this challenge was America’s ‘strategic moment’. In 1945, the United States, with help
from its allies of course, had triumphed simultaneously in two wars on opposite sides of
the globe. Moreover, America was the superpower: its economic strength placed it in a
class of its own. Indeed, throughout the Cold War years it is appropriate to think of
the United States as the first-class superpower and the Soviet Union as the second-class
one. That real distinction was to have black consequences for Soviet competitive
prospects.
This chapter comments on the apparent autonomy of the nuclear arms competition
of the Cold War. For several decades there was little genuine political dialogue between
Moscow and Washington. The two dared not compete directly by force of arms. As
a consequence, the arms race and discussion of its limitation became a, perhaps the,
prime avenue of communication between the protagonists. From the 1960s to the 1980s,
the convening of, and positions in, Soviet–American arms-control negotiations took
diplomatic centre-stage. This did not mean that the weapons competition was driving
the foreign policies of the superpowers, but it did reflect the contemporary reality that
Washington and Moscow could not talk productively about settling their political
differences. Instead, they could possibly ease political tensions and improve mutual
understanding by engaging in highly technical discussions on the limitation of arms.
To quote Marshall McLuhan’s popular maxim of the late 1960s, ‘the medium is the
message’. The world found it reassuring that there was an ongoing, albeit on–off, arms-
control discussion–negotiating process. Its very existence was talismanic. ‘At least the
superpowers are talking’ was the popular judgement.
There may have been some utility for international security in Soviet–American, and
other East–West arms negotiations, but agreements of strategic significance were impos-
sible until the political context was changed beyond all recognition by the domestic
revolution in the Soviet Union effected by Mikhail Gorbachev after 1985 and by Boris
Yeltsin in 1991. While the Soviet Union was in business as an ideological antagonist to
the world of democratic capitalism, useful progress towards better relations could not be
made by means of arms control. Politics could not be evaded by technical agreements.
The ABM Treaty of 1972 was not an exception to this rule. In Soviet eyes, though not
in most American, that treaty denied the United States the option of pursuing its
technological advantage in defensive systems. When the Soviet Empire was dissolving
in the late 1980s, its extensive nuclear and conventional armaments, and the vested
interests in their future, proved not to pose obstacles to what amounted to a political
revolution.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the scale of the strategic challenge that the United
States, its allies and the Soviet Union had to meet with the dawning of the Nuclear Age.
Blessed with the wisdom of hindsight, there is some basis for confidence in beliefs
concerning nuclear weapons. But in the 1940s and 1950s, policy-makers, soldiers and
hostage publics were moving into and through unknown strategic terrain.
The bomb
The Cold War and nuclear weapons are connected inextricably. The strategic history
of the period 1945 to 1989 seemingly was driven, assuredly was shaped, by what became
a shared realization of the danger that lurked in the nuclear arsenals. This was strategic
206 War, peace and international relations