ABSTRACT
The Cold War ended with the Paris Agreement on Conventional Forces on 19 November 1990, and yet a number of people in various parts of the world, including many members of the political class and academia in this country, are yet to accept that the Cold War is over and today there is a new international order of an economically globalized balance of power. The end of the Cold War did not lead to a transition from bipolarity to unipolarity but to a polycentric balance of power or, in less elegant phraseology, multipolarity. To understand the present situation, it is essential to grasp the nature of the Cold War and why it began and ended as a cold war – an unusual development in human history. Never before in history have two military blocs armed with nuclear missiles and tactical weapons adequate to destroy the human civilization several times over confronted each other eyeball to eyeball for over four decades and yet concluded a peace treaty as happened in Paris on 19 November 1990. There was never an arms race in history as was witnessed in those five decades and yet it did not lead to a shooting war. The end of the Cold War was followed within a year and six weeks by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of Communist ideology. This was not due to any military defeat but due to internal contradictions within the Soviet system. Though a dissident, Andrei Amalrik, predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the seventies, that was not considered a scholarly analysis.2 Even the CIA and US Administration were taken by surprise by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of Communism as an ideology. I have no pretensions of being a historian. While I have been a keen observer
of developments in international relations since my school days which happened to be during the Second World War, my academic training was in chemistry and my profession was that of a civil servant in the Indian Administrative Service. I strayed into security studies from a stint in the Ministry of Defence commencing at the time of Chinese attack on India in 1962. My focus has since been Indian security and I was a witness to the Cold War as it had a bearing on Indian security, and therefore it is from an Indo-centric point of view that I am offering my comments. Many hold the view that it was good luck and some say due to divine provi-
dence that humanity came through the Cold War without an unimaginable
catastrophe. Alternatively it is attributed to the doctrine of mutual deterrence and rationality of the leaderships of the two leading powers. I am inclined to adopt the second view, though the world did survive a US president like Nixon who believed that projecting irrational behaviour often gained advantages and on occasions put his belief into practice by subjecting the world and his own nation to enormous risks. Recently I came across a previously undisclosed account of his ordering a squadron of B-52s loaded with thermonuclear weapons to patrol close to the Soviet Pacific borders to apply pressure on them to cut off their aid to Vietnam in October 1969. The Soviets did not blink. Barring Nixon it has to be admitted that leaderships on both sides were
prudent enough not to take too much of a risk though Khruschev put nuclear missiles in Cuba. Yet he stepped back from the brink. Kennedy was prepared to agree to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Turkey and pledge never to attack Cuba. Even Mao Dze Dung, who spoke about the East Wind prevailing over the West Wind when the Soviets launched the Sputnik and tested intercontinental range missiles and who boasted to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954 that even if 300 million Chinese were killed in a nuclear war, three hundred millions would survive to build a glorious civilization, behaved relatively responsibly when China became a nuclear weapon power. In the literature, there are extensive discussions on the evolution of the
doctrine of deterrence. The concept of deterrence has been there down the ages. In the very initial stages when US alone had nuclear weapons the concept still operated. The US nuclear capability – a meagre one – was deterred by the perceived Soviet capability of being able to overrun Western Europe in a few days with its huge army. The fact that it was essentially the Soviet Union which defeated Germany and occupied Berlin endowed it with an awesome image at that stage. Therefore deterrence operated in Europe from the beginning and prevented the US exploiting its nuclear asymmetry to its advantage. At the same time the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was intended to warn Moscow that the US was determined to be the preeminent power post-Second World War. In spite of deterrence operating at the ground level, it took some time for the concept to evolve and for its nuances being grasped by western statesmen. That may be true of the Soviets as well. An indication of this on-going process of evolution was John Foster Dulles’s speech on massive retaliation. It did not give an impression that the consequences of retaliation were adequately thought out at that stage. The second sign of inadequate development of nuclear strategic thought was the propagation of the idea of use of tactical nuclear weapons to halt envisaged massive Soviet armour thrusts. The concept of escalation was yet to develop. The western strategic aim at that stage was to contain the Soviet Union all around through interlinked military pacts and use the bases in those countries to launch massive nuclear strikes on it. That led to the formation of NATO (formed in 1949 in response to the Berlin Blockade), CENTO, SEATO and alliance with Japan. The Soviet response to this threat of massive retaliation was twofold. They
developed the long range TU-16 bomber which in a one-way mission could
reach the US. Secondly they expedited the development of long range missiles. In this they were helped to some extent, not as much as in the case of Americans, by the German rocket scientists they had captured. They were also able to persuade the US to believe they had more TU-16 aircraft than they really had. That led to an American assessment of a ‘bomber gap’ in favour of the Soviet Union reinforcing the Soviet deterrence. Then came the Sputnik which shook the US. It demonstrated the Soviet
missile might to the entire world and projected the USSR ahead of the US in the missile arena. The US homeland was no longer immune to attacks by hostile nuclear weapons borne on long range missiles. The US response was not only to expedite its own missile programme but also to carry out reforms and expansion in the field of science and mathematics education. US quickly followed by putting up its own satellite once again to be out-performed by the Soviet astronaut in orbit. The US had been flying its high-altitude surveillance aircraft over the
Soviet Union from mid-fifties. In 1960 the U-2 spy aircraft piloted by Gary Powers which took off from Peshawar was shot down over Russia by a Soviet SA-2 missile. Again the USSR demonstrated it had antiaircraft missiles which could shoot down aircraft flying at such high altitudes. Following these developments the ‘missile gap’ became a campaign issue in the 1960 presidential elections, though it turned out that at that stage the Soviet Union had only four missiles with intercontinental range. Meanwhile both sides developed thermonuclear bombs with explosive
yields of mega-tons. The Soviets demonstrated a 50-58 megaton explosion in 1961. The intercontinental missile and megaton hydrogen bomb made it clear that no target in the US was beyond the reach of Soviet attack. That was a new experience for the Americans having been brought up in the firm belief that they were protected by the two oceans on either side. Faced with this challenge, the US reorganized its R&D and industrial might to catch up with and surpass the USSR. Not only did the US long-range military missile development followed, the country also embarked on manned orbital flights in spacecraft following the Soviet example and President Kennedy set a target of landing on the moon before the end of the decade. While the US and the USSR competed in manned orbital flights, only the US was able to land men on the moon by July 1969. It was a victory for American industrial capability and R&D prowess. Resource-wise the USSR could not keep up with the competition. The simultaneous missile and space programme also yielded solid fuelled land and submarine based missiles to both sides. By this time strategic theoreticians had developed the thesis of ‘The delicate
balance of terror’ which questioned whether without a second strike capability immune to destruction by a first strike disarming attack by the adversary a deterrent could be credible. That led to the development of second strike capability with silo and submarine based missiles and keeping a portion of nuclear weapon loaded aircraft up in the air all the time to escape destruction on the ground in case of a first strike.
