The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 375curred in a world where nuclear proliferation remained both a possi
bility and a reality, although exactly how many governments possessed
atomic warheads or the means to deliver them remained secret. Only
six states have exploded warheads in public,^13 but several others have
been widely suspected of possessing warheads manufactured from
plutonium produced in nuclear power plants.^14
In the postwar decades, neither the nuclear umbrella nor the efforts
of international peace-keeping bodies sufficed to prevent local wars
and guerrilla actions from breaking out and running their course re
peatedly. Armed conflicts numbered in the hundreds; and the com
batants, dependent on outside sources of arms in nearly every case,
almost invariably sought help from one or the other of the super
powers, directly or indirectly.^15 Staying aloof from such affairs was
difficult. Substantial numbers of American troops engaged in the Ko
rean War, 1950–53, for example, and even larger numbers later
fought vainly in Vietnam, 1964–73. The Russians, for their part, in
vaded unruly eastern European countries in 1956 and again in 1968,
and tried the same thing in Afghanistan in 1979. The United States
met qualified success in Korea and humiliating defeat in Vietnam. It
remains to be seen whether the Russians’ qualified successes in Hun
gary and Czechoslovakia will be followed by a different result in
Afghanistan.
The quite extraordinary power of a technically proficient society to
exert overwhelming force on its enemies depends, after all, on prior
agreement about the ends to which collective skill and effort ought to
be directed. Maintaining such agreement is not automatic or assured.
This became clear in the United States during the Vietnam War, when
the cause for which Americans were fighting became so dubious as to
make withdrawal politically necessary. American technological supe
riority did not defeat the Viet Cong. Acts of destruction merely
hardened Vietnamese opinion against the foreigners. Escalation of-
- Between 16 July 1945 and 31 December 1979 known atomic explosions were as
follows: USA, 667; USSR, 447; France, 97; UK, 33; China, 26; and India, 1. SIPRI
Yearbook 1981, App. 11B, p. 382. - In 1979 no fewer than thirty-six countries had nuclear power plants within their
borders capable of producing fissionable material. Efforts to monitor and control the
use of such material by the United States and other suppliers were fragile to say the
least. Some countries (Israel for example) had probably breached such regulations. But,
if so, the matter remained secret and rumor often may have outrun reality. - International arms sales remained under governmental control after World War
II, as much in the free world as in the Communist. Evasions of official regulations,
though real, were marginal. For a perspicacious account see John Stanley and Maurice
Pearton, The International Trade in Arms (London, 1972).