A BALANCE OF TERROR

The bomb exploded in a blinding burst of green-white light. The fireball at its center grew into a towering pillar of flame. A huge, colored mushroom of poisonous cloud boiled high into the sky. It was November 1952. American scientists testing a new weapon had blasted a whole uninhabited island out of the Pacific Ocean. They had exploded the first hydrogen, or H-bomb.

The H-bomb was many times more destructive than the atomic, or A-bomb, that destroyed Hiroshima. Just one H-bomb had five times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped in five years of the Second World War. By 1953 the Russians, too, had made a H-bomb. By 1957 so had the British. But only the Americans and the Russians could afford to go on making them. The fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union had H-bombs determined how they behaved towards one another for years to come.

That same November of 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower became President. American Presidents appoint a Secretary of State to take charge of the United States' dealings with foreign countries. Eisenhower gave this job to John Foster Dulles.

Dulles was a man of strong moral convictions. He genuinely believed that communism was evil. Truman, Dulles claimed, had not been tough enough with the Soviet Union. His own idea was for the United States to take the offensive. Instead of being content simply to contain communism ("a cringing policy of the fearful," as he called it) the United States should set out to "liberate" nations already under communist rule. In a broadcast in 1953 he told the peoples of eastern Europe that they could trust the United States to help them.

In 1956 the people of Hungary put Dulles's promise to the test. They had been under Soviet control since 1946. Now they rose in rebellion against their communist rulers. When Russian tanks rolled in to crush them they sent out desperate appeals for help. The help never came. Thousands of refugees fled across the Iron Curtain to safety in the neighboring country of Austria. "We can never believe the west again," one of them told a reporter.

Dulles failed to help the Hungarians because he knew that doing so would mean war with the Soviet Union. The devastation of nuclear war was, he decided, too high a price to pay for "rolling back" the Iron Curtain.

The way Dulles dealt with the Soviet Union in the later 1950s became known as "brinkmanship." This was because he seemed ready to take the United States to the brink - the edge - of war to contain communism. Dulles backed up his brinkmanship with threats of "massive retaliation." If the United States or any of its allies were attacked anywhere, he warned, the Americans would strike back. If necessary they would drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union and China. By the mid-1950s the United States had a powerful force of nuclear bombers ready to do this. On airfields all round the world giant American planes were constantly on the alert, ready to take off at a moment's notice.

Most Americans supported Dulles's massive retaliation policy at first. Then, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union sent into space the world's first earth satellite, the Sputnik. Sputnik did not worry the Americans. But the rocket that carried it into space did. A rocket powerful enough to do that could also carry an H-bomb to its target.

The American government began to speed up work on rockets of its own. Soon it had a whole range of bomb-carrying rockets called "nuclear missiles." The biggest were the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. These were kept in underground forts all over the United States, ready to carry their deadly warheads far into the Soviet Union. The Polaris, another missile, was carried by nuclear-powered submarines cruising deep beneath the oceans.

By the end of the 1950s the United States and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear missiles to kill everybody on earth. It is not surprising that people spoke of a "balance of terror." Both Russian and American leaders came to see that in a full-scale war between their two countries there could be no winner. They would simply destroy one another.

Nikita Khrushchev, the man who took Stalin's place as leader of the Soviet Union, realized this. He once said that capitalist and communist countries would only really agree "when shrimps learned to whistle." But in a world of H-bombs he believed that they had to try to live peacefully, side by side. In place of Cold War threats he suggested "peaceful coexistence."

President Eisenhower welcomed Khrushchev's talk of peaceful coexistence. He invited the Soviet leader to visit the United States. Afterwards the two men agreed to hold a summit meeting in Paris to work out solutions to some of their differences.

The Paris summit never even started. As the leaders were on their way there in May 1960, a Russian missile shot down an American aircraft over the Soviet Union. The aircraft was a U-2 spy plane, specially designed to take photographs of military targets from the edge of space. Khrushchev angrily accused Eisenhower of planning for war while talking peace. He went angrily back to the Soviet Union. He seemed to be furious. But maybe he was rather pleased at having made the Americans look like hypocrites. In any case, the Paris summit meeting was over before it even started.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 120 ff.