Detente and the Arms Race in the Cold War

Cold War Q’s

To say that the Cold War was won is to speak simplistically about what the Cold War was. Yes, the Soviet Union collapsed, but the animosity between the US and Russia persists even to today. There is still conflict between Russia, the US and their proxies in the Middle East. The alliance between Russia and China is viewed with hostility by the US, partly because of American distrust of China and partly because of the threat that a multi-polar world order poses to the hegemonic interests of the US (Lieberthal & Jisi, 2012). The ideological conflict between Russia and the Cold War was not really settled after 1991. It simply has changed. In fact, many Soviet principles, such as collectivism, are now embraced by and embedded in American institutions and organizations, while Russia has pivoted toward promoting traditional values like church and family in its nation. The conflict between Russia and the West, however, is and was more about geopolitics than ideologies. Ideological rhetoric simply masked underlying geopolitical tensions and realities.

The US sought a policy of containment and still does more or less. Yet Russia still exerts influence in various spheres—from the Middle East, particularly with respect to Syria and Iran, to South America and Asia. Russia has ties with Germany via a gas pipeline that the US does not want to support and is using Ukraine to thwart. The US also wants to pry apart the relationship between Russia and China because it prefers to be at the head of a unipolar world order. Russia’s military technology, particularly with missiles and missile defense systems, has excelled in recent years, however, presenting a new challenge for the US. Thus, even the arms race has been renewed in a way and cannot be said to have been terminated for once and for all in the 1990s.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by a number of factors: a report that Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba riled the Joint Chiefs, who urged Kennedy to take swift, direct, pre-emptive action against Cuba (Donaldson, 2000). Kennedy sought to de-escalate the situation so as to avoid a conflict with the USSR; however, the Chiefs were pressing him to act before it was too late. Khrushchev also played a part, indicating that the Soviet Union would not remove its missiles from Cuba until the US removed its missiles from Turkey. So both sides really caused the Cuban Missile Crisis as there was very little diplomacy between the two states and a great deal of hawkishness coming from the Joint Chiefs.

The US ultimately did well under Kennedy to avoid war, as Kennedy sought détente with Khrushchev and reached a mutual agreement with the Soviet leader to remove missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling their missiles out of Cuba. Kennedy did not want a nuclear war and his later focus on nuclear non-proliferation shows the extent to which he was committed to preventing such fallout in the future.

Both states really benefited from the resolution of the crisis: the USSR was made to feel more secure on its borders when the US removed its missiles from Turkey, and the US was made to feel more secure on its own borders as well when the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba. However, not everyone was happy with the outcome in the US, and Kennedy’s critics accused him of being “soft” on Communism ever after, fueling speculation that he was killed for that same reason.

Yugoslavia was formed out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of WW1. During the Cold War, Finland and Austria were neutral and Yugoslavia was non-aligned. The countries nonetheless worked together to help overcome some of the divisions that existed in Europe during the Cold War. Finland and Austria opted for neutrality for security reasons—they did not want to end up making one of the superpowers on either side of them angry. Yugoslavia and Finland, meanwhile, saw themselves as mediators of peace in Europe. Yugoslavia, as a Non-Aligned Movement country, was proud of its independence, but the NATO countries viewed the Non-Aligned Movement as a Third World Movement.

Austria was closer to NATO while Finland was closer to the Warsaw Pact, but both collaborated with Yugoslavia to bridge the gap between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. With the Warsaw Pact serving as the Soviet bloc and NATO as the Western alliance, the countries in the middle had a special role to play in mediating between the two, as it was especially dangerous for the whole of Europe to be torn apart by two superpowers making alliances with weaker states (Eerola, 2012)

Austria, Finland and Yugoslavia were able to retain their domestic institutions while accommodating the foreign policy preferences of the superpowers by asserting their independence (in the case of Yugoslavia) or by asserting their neutrality (in the cases of Finland and Austria). Thus, by not submitting to the Soviet bloc or to NATO, yet by leaning one way or other (apart from Yugoslavia), the countries could handle their own sovereignty and make decisions internally without committing wholly to one side. They were in effect buffer states and go-betweens, operating in a way that gave them some dexterity in the diplomatic field.

The Soviet Union chose to intervene to end the “Prague Spring” because it feared losing influence in the Soviet bloc. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956 had already created quite a stir and many saw it as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, since Khrushchev was trying to distance himself from the Stalinists in the Politburo. Prague sought to restore some of the humanity to politics that had been crushed out under the Soviet Union.

Alexander Dubcek promoted reforms that were meant to give a human face to government and to restore some of the soul of Czechoslovakia. The Soviet assessment of these reforms was that they were dangerous to the position and cohesion of the Soviet bloc because if they took hold and spread it would undermine the Stalinist-like hold that the USSR had over its satellite states. Socialism with a human face, as it was called under Dubcek, was meant to follow in the lead of Khrushchev, but Khrushchev himself had fallen out of favor in the USSR and a similar approach to politics was not going to be permitted in Prague.

The Soviet reaction to the Prague Spring nonetheless complicated the Soviet position in the world because it showed that the USSR was not interested in freedom or in any type of liberal democracy. Kennedy’s speech at the Berlin Wall in 1963 had been a challenge to the USSR, and here was the USSR essentially proving Kennedy’s words to be true: the USSR was not interested in allowing any state its own freedom or right to self-determination. It wanted strict control and would not allow any deviation from the Soviet program—and that troubled onlookers around the world (Alpha History, 2020).

The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction of the 1950s was one in which the US and the USSR essentially stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to ensure that if the one dared to launch a nuclear attack the other could launch one equally devastating. Thus, the deterrent was that any aggression on the one side would result in total destruction of both sides—so it was in everyone’s interest to de-escalate tensions. The policy did not really work, however. Tensions rose and general hawkishness in the US contributed to that rise. The Cuban Missile Crisis likely would have led to mutually assured destruction had the Joint Chiefs been in charge. The Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove was a dystopian vision of things to come for a world engulfed in MAD.

However, Kennedy pursued a policy of non-proliferation and this altered the trajectory of the conflict. The arms control treaties of the 1970s were distinguished from earlier efforts at disarmament in that they focused on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which put a limit on the number of IBMs and submarine ballistic missiles that a country could have. That was SALT 1 and SALT 2 put more limitations on arms stockpiling. Yet even these did not conclude the arms race (NPS, 2020).

The key provisions of the SALT accords were that intercontinental ballistic missiles be reduced in number and in the capacity by which they could be launched. The incentive for both the US and the USSR to engage in arms control efforts was that it eased the tension between the two, both domestically and internationally, and it freed up on the budget to spend on other programs. With both nations coming under economic pressures, it made sense to walk back military spending if both nations could agree to do so, while they managed issues on domestic and foreign fronts more effectively and economically.