The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

Probably the most consequential misunderstanding about the Cold War is that nuclear deterrence—the US and European reliance on the threat of a devastating attack against the USSR with nuclear weapons—“worked” to maintain the peace and ultimately to end the Cold War. 

Why is it a misunderstanding? Most fundamentally because, as formerly secret archives from the East bloc have revealed, the USSR had no intention either to carry out a nuclear attack or launch an invasion of Europe with conventional armed forces. The Red Army demobilized substantially after World War II and relied on a defensive orientation in the event of an invasion from the West. Only in the 1960s, with the deployment of thousands of so-called tactical nuclear weapons by the United States in Europe, did the strategy switch to an offensive one, focusing on preemptive destruction of nuclear facilities on the territory of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That strategy, misunderstood by NATO and US officials, could have resulted in nuclear devastation of the European continent in the event that the US launched limited nuclear attacks for signaling purposes as NATO planned and strategists such as Thomas Schelling advocated during the Berlin Crisis in 1961. If the crisis had not been defused, and eventually the situation in Europe stabilized by the 1972 German State Treaty (“two states, one nation”) and the 1975 Helsinki Accords, failed nuclear deterrence could have produced nuclear war.

Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.