happy’, a man who might through miscalculation
plunge the world over the precipice into a nuclear
holocaust. In 1954, as secret British Cabinet
minutes reveal, one senior minister in Churchill’s
government thought that Dulles was a greater
danger to world peace than the Russians. It
was a sentiment shared throughout the world.
Furthermore, the Soviet leaders were made to feel
Russia’s technological inferiority, especially in the
nuclear field. Was this wise? With a national
economy far weaker than America’s, the Russian
leaders redoubled their efforts to convince the US
that America’s economic superiority did not mean
that the Soviet Union was bound to remain mil-
itarily the weaker. The Soviet Union and the US
began to stockpile nuclear weapons in such quan-
tities that they would be able to destroy each
other’s population centres several times over.
Though the USSR in the 1950s had fewer
nuclear weapons than the US, it switched suc-
cessfully from aircraft to rockets. It tested the first
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) in 1957
but serious problems remained to be overcome
and they were not deployed until the 1960s. The
Soviet Union concentrated on Western Europe
first, where its more reliable intermediate ballistic
missiles were targeted in ever increasing numbers
from 1959. The Russians had scored a psycho-
logical victory when on 5 October 1957 they had
sent the first earth satellite, Sputnik, through
space. After early failures an American satellite was
successfully launched from Cape Canaveral three
months later in January 1958. But the Soviet sci-
entific first gave a rude jolt to American confi-
dence and created the myth that the US was
lagging behind and that Eisenhower had allowed
a ‘missile gap’ to develop. In this way propaganda
and achievement stimulated the nuclear-arms race
from the 1950s onwards.
The impression America gave of ruthlessness,
even recklessness, in being prepared to escalate
every local conflict between communist and non-
communist nations to all-out nuclear conflict was
in fact a false one. Both the Soviet Union and the
US clung to the need for the ultimate deterrent,
but Eisenhower and Malenkov (and his successor
Khrushchev) were agreed that nuclear war offered
no hope of victory to either side. A first surprise
strike would not eliminate all the nuclear capa-
bilities of the other side, so sufficient nuclear
weapons would remain to inflict a catastrophic
retaliatory strike on the attacker. By the mid-
1950s a new era in superpower relations and so
in world history had thus been reached. It is
graphically summed up by three letters: MAD, or
mutual assured destruction. The fact that a
nuclear exchange would destroy both countries
thereafter dominated Soviet–American relations.
Their awesome nuclear capabilities make direct
war between them inconceivable. Unhappily,
however, wars were not banished between smaller
nations.
What Eisenhower and Dulles achieved during
the years from January 1953 to the end of the
Eisenhower presidency in January 1961 was to
end American involvement in the Korean War and
to keep the US out of further conflict. The con-
trast between bellicose rhetoric and the actual
record became evident as early as the first year of
the administration when on Stalin’s death the first
cracks in Soviet control became visible in East
Germany.
There was not even a hint that military action
would be taken by the US on behalf of Soviet
satellites that rebelled. On 16 and 17 June 1953
Berlin workers rose in revolt against their com-
munist regime. Throughout Eastern Germany
other industrial towns followed. If its rhetoric
meant anything, this was the moment for the
West, led by the US, to respond to appeals for
help. There was a short, chaotic interlude while
the East German regime showed itself quite
unable to suppress the rising. Then the Russians,
who had large troop concentrations on the spot,
intervened and quickly quelled the revolt. Apart
from offering pious declarations of moral support,
the US did nothing. It was a tacit admission that
an acceptance of the divisions agreed at Yalta was
the basis of continuing peace, and that great-
power intervention in the sphere assigned to the
other side carried with it the risk of nuclear war.
In reality there could be no rolling back of fron-
tiers by force. But Radio Free Europe, financed
almost entirely by the CIA, nevertheless kept up
the barrage of propaganda directed towards
Eastern Europe.
1
THE EISENHOWER YEARS 495
