10

The Arms Race and Command Economies

since 1945

When World War II ended in

1945, return to prewar conditions was not a viable ideal. In many parts
of the earth, old political regimes were discredited and unpopular.
This was true in the defeated countries and in most European col­
onies, even in places where there had been little or no active fighting.
Both in liberated and in occupied Europe wartime destruction and
dislocations assured continuing misery long after fighting had stopped.
Even among the victors, war mobilization had attained such an ex­
treme that spontaneous return to normal, however normal might be
defined, was no longer possible. Cancellation of wartime regulations
was not enough; planned mobilization demanded planned de­
mobilization and conscious redeployment of resources. Thus national
and transnational management and command economies were as nec­
essary after the war as during it. American efforts to institute a
liberalized international trading system were rendered futile by these
facts.
What happened in the postwar years was, in its way, as surprising as
the achievements of wartime production and destruction. Methods
that had summoned enormous numbers of tanks, airplanes, and other
weapons into existence during the war when applied to the tasks of
reconstruction lost little of their magic—at least in the first years when
what to do was easy to define and agree upon. The recovery of western
Europe with the help of credits from the United States, 1948–53, was
spectacularly swift. The USSR and eastern Europe did not lag very far
behind, thanks to a still abundant pool of manpower and natural re­
sources hitherto but slenderly exploited for industrial purposes. Japan
also began to exhibit an industrial and commercial dynamism after
1950 that eventually left even Germany and the United States behind,
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