might be next that the former victims of Germany were now prepared to accept German rearmament. The Federal Republic of Germany, the new West German state, was being welcomed into NATO, and a new German army, the Bundeswehr, was being formed to march alongside the NATO forces. 

4. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 77-94

Book II: Inheriting a Different World: 15. A Confrontation and a Misreading; 16. Containing the Menace

_____

The turning point in the war in Europe, Sheehan points out, was the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, which weakened them and made the invasion on D-Day less difficult to accomplish. But Truman "viewed the Red Army as a potential threat rather than as a savior of American lives." And the opening of the Soviet archives and the subsequent work of Russian historians has tended to show that Stalin's "imperial ambitions were limited." He was not interested in invading Europe. But American specialists in Soviet policy misinterpreted Stalin's reindustrialization plans, with their emphasis on heavy industry, "as an ominous sign of military preparations."

When Stalin gave a speech on February 9, 1946, announcing these plans, George Kennan, who was chargé d'affaires in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, was asked for an interpretation of the speech. Kennan wrote a 5,500-word analysis that became known as the Long Telegram, which presented Stalin as "a fanatical revolutionary, not the complex mixture of genuine Marxist faith, cynicism, Realpolitik calculation, and suspicion and cruelty that history has shown him to be." Kennan believed Stalin to be bent on world conquest and argued that Western nations should unite to block Soviet expansion. This was what many in Washington wanted to hear:

Having just triumphed over the expansionist monster Hitler and the forces of Imperial Japan, they seemed, unconsciously, to be seeking a new monster with whom to do mortal combat.... If Russia was a society with a profound sense of insecurity, as Kennan maintained, America was equally so.

Stalin himself, being a paranoid bully, played into this image of Soviet expansionism. Britain and the Soviet Union had invaded Iran in 1941 to keep it from falling into German hands. The agreement was that both countries would withdraw in March 1946 and turn the country over to a new Iranian government, but Stalin decided to keep his troops there and support the separatist Azerbaijanis in the north, which was also where the Iranian oilfields were. Truman feared that the Soviets would take over the whole country with an eye to further expansion into Saudi Arabia. Threatened with war, Stalin withdrew in the spring of 1946.

The next crisis was in the Turkish Straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, which provided vital access to the Black Sea. Turkey had been neutral in World War II, but had allowed the Germans to use the Straits for raids on the Soviet Union. In March 1946, Stalin demanded joint Soviet and Turkish control of the Straits and mobilized a tank force to intimidate the Turks. Truman commissioned a study group led by Dean Acheson; their report, presented to Truman on August 15, "was the first statement of the domino theory that was to so govern and oversimplify and distort American thinking during the Cold War." If the domino that was Turkey were to fall to the Soviets, the next domino would be Greece. So Truman sent a naval task force led by the Missouri to the Dardanelles. Again Stalin backed down.

The next crisis was Greece, where the British had been supporting a right-wing government against Communist rebels. But Britain was nearly bankrupt and in February 1947 informed Truman that it could no longer maintain its force there. Truman went to Congress with a request for funding economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state for economic affairs, was in charge of scaring Congress into voting the money, arguing that "Soviet pressure on Iran, the Turkish Straits, and now northern Greece, where the guerrillas were strongest, had brought Moscow to the point where it might break through and penetrate three continents."

In fact, Stalin was not supporting the Communist guerrillas in Greece: He and Winston Churchill had come to an agreement in 1944 that Greece would remain under British purview in exchange for the Soviet Union's maintaining its interests elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It was Tito of Yugoslavia who was backing the guerrillas, which was one of the reasons why Stalin and Tito would openly break with each other in 1948.

Truman got the $300 million he wanted for Greece, and in announcing it, he proclaimed what became known as the Truman Doctrine: that it was "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." This was an explicit proclamation that the United States would support any nation, anywhere, that was being threatened by the communists. It was partly a reaction -- as so much American foreign policy has been since then -- to the "appeasement" of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain in 1938 that had been so disastrous. Acheson, who was an anglophile, also modeled it on the "Pax Britannica" in which the Royal Navy had ruled the seas after the defeat of Napoleon. "The 'Pax Americana' that he and Truman and their associates intended to create was not, however, going to be an exploitative system akin to British and European colonialism."

Mistrust of the Soviet Union also led to a change of American attitude toward the reparations that Roosevelt had agreed to at Yalta: The Germans were to pay $10 billion for the destruction they had wrought in Russia. The British were opposed to the reparations because Germany itself was devastated and obviously unable to pay such a sum. (With reason: The harshness of the Treaty of Versailles had contributed to the rise of Hitler.) And the Americans came round to that point of view:  "By 1947, no matter how persistently Molotov might read off the list of devastated Russian towns and cities, no one in Washington or London wanted to do anything to strengthen the Soviet Union."

But the devastation of Western Europe remained, and George C. Marshall, the secretary of state, argued that the condition of these countries might lead to electoral victories by the local Communist parties, especially in France and Italy. So Marshall proposed what became known as the Marshall Plan: billions of dollars in aid to European countries to help them rebuild "and created an environment in which capitalism would thrive." Stalin recognized the Marshall Plan for what it was: "a declaration of economic warfare." And his fears increased when Czechoslovakia and Poland showed interest in participating in the Marshall Plan. So although the plan was a huge success -- "an act of generosity, if also self-interest, that was without precedent in history" -- it also led to a divided Europe, the one split by the "Iron Curtain" that Churchill had described in a speech in 1946. Stalin began, with the help of Beria's secret police, to purge the coalition governments he had permitted in Eastern Europe of non-communists and anyone who deviated from Stalin's policies. Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland had backed down from his interest in the Marshall Plan, so he managed to save his life. Jan Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, however, was reported to have committed suicide, but was very likely murdered. And in 1952, Moscow staged show trials in Czechoslovakia that led to the execution of eleven members of the Communist Party.