366 Chapter Ten1949, entrusted the task of marshaling west European defenses against
the Red Army to an American commander in chief. At first, Russian
soldiers stationed in east European lands seemed a better guardian of
Soviet interests than locally recruited forces. But when West Ger
many joined NATO in 1955 the Russians responded by establishing a
military alliance and command system—the so-called Warsaw
Pact—that was a mirror image of NATO. Elsewhere, in southeast Asia
and the Middle East, American efforts to set up comparable regional
defense organizations met no significant success. Only in Europe did
the two super powers confront one another across a well-defined
boundary, on either side of which carefully matched polyethnic garri
sons developed war plans, carried out training exercises, and indulged
in various kinds of war gaming of a sort which in prewar years had
existed only within national frontiers. The World War II experience of
transnational organizations for war was thus institutionalized in time
of peace. National sovereignty, as once conceived, disappeared, more
through fear than from any positive conviction of the merits of new
fangled transnational military organization.
Economic and psychological factors played their part in eroding
national sovereignty in Europe; but an even more important factor was
the drastic new threat that nuclear weaponry presented. NATO came
into being, initially, in response to the presence of large Red Army
forces in eastern Europe. Their mere numbers seemed capable of
overrunning the entire continent at will, unless American military
force, backed by the ultimate atomic sanction, were permanently
committed to defending the European bridgehead projecting so pre
cariously from Russia’s vast Eurasian sphere of management and
control.
The Russians, on the other hand, were quite unwilling to remain
indefinitely at the mercy of American bombers. Stalin spared no effort
to achieve atomic capability. In 1949, five months after NATO was
established, the USSR exploded its first nuclear device. This provoked
surprise and dismay in the United States, for nearly all Americans had
been sure that the Russians would not be able to master the com
plexities of atomic technology for many years. Russian prowess in
science, engineering, and weapons design was further demonstrated
by the next round of the postwar arms race. For in 1950 the American
government reacted to the loss of its atomic monopoly by deciding,
reluctantly, to press ahead with the development of a far more terrible
weapon, the fusion or H-bomb. The Russians kept pace, exploding