To Move the World (23 page)

On the Soviet side, the nuclear arms buildup after 1963 was dramatic and unrelenting until Gorbachev’s accession to power. The Soviet political and military leadership felt deeply aggrieved by the success of the United States in forcing a reversal of the missile deployment in Cuba. Their conclusion was that the U.S. advantage in nuclear warheads and delivery systems had been crucial to America’s success in the crisis itself. Many Soviet leaders pledged that the Soviet Union would never again face that kind of humiliating retreat as the result of its nuclear inferiority. Between 1963 and 1986, the Soviet Union closed the numerical gap in warheads (as of 1978), and then soared beyond the U.S. numbers, with the total number of Soviet ICBMs rising by a factor of around 14, warheads
by a factor of around 10, and total megatons by a factor of around 6.
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This mutual arms buildup was avoidable, but very strong political leadership would have been required on both sides to face down the vested interests of each country’s military-industrial complex. Robert Jervis’s “security dilemma” was clearly and repeatedly at play. Though each side characterized its own buildup as defensive—intended only to keep up with the other side—the other side invariably interpreted each new arms deployment as an attempt at nuclear dominance, perhaps even at a nuclear first strike. Again and again, each side used “worst-case” analyses to justify the next upward ratchet of the arms race.

In the end, the arms race up till 1991 deeply undermined the long-term interests of both sides. The military outlays were enormous, and came at the neglect of domestic needs. The Soviet Union erred catastrophically by crushing its domestic economy in order to make room for its massive nuclear buildup. Over two decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, the Soviet military-industrial complex in effect suffocated the civilian economy, drained civilian morale and economic incentives, and thereby contributed to the economic implosion that destroyed the Soviet Union itself.

Realists on both sides tried to break the arms race, but hardliners and the military-industrial complexes on each side easily outmaneuvered them. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for example, tried to slow the arms buildup in the mid-1970s through arms control agreements. In a 1974 press conference in Moscow he stated in exasperation:

Some claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the ultimate vindication of the U.S. armaments buildup during the Cold War. Did not the United States, after all, end up bankrupting the Soviet state? This may be the case, but there is also good reason to believe that the Soviet Union might have reformed itself in a peaceful yet far less tumultuous manner, as have China and almost all other state-run economies. Or the Soviet Union might have collapsed under the weight of economic failure even without the nuclear arms race. A less tumultuous collapse would have come at much lower cost to the people of the Soviet Union, clearly, but also at lower cost and risk for the rest of the world as well. Moreover, the dramatic collapse of the Soviet state and economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the resulting chaos, lawlessness, and corruption, have surely detracted from the human and security gains the world might otherwise have enjoyed from the demise of the Soviet system.

Much better news on arms control came at the very end of the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union, in its final days, began a process to reduce sharply the number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems. START I, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in 1991, limited the total warheads on each side to around 6,000, with a ceiling of around 1,600 missiles and bombers.
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In 1993, START II limited the deployment of MIRVs (multiple independently targeted warheads on a single missile).
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The most significant step has come recently, with the New START treaty (2010), which caps the number of warheads at around 1,550 (with technicalities affecting the count) and strategic delivery systems at 700.
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The sharp decline in the number of warheads from the mid-1980s to 2012 can be seen in
Figure 2
.

These notable accomplishments are in line, finally, with Kennedy’s aspirations of a half century earlier. The numbers are coming down to around a twentieth or less of their peak numbers at the height of the Cold War arsenals. The declining numbers have
given some realistic hope that progress can be made toward full nuclear disarmament, a goal that, as I mentioned earlier, is now articulated by some of America’s most experienced foreign policy figures.
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Of course the prospects for a nuclear-free world are made far more complicated by the continuing threats of proliferation to new countries such as Iran and North Korea, and even to rogue groups. Nuclear arms control, alas, can no longer be achieved by just a handful of countries.

Proxy Wars
 

An even more deadly disappointment was the lack of positive spillover from relaxed U.S.-Soviet tensions into the peaceful resolution of regional conflicts. If anything, the United States and Soviet Union continued to spur and participate directly in proxy wars around the world as part of their ongoing Cold War confrontation and rivalry. The United States started this post-PTBT pattern with Johnson’s dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964–1965. The result was a devastating ten-year ordeal in which the United States committed more than 500,000 troops, killed more than one million and perhaps up to two million Vietnamese civilians, lost more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers in combat, and bled itself militarily, financially, socially, and emotionally for decades thereafter.
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Alongside the surging nuclear arsenals, proxy wars became the new emblems of the Cold War. These wars—in South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere—were often fueled and supported by secret CIA operations on the U.S. side, and corresponding acts of secret destabilization and militarization on the Soviet side. As such, they constituted wars within wars, often effectively unsupervised by political authorities and feeding the most extreme ideological, militaristic, or even personal agendas on each side.

Vietnam was America’s greatest blunder of the Cold War; Afghanistan proved to be even more devastating for the Soviet Union. In the mid- to late 1970s, impoverished Afghanistan fell into paroxysms of instability in a series of coups and countercoups, exacerbated by regional instability, including the Iranian Revolution, the Indian nuclear tests in 1974, the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace agreement (which was viewed by the Soviet Union as a threat to Soviet influence in the Middle East), and extreme tensions with neighboring Pakistan. In 1979, the Soviet Union made the fateful decision to intervene in order to support a Soviet-favored faction. This in turn provoked the United States to support an international force of Islamic fighters, the mujahideen, who were organized and funded by the CIA.
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The Afghanistan war proved even more of a drain on the finances, the morale, and the military capacity of the Soviet Union than the Vietnam War was for the United States. The bloody and costly debacle, ended by Mikhail Gorbachev only in 1989, was one of the factors leading to the Soviet economic crisis of the late 1980s, which in turn helped to precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The End of the Cold War
 

The end of the Cold War was shocking on several fronts. Most amazing, of course, was its rapidity, predicted by almost nobody.
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The Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, and the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, a dozen years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which had been seen by some in the United States as a high-water mark of Soviet global power. A country with more than 40,000 nuclear weapons and a massive internal security apparatus collapsed in disarray.

There are countless views about the causes of the end of the Soviet Union, and these conflicting interpretations may never be resolved. To the American anti-communist hardliners, Ronald Reagan’s aggressive posture was the decisive margin of victory. According to this view, he had re-instilled an arms race that the Soviet Union could not match. Later, he had charmed Gorbachev, so the story goes, into concessions that otherwise would not have been made.

Yet the demise of the Soviet Union was vastly more complex than this. Many other leaders played important roles. John Paul II, the Polish pope, was another decisive force, re-instilling hope, nationalism, anti-communist fervor, and faith in a country reeling from martial law under the Soviet shadow. Great and brave dissidents from Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov to Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and others in Eastern Europe had a profound effect on undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet regime. The 1975 Helsinki Declaration, including Article VII on human rights, created a far more powerful norm of human rights across the communist world than the Soviet leaders (and nearly everybody else) imagined possible at the time. Here was Churchill and Kennan’s ultimate insight at play: that even a tightly closed Soviet system would ultimately wither under exposure to a more open world. So too did unexpected events accelerate the collapse of the
Soviet state, notably the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the collapse of world oil prices in the 1980s.

In the end, the Soviet Union and its economic and political system unraveled through a concatenation of economic and geopolitical events. Gorbachev deserves the world’s supreme credit as the highest practitioner of peace, the greatest statesman of the age. As the Soviet economy spiraled downward, as Soviet power in Eastern Europe came unstuck, as the disastrous Afghan War ate away at the nation’s morale, as internal dissension in Russia and throughout the non-Russian states threatened the sovereignty of the nation itself, Gorbachev himself held firm: No violence would be deployed to hold the Soviet Union in place. This was the fundamental departure from all that had gone before. For this, Gorbachev merits the world’s highest approbation. One wonders how many politicians of any ilk in any part of the world would have displayed such fortitude for peace in the midst of such earth-shaking events.

Yet the fairest verdict of all is that the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, not because of the Cold War, not because of a single personality or particular adverse events, but because the organization of the Soviet economy and political system proved to be fatally flawed. The planned economy was simply a bad idea, one that had shown certain early merits—namely in rapid heavy industrialization—but was beset by far deeper long-term flaws: the lack of incentives, the lack of technological dynamism, the inability to plan an entire economy, and the relative isolation of the Soviet economy from technological advances occurring in the rest of the world.

It is useful to recall two great thinkers as we today ponder the demise of the Soviet Union. The first is John Maynard Keynes, the greatest political economist of the twentieth century. He had occasion to visit Russia in 1925, to form a judgment about the new communist order just taking hold. His economic judgment was damning, complete, and fully vindicated in time:

Still, Keynes wondered whether beneath the “cruelty and stupidity of New Russia some speck of the ideal may lay hid.” Could the revolution usher in new ideas regarding human values that would prove of lasting worth in social organization?