. . . it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.
George Orwell, on the atomic bomb, 1945
By 1950, as the immediate aftermath of the Second World War subsided, a new Europe, riven in two – ideologically, politically and socio-economically – had emerged. It was the beginning of a completely changed era in the continent’s history, one of unprecedented insecurity. It was an era intrinsically shaped by the division that the war had left as its overriding legacy – and by the appalling threat of nuclear annihilation.
For more than four decades the Cold War was to drive the two halves of Europe apart. The largely separate development took place, however, with one vital feature in common: the primacy of military power. This military power, the dominant feature of post-war Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, was now controlled by only two countries: the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Both were preoccupied with security. Both were determined to prevent the enemy dominating Europe. The novelty in their tense relationship was that it rested ultimately on weaponry of such fearful destructiveness that neither side dared use it. Within the space of only a few years it became the power of complete destruction. Both the United States and the Soviet Union – one already a superpower, the other on the verge of becoming one – had built atomic bombs by 1949. Four years later both the USA and the USSR had acquired the immensely more powerful hydrogen bombs and were soon in possession of nuclear arsenals capable of destroying civilized life on the planet several times over.
During the years 1950 to 1962 the Cold War was at its most intense, and most dangerous. For much of this period Europe was the centre of the Cold War – though in a nuclear age superpower confrontation anywhere on the globe could have had the direst repercussions for the European continent.
The emerging conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the immediate post-war years had been threatening at times but had avoided disaster. No sooner had the new decade begun, however, than a dangerous crisis threatened to have grave consequences. That the crisis erupted over distant Korea was the most obvious indicator that Europe could not avoid being part of a global conflict between the superpowers. Whereas before 1945 the United States had been reluctantly drawn into European affairs to fight in two world wars, Western Europe now became in essence an appendage – if an important one – of American foreign policy. Meanwhile the eastern bloc (apart from Yugoslavia, which had in the aftermath of the war successfully asserted its independence from Moscow) was even more directly committed to support of the USSR in its worldwide confrontation with the USA.
Korea had been annexed by the Japanese in 1910 and ruled by them until the end of the Second World War. The Korean peninsula was then divided more or less in half at a demarcation line on the 38th parallel by an agreement between the Americans and Soviets to split the administration of the country temporarily. By 1948 expectations of a reunited Korea had disappeared. The division congealed into a communist republic in the north, effectively a Soviet satellite and seen by Moscow as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and a vehemently anti-communist republic in the south, dominated by American interests. But the victory of communism in China in September 1949, after more than two decades of bitter civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (which had run alongside the immensely bloody war against the Japanese invaders between 1937 and 1945), had left the Korean peninsula exposed. The south remained a non-communist enclave in a vast region of communist dominance. When, on 25 June 1950, the North Koreans crossed the demarcation line and attacked the south of the partitioned country, superpower confrontation escalated dangerously. The United States, committed to the containment of Soviet power and highly allergic to the prospects of further expansion of communism, in Southeast Asia as well as in Europe, could not contemplate the loss of South Korea and the evident threat that Japan would then face.
The Americans correctly presumed that the North Koreans would not have attacked without Stalin’s authorization. The Soviet dictator had, in fact, given a green light some weeks earlier, though he was unwilling to send combat forces, looking to the Chinese to provide military assistance, if necessary. The American leadership took the view that communist expansion had to be halted there and then if a domino effect were to be prevented. If the fall of Korea were not arrested, argued President Harry Truman, then the Soviets would ‘swallow up one piece of Asia after another’. And ‘if we were to let Asia go, the Near East would collapse and [there was] no telling what would happen in Europe’. Not for the last time in post-war Europe, the failed appeasement policy of the 1930s was cited as a motive for military action. The appeasers had failed to stop Hitler. If the communist advance were not now stopped in its tracks, it would lead to a third world war.
The United States gained the backing of the United Nations, established in October 1945, to use force to defend a member nation under attack. This was the first time that this had happened, and it arose from a Soviet mistake. Both Stalin and the United States leadership were satisfied, when it was agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 to create the United Nations Organization, that they would have the right of veto in any vote in the envisaged Security Council, whose five permanent members would also include Britain, France and China. Through a Security Council controlled by the great powers, it was imagined that the United Nations would prove far more effective than the League of Nations had been. The fallacy of such a presumption was to be repeatedly demonstrated during the Cold War when the use of the veto by one or the other superpower almost invariably produced stalemate on the Security Council. The exception was in 1950 when a temporary Soviet boycott of the Security Council in protest at the refusal to give a seat to Communist China enabled approval for the aid necessary to repel the invasion of South Korea and to re-establish peace and security. Stalin quickly realized his error and the Soviets again took their seat on the Security Council. But it was too late to stop a United Nations Command force, dominated by the USA, being sent to support the South Korean military. By the time the war ended the United Nations Command, which had incorporated the South Koreans, totalled almost 933,000 troops. The overwhelming majority of them were South Koreans (591,000) and Americans (302,000). A number of European countries – Britain and, with far smaller contingents, France, Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands, along with a tiny contribution from Luxembourg – sent combat troops.
The Americans took the initiative throughout, expelling the North Koreans from the south, then pushing on beyond the demarcation line and into the north. Fearful of outright hostilities with the United States, Stalin rejected North Korean requests for Soviet intervention. The Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, however, was not prepared to see Korea fall wholly under American control, perhaps offering a gateway to an attack on a future date on China itself (whose relations with the Soviet Union were already less than harmonious). In autumn 1950 Mao had dispatched a sizeable force, eventually numbering about 300,000 troops, and forced the US Eighth Army into panicky retreat. It was a first indication that the West would have to reckon with China as a major military power. Within two months, the whole of North Korea was again under communist control and the South Korean capital, Seoul, had fallen. An alarmed Washington considered dropping an atomic bomb.
The United States still possessed a huge supremacy – 74 to 1, according to some estimates – in operational atomic bombs, compared with the Soviet Union. But what, exactly, would be the targets? In a war fought overwhelmingly in the Korean countryside, this was not obvious. And the prospects of a massive retaliatory escalation of what was a regional war, possibly extending to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or even atomic bombs dropped on European cities, had to be contemplated. Towards the end of 1950 the prospect of the widening of the conflict leading to a third world war was a very real one. The American military leadership had drawn up a list of Russian and Chinese cities as targets and considered delivering an ultimatum to China to retreat beyond the Yalu river. If necessary there would be a resort to ‘prompt use of the atomic bomb’.
Wiser counsels prevailed. And by spring 1951, by which time the Chinese offensive had been blocked with much bloodshed, the Americans had regained the initiative, and the UN Command troops had eventually forced back the communist army. For the next two years both sides remained mired in a horrible war of attrition. In the armistice concluded in July 1953 the Korean War ended much as it had started, with each side behind the demarcation line at the 38th parallel. The three-year bitter war had cost the lives of nearly three million dead and wounded – the vast majority of them Koreans from both sides of the divide. American casualties numbered almost 170,000, over 50,000 dead, and those of the European contingents over 8,000, the majority of them British.
Although far away and not primarily involving Europeans, the Korean War had significant consequences for Europe, resulting from the dramatic rise in American defence expenditure. The first test explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949, before the Korean War, at the Semipalatinsk test site in modern-day Kazakhstan, had already concentrated American minds on the need to advance the development of nuclear technology to keep ahead of the Soviets. President Truman had commissioned not just the accelerated production of atomic bombs but also, on 31 January 1950, the building of a ‘super-bomb’. Military spending was already set to escalate by the time the outbreak of the Korean War sent it soaring. Within a year the US defence budget more than quadrupled. By 1952 military expenditure was consuming little short of one-fifth of American gross domestic product, up from less than a twentieth only three years earlier. On 1 November that year the Americans carried out the first test of their ‘super-bomb’ – a hydrogen bomb that ‘blotted out the whole horizon’ and obliterated the Pacific island (Eniwetok Atoll) where the explosion had taken place. Only nine months later, on 12 August 1953, the Soviets followed suit with their own test in a Central Asian desert. Winston Churchill later aptly spoke of a ‘new terror’ that brought ‘equality in annihilation’.
Unsurprisingly, the Americans felt obliged to review not just their expenditure but also their overseas commitments in the light of a policy of global containment of a Soviet threat that was perceived to be a rapidly growing menace. This obviously affected Europe. The Americans thought increasingly of aid to Europe in military terms. The Marshall Plan, established in 1947 to stimulate European economic recovery after the war through the provision of around $13 million over four years, was wound down. But by the end of 1951 American military aid to Europe had amounted to almost $5 billion. By 1952, as the build-up of arms increased in the wake of the Korean War, up to 80 per cent of American aid to Western Europe was directed at military purposes rather than civilian reconstruction.
In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been established as a pact that bound, initially, twelve countries – the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Iceland (extended in 1952 to include Greece and Turkey) – to the defence of Western Europe. But it was plain to American leaders from the start that NATO’s armed strength was inadequate. And they felt European countries needed to contribute more to their own defence costs; that the United States, starting to see itself as the world’s policeman, could not continue to carry a hugely disproportionate burden of European defence. Each of NATO’s European partners accordingly increased defence expenditure. West Germany, prohibited from the manufacture of arms but producing military machinery, tools and vehicles in ever greater numbers, benefited greatly from the demand for steel, increasing output by over 60 per cent between 1949 and 1953 – a boost to its burgeoning ‘economic miracle’. Expenditure had to be turned into military strength. So at a NATO meeting in Lisbon in 1952, members determined to raise at least ninety-six new divisions within two years.
However, the elephant in the room could not be ignored for much longer. Strengthening NATO could make little progress without the rearming of West Germany. Such a short time after it had taken a mighty alliance to crush Germany’s military power, once and for all it was thought, the prospect of a resurgent German militarism not surprisingly held scant appeal for her European neighbours (as well, understandably, as terrifying the Soviets). The Americans had raised the question of West German rearmament already in 1950, not long after the outbreak of the Korean War. They continued to press, and Western European NATO partners had to acknowledge that there was logic in their case. Why should the Americans continue to foot the lion’s share of the bill for the defence of Europe if the Europeans were prepared to do so little? From the European point of view, there was always the lingering fear that the United States might even retreat from Europe, as it had done after 1918 and had initially been envisaged following the end of the Second World War. And there was also the need to ensure that West Germany remained bound to the Western alliance, something that Stalin was prepared to test with an overture in 1952 – rejected outright by Western leaders – that dangled before German eyes the inducement of a unified, neutral Germany. Stalin’s initiative was interpreted in the West as an attempt to press the Americans to leave Europe. It also plainly aimed to head off the closer incorporation of the Federal Republic in the Western alliance (which the West German government, under its Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was keen to attain). This was by now closely bound up with the question of a West German armed force.
Already in 1950 a proposal that appeared to offer a potential breakthrough in the conundrum of how to make West Germany a military power while not alienating European countries vehemently opposed to such a step had, surprisingly perhaps, come from the French. The French proposal, advanced in October 1950 by the Prime Minister René Pleven, was intended to avoid the accession of West Germany to NATO, the step sought by the Americans, by the formation of a European defence organization that would incorporate but control German involvement. It envisaged a European army that would include a West German component under European, not German, command (ensuring, in effect, French supervision). This proposal was the basis of what became by May 1952 a treaty to establish a European Defence Community (EDC).
The title was misleading. The envisaged EDC did not even extend to all the countries in Western Europe. From the outset it encountered the fundamental problem that would bedevil all steps towards European integration over subsequent decades: how to create supranational organizations while upholding the national sovereignty of individual members. The Schuman Plan of 1950 (named after the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman) had formed the basis of the European Coal and Steel Community, established the following year, which would emerge as the embryo of the Common Market and subsequently the European Economic Community. Its members were France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. But Great Britain chose to remain aloof. The EDC built on a similar model, with the same membership. But Great Britain, possessing alongside France the largest armed forces in Europe, while welcoming the EDC and pledging its closest cooperation through its membership of NATO, was not part of it. Britain was not prepared to commit troops indefinitely to the defence of Europe or to participate in a project whose aim, according to the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in 1952, was ‘to pave the way for a European federation’. The diminution of national sovereignty that membership of a supranational EDC would have entailed could not be contemplated. Scandinavian members of NATO took a similar view. So the EDC was confined, as indeed was initially intended, to the countries that were starting to converge on economic policy. But the treaty had to be ratified. And here it came to grief in the country that had proposed it in the first place, France. The issue of national sovereignty was, here too, the decisive issue. When EDC ratification came before the French National Assembly on 30 August 1954, it was resoundingly rejected. With that the EDC was dead.
German rearmament, however, was not. Adenauer had deeply regretted the demise of the EDC, which he had viewed as an important step towards the integration of Western Europe. He had initially seen the vote in the French National Assembly as destroying his hopes of regaining German sovereignty. In fact, however, with its failure the prospect opened up of what Adenauer (the British and Americans, too) had wanted all along: the militarization of West Germany as a fully fledged member of NATO and recognition of his country as a sovereign state. The time was now propitious for such a step. Stalin had died in March 1953. The Korean War was over; West Germany was firmly committed to the Western alliance; and lingering notions of West German neutrality and reunification (which the opposition Social Democratic leadership, supported by a sizeable proportion of German opinion, had continued to entertain) were as good as buried. At conferences in London and then Paris, in September and October 1954, NATO members agreed to end the occupation of Germany (though Allied troops would remain by German agreement), to accept West Germany as a sovereign state, and to incorporate the Federal Republic into NATO. On 5 May 1955 West Germany attained its state sovereignty. Four days later it formally joined NATO. The Federal Republic was now allowed an army (not to be larger than half a million men), air force and navy, though prohibited totally from the possession of nuclear weapons.
From the Soviet perspective the developments in the West were deeply worrying. America was the only country actually to have used atomic bombs in war. It had been the first to develop the hydrogen bomb. It had intervened militarily in Korea. It had a lead in the unfolding arms race. And it had now consolidated an anti-Soviet alliance in Western Europe, including a rearmed West Germany. The Soviet Union had done all it could do to prevent this happening. Alarmed at the prospect of restored ‘German militarism’, the USSR had in 1954 even suggested to the Western powers, in a vain attempt to weaken or split the alliance’s resolve, its own readiness to join NATO – a suggestion that was briskly rejected by the West.
Since the Soviet overtures predictably fell on stony ground, and given the perception that NATO was an aggressive alliance directed at the USSR and dominated by hawks in the American leadership, it was little wonder that a quick riposte to the inclusion of West Germany in NATO followed only ten days later, on 14 May 1955, with the formation of the Warsaw Pact. This bound Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to the Soviet Union in a military alliance. At the same time the USSR took steps to improve relations with strategically important ‘floating’ European countries, especially Yugoslavia and Austria, to ensure that they were not drawn into the Western alliance. The schism with Yugoslavia, unmitigated since Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948, was ended, at least officially, with a declaration in Belgrade on 2 June 1955 of mutual respect for independence and territorial integrity and commitment not to interfere in internal affairs. Already on 15 May, the day after the Warsaw Pact had come into existence, the signing by the four wartime powers – the USA, the USSR, Great Britain and France – of an Austrian State Treaty (to come into effect on 27 July) brought the occupation of Austria to an end and established the country as an independent sovereign state. The Soviet Union had been ready to make this step possible once Austria undertook to disallow the presence of any military bases on its territory and not to join any alliances. Austria’s neutrality was formally announced on 26 October 1955, the day after the occupying powers had left the country. And in the previous month the closing of a Soviet naval base near Helsinki signalled a readiness to allow Finland more firmly to establish its neutrality, genuinely independent of its giant Soviet neighbour but not aligned with NATO.
The formalization of opposed military alliances facing each other across Europe’s Iron Curtain, each alliance presided over by a superpower in possession of weaponry of unimaginable destructive force, introduced a brief moment when the ice forming over the Cold War, if not starting to thaw, at least did not thicken. Both the Soviet and the American leadership seemed ready to defuse the tension. On 18 July 1955, the heads of government of the USA, the USSR, Great Britain and France met in Geneva. It was the first time in ten years they had come together; the last time had been during the Potsdam Conference, immediately following the end of the Second World War in Europe. The summit meeting (as such gatherings started to be called) ranged widely, especially over issues affecting security. It appeared to offer a glimmer of hope of attaining something like a basis for peaceful coexistence. At least the leaders of the superpowers were prepared to sit down and talk to each other. That was a straw to be grasped from the conference. But nothing worthwhile materialized. President Eisenhower proposed an ‘open-skies’ policy, aimed at allowing the United States and the Soviet Union to conduct aerial reconnaissance over each other’s territory. The Soviets, cautious of allowing the Americans any insight into their nuclear installations and the potential of recognizing how limited their long-range bombing capability was, were quick to reject the proposal. (To the USA this mattered little. They were soon flying new U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union, until one was shot down in May 1960 and the pilot, Gary Powers, was captured, causing an international incident.) The ‘spirit of Geneva’ was quick to evaporate. Within a year the Cold War reasserted itself. The savage repression of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule, coinciding in early November with the culmination of the Suez Crisis (which included a threat from the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to use ‘rocket weapons’ against Britain and France), brought a renewed and terrible tension to international relations.
By this time the nuclear arms race had reached truly overwhelming proportions – not that most ordinary people on either side of the Iron Curtain had any genuine inkling of the scale of the stockpiling of weaponry. Britain had decided already in 1947 that it had to build its own atomic bomb (seen as guaranteeing a place at the ‘top table’ of international diplomacy). The Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had strongly advocated this step as early as August 1945, immediately after the Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, a dominant member of the post-war Labour government, had then decisively argued the following year in favour of a British bomb when others, including Attlee himself, wavered: ‘We’ve got to have this,’ declared Bevin, whatever the cost. ‘We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ Britain duly became the third nuclear power in October 1952 when it carried out its first test, in the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia. Within two years of the test the British government had decided on the manufacture of a hydrogen bomb. By 1957 a British bomb was added to the growing thermonuclear arsenal. Winston Churchill, Attlee’s successor as Prime Minister, had contended that it was ‘the price we pay to sit at the top table’ of world leaders. France, like Britain, regarded possession of an independent atomic (then hydrogen) bomb as the indispensable sign of great-power status. It would join ‘the nuclear club’ as its next member, testing its first atomic bomb in February 1960 near Reggane in the Algerian Sahara desert, then producing a thermonuclear weapon in 1968. These steps amounted to a worrying proliferation of nuclear weapons, if still confined to the victorious powers of the Second World War. But the crucial development was the competition between the two superpowers for ever greater destructive capacity.
In March 1954, on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the Americans had exploded a hydrogen bomb 750 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that had devastated Hiroshima. The fallout from the explosion led to deaths from exposure to radiation over eighty miles away. Not to be outdone, the Soviets exploded a still larger bomb that September, near the village of Totskoye in Orenburg Oblast in the southern Urals, and the following year their first airborne hydrogen bomb a hundred times more powerful than their first bomb. The United States was by this time working on the manufacture of small ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons that could be fitted into the nose cone of a missile. From autumn 1953 the Americans began creating what would become a sizeable stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Trainee officers in America were soon being presented with scenarios of Europe as a nuclear-torn battleground. The hawkish American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (who conceived of policy in new terms, no longer of the ‘containment’ of Soviet communism but of its ‘roll-back’), told NATO leaders the following year that atomic weapons had now to be regarded as a conventional part of the Western alliance’s defence capability. A limited nuclear war, with Europe as the battleground, seemed a real possibility. The United States contemplated a rapid knock-out attack on the Soviet Union. At a briefing of representatives of the US military services in March 1954, General Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command (and who had directed the bombing campaign against Japanese cities towards the end of the Second World War), outlined plans for a massive air attack, envisaging ‘that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours’. LeMay was ‘firmly convinced that 30 days is long enough to conclude World War III’.
The escalation in nuclear firepower was breathtaking. In 1950 the US military was in possession of 298 atomic bombs. By 1962 it had no fewer than 27,100 nuclear weapons and over 2,500 bombers capable of carrying out long-range attacks. The Soviets had some long-range bombers that could reach American targets, but lagged behind the United States in their numbers and capabilities. But in 1957 the Soviet Union caused renewed anxiety with a double-coup in the arms race. In August it launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, the first the world had experienced. Even more spectacularly, in the early morning of 5 October (Moscow time), using the missile, it launched the first space satellite, which it called Sputnik, meaning ‘fellow traveller’. Although most Europeans rejoiced at what they saw as an extraordinary achievement, the first step towards space exploration, American scientists and politicians were not slow to realize what Sputnik meant. The Soviet Union might soon be in a position to launch a nuclear attack from space on the United States. An American report pointed to an alarming inferiority to Soviet technology and called for a big build-up of a US missile force – necessitating, of course, a major increase in funding. By 1959 military spending accounted for half of the US federal budget. Already the previous year the Americans had followed the Soviets into space with the launch of their Explorer and (after an earlier embarrassing failure) Vanguard rockets to put their own satellites into orbit. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded the same year, in July 1958, to undertake the scientific exploration of outer space, but – emphasizing the military significance of the rapidly expanding programme – with part of its funding derived from the Pentagon (US military headquarters) and directed at missile research. In fact, though American political and military leaders continued to be almost paranoid about the ‘missile gap’ with the Soviet Union, believing they were lagging behind, by the time John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States in November 1960 the Americans had perhaps seventeen times as many usable nuclear weapons as the Soviets.
Which of the superpowers possessed the larger nuclear arsenal had by now, however, become largely meaningless. For by the early 1960s the nuclear arms race had long reached the point of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), as it was aptly labelled. Interballistic missiles could deliver their devastating load within minutes. Fleets of bombers and submarines were armed with nuclear weapons, ready to unleash them should the command be given. The world had to live with the possibility that a crisis could escalate to the point where the button would be pressed; or that a nuclear bomb could wreak devastation by accident (such as came close to wiping out East Anglia when in 1957 an American bomber crashed into a repository holding three nuclear bombs). A reminder of the scarcely imaginable devastation that a nuclear war would bring was provided when, on 30 October 1961, the Soviets detonated what would prove to be the largest and most powerful bomb of the Cold War, north of the Arctic Circle over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The mushroom cloud stretched forty miles into the stratosphere. The flash from the explosion could be seen 600 miles away. The 50-megaton monster’s scarcely conceivable destructive capability was said to have been 1,400 times more powerful than the combined force of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and far greater than all the explosives used by all the belligerents during the Second World War.
For three years up to that point superpower tension had once more revolved around the issue of Berlin. There had already been one major Berlin crisis, in 1948 when Stalin had attempted to force the Western Allies out of the city. Berlin, though under four-power occupation, was located around 100 miles within the Soviet-controlled zone. The Soviet dictator had eventually backed down in spring 1949 after the Western Allies had carried out the ‘Berlin airlift’ that lasted almost a year to beat the blockade he had imposed. In 1958 Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev, judged the time right to impose new pressure on the Western Allies over Berlin. This was in response to American plans, encouraged by the West German government, to station intermediate-range nuclear weapons in West Germany – itself a reaction to the Soviet launching of space satellites and Khrushchev’s boasting of Soviet nuclear capability.
Nikita Khrushchev had boxed his way through a power struggle in the Kremlin that had lasted for more than two years after Stalin’s death in 1953 to emerge as the Soviet leader. As both Chairman of the Council of Ministers and First Secretary of the Communist Party – effectively combining the position of state premier with the all-important leadership of the party – he had outright supremacy in the Soviet system. A former protégé of Stalin (and collaborator in his purges), from a poor, uneducated background, Khrushchev was crude but quick-witted. His superficial amiability could rapidly give way to temper tantrums and outright menace. In the mid-1950s the West had briefly hoped that under his leadership better, less tense relations with the Soviet Union could be established. But Khrushchev was a volatile character, less predictable in foreign affairs than Stalin had been. That enhanced the danger that superpower conflict could quickly spin out of control.
The status of Berlin had remained a thorn in the side both of the East German leadership and of their masters in the Soviet Union. West Berlin was a small Western-run island in a Soviet-controlled ocean. But members of the Western occupying forces had the right to go in and out of East Berlin (just as Soviet military patrols occasionally still entered West Berlin, since the entire city technically remained under the control of all the four occupying powers). And East Berliners could without difficulty cross into West Berlin, which functioned as a showcase for the more prosperous West. They did not just come and go. Many of them stayed to find work, settling and enjoying the higher living standards in western Germany. Between 1953 and the end of 1956 more than 1.5 million East Germans had voted with their feet and left. Almost half a million more followed in 1957–8. The levels of departure were not compatible with either the economic or the political plans of the East German leadership, or of maintaining East Germany as a bulwark against the capitalist West. Beyond the economic considerations lay the recent developments that had seen West Germany remilitarized, part of NATO and with American nuclear weaponry on its soil. Furthermore, West Berlin was a hotbed of Western espionage and propaganda (to which increasing numbers of East Berliners were exposed on a daily basis through television transmitted from West Berlin). Khrushchev reckoned it was time to challenge the status quo. And to reopen the question of Berlin’s status meant reopening the German question itself.
On 27 October 1958 Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, announced in a major speech that ‘the whole of Berlin stands on the territory of the German Democratic Republic’ and fell within its sphere of sovereignty. This was an outright contradiction of Berlin’s status as a city under the control of the four occupying powers. Ulbricht had obviously cleared the speech with Khrushchev, for only two weeks later, in Moscow on 10 November, the Soviet chief stated that the time had come for the occupation of Berlin to end. He followed this up on 27 November with an ultimatum to the Western powers – the USA, Great Britain and France – to accept the demilitarization of West Berlin within six months and thereby the end of their ‘occupation regime’ or face unilateral action to achieve this goal by the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. The wartime agreement, on which the occupation rested, would in that case be deemed to be invalid.
Plainly, to accept the ultimatum would have meant a serious weakening of the Western powers, and not just in Berlin. A potential showdown was, however, averted by semi-conciliatory diplomacy (without actually yielding anything) on the part of the Western powers, and by an invitation from President Eisenhower to Khrushchev to visit the United States in 1959. The initial ultimatum deadline came and went without incident. And on 15 September 1959 Khrushchev began a twelve-day visit to America which, although it produced nothing of substance, provided an opportunity for the leaders of the superpowers to meet face to face and brought a temporary warming of the previously frosty atmosphere.
The crisis that had been brewing subsided temporarily. Deteriorating relations with China (epitomized by Mao Zedong’s scant regard for Khrushchev) were among the reasons that the Soviet Union was willing to reduce the tension in Central Europe. This tension was bound to recur, however, since the problem that underlay it – the haemorrhaging of the East German population across the border into West Berlin – continued unabated. The constant drain of population to the west had prompted the East German regime, already in 1952, to seal off the demarcation line to the Federal Republic. But the border in Berlin was not closed, and it remained a way out of East Germany for those wanting to enter the west.
Hundreds of East Germans were by now crossing the border every day. At the high point of the refugee flood as many as 2,305 people headed from East to West Berlin on a single day, 6 April 1961. Most of those leaving were young. Many were farmers, choosing this way out of the collectivization of agricultural production that had been introduced in June 1958. Skilled workers, newly qualified students and young professionals – none of which the East German state could afford to lose – were also prominent among the droves seeking a better life in western Germany. In 1960 some 200,000 East Germans left. The numbers threatened to grow even larger in 1961. In April that year alone 30,000 crossed the border for good. Between the foundation of the GDR in October 1949 and August 1961 no fewer than 2.7 million East Germans (15 per cent of the population) had cast their own verdict on the socialist system of the east and moved to western Germany.
When Khrushchev and Kennedy met for the first time in Vienna on 3–4 June 1961, the question of Berlin was at the centre of their uneasy deliberations. Khrushchev was little more than contemptuous of the new and inexperienced American leader. Kennedy had been badly bruised by the ‘Bay of Pigs’ debacle in April – an ill-fated invasion sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) aimed at toppling Cuba’s communist government. Seizing the initiative at their meeting, Khrushchev posed a new ultimatum. If the Western powers would not agree to making Berlin a ‘free state’ and renounce their rights of access, he would transfer all Soviet rights over the air corridor between West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany to the German Democratic Republic, forcing Western planes to land on East German territory. Kennedy, undaunted by the Soviet leader’s bluster, raised the prospect of war if Khrushchev persisted in his demands.
A few weeks later reports that the council of NATO had agreed to take military measures to prevent the blockage of access routes to West Berlin caused Khrushchev to revise his initial view that there was no serious threat of war. Only at this point did he agree to a request that Ulbricht had made already in March at a meeting of Warsaw Pact representatives in Moscow to seal off the border between West Berlin and the territory of the German Democratic Republic. (Plans to wall off West Berlin to block access to and from the east dated, in fact, to as far back as 1952.) On 24 July 1961 the Politburo – the ruling body – of the Socialist Unity Party (SED, the GDR’s Communist Party) decided to make the appropriate preparations. The Warsaw Pact states backed the step in early August, and on 12 August Ulbricht gave the orders for the border to be closed from midnight. The next day, 13 August – first with swiftly erected barbed wire but soon with a twelve-foot-high concrete wall nearly a hundred miles long backed by guard towers, minefields, police dogs and orders to shoot anyone crossing the ‘death strip’ on either side of the wall – the border between East and West Berlin was sealed. It would remain so for the next twenty-eight years.
The West’s response was muted. It suited all of the Western powers, in fact, to calm the crisis. Britain, an overstretched imperial power, wanted to cut its occupation costs in Germany. The French, equally overstretched, were even less willing ‘to die for Berlin’ (as their Defence Minister commented), preoccupied as they were by a severe crisis in their colony of Algeria. And the Americans, obviously the dominant Western power, had no interest in war over Berlin. So there were predictable verbal protests from the West but little more, beyond a symbolic show of solidarity through a visit to West Berlin a few days after the closing of the border by the American Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the former hero of the airlift, General Lucius D. Clay. Equally symbolic was the dispatching of 1,500 American combat troops to the city – who were given a rapturous reception from West Berliners as they marched down the main boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm.
Signals from Washington had, in fact, already hinted that the United States would not stand in the way of blocking off East Berlin, as long as there were no Soviet moves to alter the status of West Berlin. In late July, President Kennedy, addressing the American people on television on essential stipulations over Berlin – the right of the Western Allies to a presence in the city, right of free access, and right of self-determination for West Berliners – had not mentioned East Berlin or its population. He had acknowledged legitimate Soviet security concerns in Central and Eastern Europe (though, to Khrushchev’s fury, he also stated that he would be seeking the approval of Congress for a further $3.25 billion of military spending, mainly for conventional forces). The President had told one of his closest aides that he could hold the Western alliance together to defend West Berlin, ‘but I cannot act to keep East Berlin open’. And on 30 July the chairman of the American Senate’s foreign policy committee, William Fulbright, had almost seemed to invite the East Germans to seal their border, indicating in a television interview his belief that they had the right to do so. Khrushchev, who wanted war just as little as did the Western powers, had his way out of the crisis that he had initiated.
The closing of the border on 13 August 1961 was well timed. It was a Sunday morning when Berliners awoke to find that East German workers under armed guard had overnight erected barbed-wire fencing throughout the city. Kennedy was only informed in mid-morning – late afternoon in Berlin. He and his leading advisers decided that, despicable as the barrier was, it was preferable to war. ‘It’s not a very nice solution,’ Kennedy stated, ‘but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.’ Privately the US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, admitted that the closure of the border ‘would make a Berlin settlement easier’.
It was not to be expected that the other Western powers would adopt a more aggressive stance. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Christopher Steel, expressed his surprise that it had taken the East Germans so long to seal their boundary. The French commander in Berlin had to await instructions from Paris. Those could not be expected instantaneously: most of the Foreign Ministry staff were on holiday. Charles de Gaulle, President of France, remained unperturbed at his country residence in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, returning to Paris only on 17 August. In England, the day before the Berlin border was sealed was the ‘glorious twelfth’ – the start, each year on 12 August, of the season when the British upper class indulge in their sport of grouse-shooting; the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was not to be diverted from his enjoyment on the Yorkshire estates of his nephew, the Duke of Devonshire.
Two months later, in October 1961, there was a further flashpoint over Berlin, caused by the dangerous and unnecessary escalation of a minor incident. This arose when an American diplomat and his wife refused to show East German border guards their passports and were consequently denied passage to cross into the east to visit the theatre. The Americans responded by sending a squad of soldiers to escort the diplomat into East Berlin, and over the next days soldiers in jeeps with rifles at the ready accompanied civilians across the border in what was little more than a provocation. The hawkish General Clay then had ten American tanks brought up to the crossing at Checkpoint Charlie. The Soviets responded by bringing in their own tanks and lining ten of them up a hundred metres away across the border. Any minor provocation in the standoff could have imperilled world peace. But no one wanted nuclear catastrophe over a triviality – ‘this childish nonsense’ in the words of Harold Macmillan. It was obvious to the leadership on both sides that the issue had to be defused. President Kennedy had already decided that enough was enough. He sent a message to Khrushchev (who had equally little interest in further escalation) ensuring him that the Americans would match any withdrawal. After a sixteen-hour standoff, both sides pulled back – slowly at first, but the crisis was over.
With that, not only Berlin but Germany and Europe ceased to be the epicentre of the Cold War. The people who had to pay the price for the attainment of superpower stasis in Europe for almost three decades to come were the peoples of Eastern Europe, and not least the East Germans. Although the Wall encircled West Berlin, the population of the German Democratic Republic were the ones actually walled in – deprived of their freedom to travel across the continent, their means of communication curtailed, often separated from relatives and friends, condemned to a regime of high restriction and constant surveillance, and unable to benefit from the rapid improvements in the standard of living of their compatriots in the west (which they could witness on Western television).
There was no longer any population flow to the west. East Germans seeking to leave now ran a high risk of being killed as they tried to cross the border. One of the first killings took place shortly after marking the first anniversary of the building of the Wall had brought serious disturbances in West Berlin. An eighteen-year-old boy, Peter Fechter, who tried to escape near Checkpoint Charlie on 18 August 1962, fell in a hail of bullets a yard from freedom as he attempted to scramble over the last barbed-wire fence before reaching West Berlin. A West German television crew filming a documentary on the Wall happened to be on the spot and filmed the death agony of the boy as he screamed in pain while the East German border guards remained at their posts and did nothing. Officially – though other estimates are far higher – the number of deaths at the Wall in the twenty-eight years that it stood totalled 139 persons (the first a week after it went up, the last six months before it came down).
These were the most awful human costs of the Wall. Politically, the Wall had a calming effect. Continued crisis over Berlin, with its potential to spiral into nuclear disaster, was intolerable for all the major parties. No one wanted war. The Wall was an appalling indictment of Soviet-style socialism. But without it, the drain on the East German economy would have been intolerable, undermining the political system of the GDR. And without East Germany the entire eastern bloc of Soviet satellite states would have been endangered. The Soviet leadership is unlikely to have remained passive. The Wall, cynical and inhumane as it was, brought calm not only to Germany but to the whole of Central Europe.
There was still, however, one moment of utmost tension – actually the only time in over four decades of Cold War that the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. That it happened thousands of miles away, on the sea approaches to Cuba, but could have enveloped Europe in a nuclear holocaust, shows the extent to which the superpower conflict had by now become a worldwide confrontation.
The crisis arose when Khrushchev decided in October 1962 to station intermediate- and medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuba. The American leadership continued during the crisis to think that Cuba was also related to the Berlin question – a way of putting pressure on America to give way on West Berlin. This indeed appears to have been an indirect reason for Khrushchev’s dangerous initiative; he remained obsessed with the German question, aware that the Berlin Wall had actually constituted a defeat for the socialist East and a humiliation in the eyes of the world for Marxism-Leninism. But he also had other motives. The impulsive Kremlin chief was acutely aware that the Soviet Union lagged far behind the United States in long-range missile capability. And he was more than sensitive to the fact that American intermediate-range missiles were aimed at the Soviet Union from bases in Britain, Italy and Turkey. Part of his thinking was to pay back the Americans in kind and give them ‘a little of their own medicine’ by exposing them to the fear of missiles pointing at them and based just off their own coast. Khrushchev seems also, however, to have been motivated by the need he felt to uphold Soviet prestige in Cuba (where a second American attempt to overthrow the communist leader, Fidel Castro, was expected) and to stimulate wider revolution in Latin America.
When Kennedy’s administration responded on 21 October to the shock news that forty-two intermediate-range nuclear missiles were on their way to Cuba, by threatening to intercept the Soviet ships and at the same time placing American forces on the highest state of nuclear alert short of war, the world stood on the verge of Armageddon. The high-stakes brinkmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev lasted a week. After days of unbearable tension Khrushchev finally backed down on 28 October and ordered the return of the missiles to the Soviet Union. The whole world could breathe with relief. The Americans could claim a victory (even if some hotheads in the Pentagon regretted that it had not come to military action). But the Soviets did not emerge completely empty-handed. Kennedy pledged publicly to make no further attempt to invade Cuba. He also agreed to remove the missile bases in Turkey, a part of the deal kept secret at the time since these were technically NATO bases that the United States was unilaterally preparing to dismantle. The missiles were removed from Turkey the following year – without any admission that this was connected to the Cuban crisis.
Never before during the Cold War had nuclear war been so close. No one could know that it would never come so close again. This realization, in Washington and in Moscow, persuaded American and Soviet leaders to end – or at least pose limits to – the lunatic arms race. The installation in 1963 of a ‘hot line’ between the White House and the Kremlin was a sign of a willingness to defuse tension rather than run the risk of escalation to the point of nuclear conflict. And in Moscow on 5 August 1963 the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain agreed to a limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting other than underground testing. (France did not sign.) It was a modest step, but it amounted at least to a start.
Little over a year later, in October 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power in a ‘palace coup’ in the Kremlin. His action in provoking the Cuban missile crisis, seen to have damaged the Soviet Union’s international standing, was among the reasons for his deposition. So was his authorization of the building of the Berlin Wall. With Khrushchev’s departure, the Cold War lost an erratic, blustering, unpredictable component. Two new Soviet leaders replaced him: Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Communist Party and Alexei Kosygin as Prime Minister. The shift of power in the Kremlin began a new phase of the Cold War. There would be future points of tension, certainly, but the erection of the Berlin Wall, the defusing of the Cuban crisis and the toppling of Khrushchev saw the worst of the heat evaporate from the Cold War. For a time, in international affairs, Europe remained quiet.
‘We were all living in a kind of nervous hysteria,’ recalled Eric Hobsbawm, one of Europe’s greatest historians, nearly fifty years later when reflecting on the ‘black shadow of the mushroom clouds’. That was an intellectual’s understanding. But how far did the generalization apply to the mass of ordinary Europeans? Did most people experience perpetual fear and live in ‘nervous hysteria’? It is not an easy question to answer.
After a generation dominated by war, bloodshed, suffering and devastation, most people in Europe, east and west, longed more than anything for peace and ‘normality’. Although there had been little ‘normality’ to speak of in previous decades, this in essence meant a return to lives revolving around family and work, spent in decent material circumstances, protected from the worst inroads of poverty and insecurity. As the horrors of the Second World War gradually receded and the contours of a new Europe began to emerge from the wreckage, what mattered to the great majority of people were security, stability and prosperity. They began to dream of better times. But the prospect of nuclear war between the new powers which now controlled Europe, and glowered at each other over the Iron Curtain that divided the continent, cast a long shadow. The capacity of nuclear weapons to inflict total destruction rendered Europe’s citizens powerless. People throughout Europe (and beyond) had to learn to live with the bomb. Fear and fatalism existed side by side. There was good reason for both.
How people adjusted to the new reality of the threat to their very existence varied, of course, with personal circumstances, beliefs and convictions, social class, nationality, geography, and a myriad of other factors. It was not least greatly influenced by the information they received from political parties and their leaders, the mass media and social commentators and influential individuals at various levels. However difficult it is to arrive at generalizations, it appears to have been the case, paradoxically, that when Cold War confrontation was at its most dangerous, between 1950 and 1962, opposition to nuclear weapons was relatively muted.
Anti-nuclear movements were in their infancy during the hottest part of the Cold War and unable to win wide popular resonance. Western European governments were successful for the most part in instilling in the citizens of their countries profound anti-Soviet views and its counterpoint – a belief in the security provided by the United States of America, widely seen as Western Europe’s saviour and the guarantee of its future wellbeing. In the other emerging nuclear powers, Britain and France, there was also widespread readiness to accept the deterrent effect of independently possessed nuclear weapons. Therefore, in Western Europe the fear of nuclear weapons was, it could be said – with pardonable exaggeration – largely one-sided. Soviet weapons were a source of fear; NATO, meaning in effect, American (and British and French) weapons, were a source of security. The anti-Americanism, which would feed into a widening anti-nuclear protest movement from the late 1960s onwards, greatly influenced by reactions to the Vietnam War, played a far smaller role in the 1950s.
One set of impressions of reactions in Britain to the prospect of nuclear war in the early 1950s can be gleaned from the diary entries of Nella Last, a lower-middle-class married woman, in her sixties, a supporter of the Conservative Party living quietly in the suburbs of Barrow-in-Furness in the north of England. On New Year’s Day in 1950 she felt depressed at what the future might hold. She had been reading an article in an American magazine, passed on to her by some friends, which had spoken of war as inevitable after 1951 and suggested that atomic bombs were a trivial matter ‘when compared to the germ bombs Russia was concentrating on’. Her reading of newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio and conversations with friends, had shaped and confirmed her clear views on the developing Cold War. In May, concerned about the threat of atomic weapons and hearing about ‘70-foot atom-proof shelters’ being built in Stockholm, Nella worried about the likelihood of a new war and pondered about mankind eking out some kind of life deep underground. When the Korean War began in late June she had ‘a sick feeling’ that events there might ‘destroy civilisation as we know it’ and wondered what Russia held behind the Iron Curtain. She favoured Western action to ‘put a stop to the Communist drive and urge’. Later in the month, attending instruction on civil defence and watching gas masks being fitted, she was depressed to hear of the devastating effect that the explosion of an atomic bomb would have on Barrow and the pessimism of the man sitting next to her, who had remarked: ‘sooner it’s over, sooner to sleep’. ‘Ordinary people can do so little,’ Nella concluded, ‘only pray.’
Towards the end of July she expressed her foreboding at the testing of ‘this dreadful H-bomb’ and wondered whether America would drop an atomic bomb in Korea (thereby giving Stalin just cause, she added, to claim that the West stood for ‘death and mutilation’). A weak Britain, she thought, could not influence such a decision. ‘And if such a dreadful thing did happen (she went on) – and Russia has them [atomic bombs] – all hell could easily be let loose. A terrifying outlook.’ Mrs Last continued to harbour a ‘deep fear that another atom bomb will be dropped’ and saw the chances of this growing, with ‘no other weapon against such odds’. Towards the end of the year she ‘felt that never before in the world’s history was so difficult a situation facing men, or countries’ in the light of ‘the certainty of Stalin’s deep-laid plans to engulf Europe, and, if Europe, the whole of the world’. Her fear of, and anxiety about, the Soviet Union knew no bounds. ‘Beside Stalin,’ she wrote, ‘Hitler seems a boy scout. He is the Anti-Christ and not Hitler.’
Nella Last’s worries about the atomic bomb, so frequently expressed in 1950, appear, however, to have dissipated once the most acute phase of the Korean War passed. She may have been more politically aware than many of her British contemporaries, though her views were perhaps fairly typical for her generation and social class as the outbreak of the Korean War stirred new anxieties. Whether her palpable fears were representative of the views of wider sections of the population is, however, doubtful. Certainly on the left there were strong feelings about rearmament. Fifty-seven members of the Labour parliamentary opposition rebelled in March 1952 against the party leadership in condemning the British rearmament programme. In autumn that year Britain tested its first atomic bomb and vehement denunciation on the Labour left of Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons started to mount sharply. By 1957, when Britain tested the far more devastating hydrogen bomb, the Labour Party seemed to be approaching a split on the issue. At the annual conference in 1957 as many as 127 motions called for disarmament and there were vehement attacks, led by the left-wing firebrand Aneurin Bevan, on the leader of the party, Hugh Gaitskell, and the support for an independent nuclear deterrent. The party’s leadership, however, backed by the great majority of party members, remained resolutely against Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Some members of the Anglican clergy also voiced their opposition to Britain’s nuclear capability. But when a petition signed by fifty-one members of the clergy urged the British people to reject Britain’s acquisition of the bomb, the people took no notice. Opposition to Britain becoming a nuclear power was confined to a small minority. One former Labour minister acknowledged the general disinterest of most people. Social and economic matters were what concerned them. Towards the bomb there was a ‘collective shrug of the shoulders’.
People no doubt felt the bomb was terrible; but it was better to have it than not, and there was little that ordinary people could do about it anyway. By the later 1950s, however, fear of the bomb and demands that Britain end its possession of nuclear weapons were growing. The sense of anxiety was expressed directly or obliquely in a variety of works of literature and in film – though the bleakest depiction of the impact of a nuclear attack on Britain, The War Game (1965), was deemed by the BBC to be too horrifying for a mass audience and was banned.
Fear of nuclear weapons had given rise by the late 1950s to the first organized forms of popular opposition. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in February 1958, was backed by a number of prominent left-wing intellectuals and public figures. Among them were Bertrand Russell, the eminent philosopher and longstanding anti-war activist, and John Collins, a well-known Church of England clergyman, a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, an ardent pacifist. Its inaugural meeting in London the following year, demanding Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament, was attended by 5,000 people, in the main Labour supporters. By 1959 it had over 270 branches throughout Britain. Increasingly impressive numbers – an estimated 150,000 by 1962 – joined the march at Easter each year from 1958, the first from London to the nuclear research base fifty miles away at Aldermaston, subsequent marches taking the reverse route. The marchers were predominantly middle class and well educated, the majority of them supporters of Labour. They came from all age groups. Two-thirds of them were male, almost a half of them had a Christian belief, and a similar proportion were uncompromising pacifists.
Some were unworldly idealists. Dora Russell (Bertrand’s second wife), a strong feminist and prominent campaigner on social issues, on whom the Russian Revolution had left an indelible mark, supplied tea to the marchers from the back of her battered campaign coach. The Aldermaston March in 1958 gave her the idea of linking with women from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on a joint peace initiative. The Women’s Caravan for Peace that she organized at the age of sixty-four (actually comprising her old coach and a Ford lorry), comprising nineteen women, took their crusade on an extraordinary journey lasting fourteen weeks through much of Central and Eastern Europe, ending up in Moscow, where they met the Soviet Peace Committee and were treated to an approved tour of agricultural cooperatives. They returned to England by train. Few in London, however, were interested in the epic tale they tried to tell.
Fear of imminent nuclear war was never as acute as during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.* It marked for nearly twenty years the high point of the CND’s protest. The Test Ban Treaty the following year saw its support slump. The CND had always been a minority movement – significant certainly, but never gaining the backing of the majority, even in the Labour Party. Most people recognized the fallacy of the notion that possession of the bomb gave Britain any genuine autonomy from the United States should it come to nuclear war. It was plain during the anxiety at the time of the Cuban missile crisis that, should it come to nuclear war, Britain would most likely be attacked whether it had the bomb or not. Opponents of the country’s nuclear capability argued that it was pointless, therefore, to have the bomb. That was not, however, the reaction of most people. The majority of the population did not favour giving up Britain’s independent nuclear weapons. The bomb was seen as a safeguard, a deterrent against attack – almost universally considered as most likely to come from the Soviet Union. When, if ever, it might be used, and whether a decision on its deployment could be taken independently of America, were seldom questioned. The belief that Britain could rely upon its victorious wartime ally, the United States, indeed perhaps fostered a degree of confidence, even complacency.
It did not follow that there was enthusiastic backing for Britain’s nuclear weapons. People instead largely combined fatalistic acceptance of what they could not change with cautious optimism about the future. Of those asked in an opinion survey conducted in 1959 to gaze into the crystal ball and imagine what might happen by 1980, only 6 per cent thought an atomic war was likely, and 41 per cent thought the Soviet Union and the West would probably by then ‘be living peacefully together’. And five years later, in the general election campaign of 1964, a mere 7 per cent highlighted defence as their most important concern. Daily bread-and-butter issues, not worries about nuclear Armageddon, were what shaped the lives of most people.
Britain and West Germany were in the 1950s and early 1960s in many ways at opposite ends of the spectrum of reactions to the threat posed by the Cold War. Britain saw itself as largely detached from the European continent, a victor in the Second World War, still a great power in possession of a world empire and, since 1952, of its own nuclear weapons. West Germany bore all the psychological as well as material scars of total defeat in the Second World War. Beyond this, divided and (until 1955) still occupied and demilitarized, West Germany stood in the absolute front line of Cold War confrontation, the obvious battleground if hostilities between the superpowers should become a reality, the most likely site of nuclear devastation should confrontation become uncontrolled. While there were some similarities in the way people in the two countries responded to the danger of nuclear war, there were also substantial differences.
So often in the eye of the storm in the post-war years, West Germans were especially sensitive to the threat to world peace posed by an international crisis. In October 1956, for instance, the double crisis over the popular insurrection in Hungary and the ill-fated Suez adventure of Britain and France prompted fears of war in West Germany that were not widely felt in Britain. The extensive sympathies in Britain with the Hungarians who had suffered bloodshed and repression at the hands of the Soviets had not generally been coupled with anxieties that the uprising might lead to war. And the invasion of Egypt by Anglo-French and Israeli forces, though sharply dividing opinion, was as it was taking place backed by a majority of the population (when the invasion failed so dismally, it was another matter). In West Germany, by contrast, in November 1956 well over half of the population feared another war. Almost as large a proportion of public opinion thought that the Soviets would have carried out their threat to launch rocket attacks on Britain and France had there been no ceasefire in Suez. A majority of West Germans thought in the early 1950s that the Western democracies and the communist East would not in the long run be able to live together in peace. Nearly half of those asked between 1951 and 1963 were apprehensive about the imminent outbreak of another war, and felt that they had to reckon with another world war. And a third of the population thought that a future war would entail the use of atomic weapons.
These were certainly the fears of an elderly lower-middle-class citizen of West Berlin, Franz Göll, who lived alone and confided his reflective analysis solely to his diary. Göll thought in 1958 that ‘we are already so close to a Third World War as to be prepared for its outbreak “by the hour”’. He completely opposed the stationing of nuclear weapons on German soil since it made Germany a target in any future war but also restricted the country’s options in any superpower confrontation. He was not assured by the integration of West Germany into NATO, and feared that some unpredictable incident could trigger an American nuclear response. The larger the stockpile of weapons, the more likely it was in his view that an imminent threat ‘will bait the button-pushers’. Rearmament and nuclear weapons, he concluded therefore, threatened rather than guaranteed Germany’s security.
Despite such evident anxieties, anti-nuclear protest made relatively little ground in West Germany during the most dangerous phase of the Cold War. When eighteen internationally famous West German atomic physicists – including Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg – signed an appeal in 1957 against the use of tactical nuclear arms by the recently established federal army or Bundeswehr (a stance that the federal government was considering), their manifesto evoked a response worldwide but only a muted one within West Germany itself. Nevertheless, spurred by this protest and by the example of the CND in Britain, an organization to lead West German opposition to nuclear weapons, backed by sections of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), some well-known intellectuals, a number of public figures and some Protestant theologians, was founded in early 1958. It called itself the ‘Fight against Atomic Death’ (Kampf dem Atomtod). Among its leading representatives were the Protestant theologian Martin Niemöller and the Catholic intellectual Eugen Kogon (both of whom had been incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps), one of West Germany’s most eminent writers, Heinrich Böll, and Gustav Heinemann, a significant voice in the Protestant Church and a political figure of importance (a one-time CDU minister in Adenauer’s first government, but in the meantime an SPD member and later to become the President of West Germany).
While the Protestant Church, though deeply divided on the issue, was heavily engaged in the debate over nuclear weapons, West Germany’s Catholic Church officially kept its distance. It had taken the stance, voiced in 1950 by Cardinal Josef Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, that it was a moral duty to bear arms against totalitarianism. Acceptance of the possibility of a ‘just war’, even using nuclear weapons, remained the Catholic Church’s position – one derived from the experience of Nazism, but now transferred to the perceived evil of Soviet communism. One extreme (if not outrightly zany) view expressed by a Jesuit theologian, Gustav Grundlach, in 1959 (and denounced by other Catholic writers), was that destruction of the world in a nuclear war was preferable to the evil of totalitarian rule.
‘Fight against Atomic Death’ sought to mobilize public feeling against the possibility of the newly established Bundeswehr acquiring nuclear weapons, and to force the removal from West Germany of Allied nuclear weapons. Building on the Aldermaston example, Easter marches of anti-nuclear demonstrators began in 1960 after press reports the previous winter that German troops had tested atomic weapons. The marches gained in popularity over the following years. By 1964 they were taking place in nearly all big German cities and towns; an estimated 100,000 citizens in total took part. Intellectuals, clergy, writers and artists, lawyers and trade unionists were prominent among them, as were young people. But the main political parties (the Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Social Democrats) and most of the press remained hostile towards the anti-nuclear movement.
Unsurprisingly, given such strong influence on public opinion, the protests held little appeal for the majority of the German population. The proximity of the perceived communist threat obviously posed a major problem to the prospects of winning support for disarmament proposals. And the beginning of the protest movement had coincided with the start of the Berlin crisis instigated by Khrushchev. For most people, the worries about the escalating conflict did not translate into opposition to nuclear weapons. The time did not seem right to take the risk of disarmament. And the takeover in West Berlin of the leadership of ‘Fight against Atomic Death’ by Communists (though the official West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956) hardly helped. The ‘Fight against Atomic Death’ campaign had very limited success and was of short duration. It would be more than two decades before the anti-nuclear movement in West Germany would gain new strength.
In France, the second country in Western Europe to acquire its own atomic bomb, the anti-nuclear protest movement also faced great difficulties. Public opinion was evenly split in 1959 on France building its own bomb. The conservative press was in favour, the left-wing press against. Over the next few years increasing proportions of those questioned in opinion polls favoured multilateral nuclear disarmament. But a French bomb was seen as a prestige symbol, an indication that France was a great power. Important voices opposed a French bomb. But they were not backed by most of the population, who were more concerned by the bitter Algerian war than by the prospect of France becoming a nuclear power. Hundreds of writers and public figures (including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir), academics, scientists and religious leaders appealed in 1959 to Charles de Gaulle, who the previous year had become President of the new French Fifth Republic, to abandon nuclear testing. But the first French nuclear test went ahead on 13 February 1960, to widespread popular approval according to an opinion poll the following month. Some 67 per cent of respondents took the view that possession of the atomic bomb gave France higher standing in international affairs. By 1964, however, a year after the partial Test Ban Treaty (which France had not signed), more people opposed than supported a French nuclear defence force. The division mirrored the sharp political division within France on this and other issues. The non-Gaullist parties were by the mid-1960s opposed to France’s nuclear bomb, the conservatives in favour of it.
In most of Western Europe a fairly common pattern emerged. The anti-nuclear movement gained support, especially among the well-educated middle classes and the far left, but ran up against the opposition of the political establishment, the military and most of the press. Frequently, as in the Netherlands, none of the major parties supported the anti-nuclear campaign. Here, the Dutch Labour Party joined conservatives in backing the installation of NATO’s nuclear weapons. In Catholic countries anti-nuclear protest had to contend with the opposition of the Church. This was the case in Italy, where the Catholic Church backed the pro-nuclear policy of the dominant Christian Democrats (though this started to change following the publication of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical letter Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth, in 1963, which exerted a powerful influence internationally on Catholic thinking on war and peace).
Accordingly, anti-nuclear campaigns everywhere failed to win over the majority of the population. Opinion surveys demonstrated widespread and increasing support for complete nuclear disarmament of all countries and, as a step on the way, approval of a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. But one-sided disarmament was another matter altogether.
Some of the strongest support for the anti-nuclear campaign outside Britain and West Germany arose in Greece (somewhat curiously, since there had been no strong pacifist tradition) but there, too, it ran into strong headwinds from the political and military establishment. The CND Aldermaston marches once more provided the main inspiration. And the fear provoked by the Cuban missile crisis swelled the ranks of its activists, especially among students. Some of its support also came from communists whose party had been banned since the civil war of the late 1940s. The conservative government saw revolutionary tendencies in the anti-nuclear protest movement and resorted to heavy-handed repression. It not only banned a march (a copy of Aldermaston) from Marathon to Athens in 1963, but arrested 2,000 protesters and injured several hundred others. The tactic backfired. Support increased rather than fell away. When a Greek independent MP, Grigoris Lambrakis, the only person (because of his parliamentary immunity) to complete the banned Marathon march in 1963, was subsequently murdered by right-wing paramilitaries, no fewer than half a million people joined his funeral procession. The following year, the Marathon march was permitted, with an estimated 250,000 people participating in its final stages. But the anti-nuclear movement remained somewhat disorganized, unclear in its political aims, dependent on communist support, which alienated many Greeks, and relentlessly opposed by the political establishment and the armed forces. Despite the impressive levels of mobilization for the Marathon marches, it would be as well not to exaggerate the support for the anti-nuclear campaign in Greece. This was, as in all countries in Western Europe, divided over the frightening new weapons but mostly favoured their retention if getting rid of them meant exposure to domination by Soviet communism.
Even in neutral Switzerland fear of the bomb did not readily convert into support for anti-nuclear protest. Public opinion was again heavily shaped by a press that reflected the pro-nuclear position of the political establishment and the military. When a grassroots movement to block arming Swiss armed forces with tactical nuclear weapons forced a referendum on the issue, the proposal was opposed by two-thirds of voters. Despite the referendum victory, however, the government, anxious not to incite opposition and divide the country on such a contentious issue, took no steps to arm the military with nuclear weapons.
Only in Denmark and Norway did opposition to nuclear weapons accord with, rather than contest, government policy. Demonstrations against nuclear weapons were aimed at preventing their governments from acquiring them or allowing them to be stationed in their countries. But Danish protesters were largely pushing at an open door, since none of the main political parties favoured the deployment of nuclear weapons in Denmark. Much the same was true of Norway, where parliament had rejected the stationing of nuclear weapons. This move was widely popular, but otherwise Norwegian anti-nuclear agitation gained only limited support owing to its lack of obvious practical objectives. Growing opposition to nuclear armament in the wake of the escalating arms race between the superpowers did score a success in Sweden. Support for the building of a Swedish bomb dropped sharply after the nuclear debate began in 1957. At first backed by 40 per cent of the population, it was a decade or so later opposed by 69 per cent. By the mid-1960s the Swedish government was committed to non-nuclear defence.
Every country in Western Europe, often initially inspired by the CND in Britain, developed its own movement against nuclear armament. Sometimes, as in Britain, the emphasis was on unilateral nuclear disarmament, but in most cases the aim was a worldwide end to nuclear weapons and an immediate ban on their testing. Such feeling mingled with pacifism, though extending far beyond it, and reached a peak between 1957 and 1963 before subsiding as tensions eased following the Test Ban Treaty of 1963. The widespread influence of the CND demonstrates the international character of the peace movements. Even so, national considerations predominated. Whether a country’s background and cultural tradition had been as a ‘great power’ or generally rooted in neutrality and non-alignment strongly affected attitudes. So did the relative weighting of influence from the Christian Churches, the extent of popular support for parties of the left, levels of education, and the role of the mass media in promoting fear of communism and undermining protest through their backing for the policies of governing parties.
Difficult though it is to gauge levels of fear, fatalism and opposition to nuclear weapons in Western Europe during this period, it is absolutely impossible to reach any clear notion of genuine opinion among the peoples of Eastern Europe. Opposition to the Soviet slant on nuclear weaponry, the Cold War and the West could not be publicly expressed. Public opinion was determined by the leadership of the Soviet Union and its satellites, orchestrated to produce maximum uniformity in support of the regime’s policy. Dissident voices could not be publicly heard and were, in any case, few. Relentless and ferocious propaganda was levelled at Western ‘imperialists’, ‘warmongers’ and ‘fascists’ who threatened the peace, democracy and socialism of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Lurid prose was used to denounce the Americans who were ‘brandishing the atomic bomb’ while the Soviet Union ‘stood vigilantly in defence of peace’.
This stance in the Soviet bloc had hardened as the Cold War had deepened in the late 1940s. By 1950 the self-portrayal of the Soviet Union as the leader of a vast international movement of ordinary people seeking peace and freedom from the tyranny of nuclear weapons in the hands of ‘Western imperialists’ had taken shape. In March that year, driven more than anything by fear of war with the United States, a Permanent Committee of the Partisans of Peace, an international organization of pro-Soviet campaigners, met in Stockholm to devise its programme. Out of this emerged the Stockholm Peace Appeal, demanding ‘the unconditional prohibition of the atomic weapon’. A vast, meticulously organized campaign was then launched with intense mobilization of the population through mass meetings, rallies and propaganda in factories, workshops and homes to gather signatures throughout the Soviet bloc and beyond for a petition in support of the Appeal.
The petition gained, so it was claimed, the signatures of over 500 million citizens from 79 countries, 400 million of them from communist countries, the rest largely from Soviet sympathizers elsewhere. By the end of 1950 it had been signed by more than 115 million Soviet citizens, more or less the entire adult population of the USSR. In Hungary an unlikely total of 7.5 million signatures from a total population (including children) of 9.2 million was announced. In Poland it was signed by 18 million people. The 190,000 who had failed to sign it (sometimes, individuals claimed, because they had been ill or incapacitated) were denigrated as ‘kulaks, urban speculators . . . the reactionary section of the clergy and members of Jehovah’s Witnesses’. Only Yugoslavia, constantly assailed by the Soviet Union since the schism of 1948, trod a different path. Its own peace movement attacked ‘Soviet imperialism’ as a threat to world peace as well as the aggression of Western powers.
Even though the worst of the repression of deviant views was ended with Stalin’s death in 1953, outright opposition to the regime’s policy on nuclear weapons could still not be openly expressed. A number of leading scientists, sometimes emboldened by contacts with their counterparts involved in anti-nuclear protest in the West, argued behind the scenes for nuclear arms control and disarmament. But even at a high level this was not without risks. The nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov had played an important part in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but by the 1970s he was persecuted for his outspoken views on human rights and suppression of liberties in the Soviet Union. When he opposed plans for a resumption of nuclear tests at a meeting of government leaders and scientists in Moscow in 1961, he was denounced by Khrushchev before the entire General Assembly in a tirade lasting half an hour.
Opposition expressed in a closed meeting did not, of course, seep out to the general public. A hint that the official stance of the regime did not wholly match popular views on nuclear weapons might be gleaned from the warm reception given by hundreds of passers-by in many towns and villages to a remarkable trek in 1961 by thirty-one peace marchers. They walked from San Francisco to Moscow and were permitted to travel through the Soviet Union on the last stages of the 5,000-mile journey. What people privately thought of the escalation of the nuclear arms race and how extensive their fears were can, however, only be surmised.
A reasonable assumption is that the views of most people amounted to practically a mirror image of Western fears of the Soviet Union. The scaremongering about Western ‘imperialists’, the emphasis on the nuclear danger posed by the United States and NATO (far from always unjustified), and the civil-defence propaganda that drew attention to the threat of nuclear attack, probably contributed to enhancing the anxieties of ordinary citizens. At the same time, there is no reason to doubt that most people believed much of what they were told about the Cold War (from exactly the opposite viewpoint of those in Western Europe) and were convinced that Soviet strength offered them the best safeguard against NATO-led aggression. Probably, therefore, people in the Soviet bloc welcomed the displays of Soviet military hardware and nuclear prowess (seen in the West as threatening) as their own guarantee against the danger from the West, specifically from the United States.
The great divide across the Iron Curtain thus separated attitudes towards the nuclear threat as it did so much else. The threat of nuclear devastation was common, however, to both halves of the continent – a continuing backcloth to people’s lives even if the population (or their representatives) reacted to it in different ways. And at certain critical junctures, most especially during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, it intruded sharply, though usually briefly. The evidence, difficult though it is to assemble and interpret, does not, however, tend to support Eric Hobsbawm’s notion (mentioned earlier) that people lived in ‘a kind of nervous hysteria’ about The Bomb.
Unquestionably, there was near universal support for limiting the arms race, and preferably stopping it altogether. Most people, too, favoured nuclear disarmament by all powers – though unilateral nuclear disarmament was a different proposition altogether. The anti-nuclear movement gained momentum, starting in Britain, in practically all Western European countries in the late 1950s, as the horrific destructive potential of the hydrogen bomb became widely evident and Europe faced the dangerous crisis over Berlin. But nowhere did it win the support of the majority of the population. Anti-Soviet propaganda and the perceived threat from the USSR were sufficient to ensure that the bulk of the population in Western European countries backed the Cold War stance of their governments. In the Soviet bloc regime control of opinion was even more successful in blotting out any possibility of a challenge to nuclear policy, at the same time ensuring near total official commitment to peace, reinforced through the image, incessantly hammered home, of the dangerous, warlike ambitions of the United States and NATO.
In the east, too, in so far as it is possible to detect, the population ideally wanted worldwide nuclear disarmament and in any case limitations on nuclear arms. In both Eastern and Western Europe there was a good deal of realism behind the differently structured peace movements. A world completely free of nuclear arms was the ideal of most people. But there was also recognition that nuclear weapons, once invented, could not be wished away. They were a fact of life – a terrifying one if allowed to preoccupy the mind. So there was little tendency to dwell upon the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. People shut it out of their minds. They simply got on with their lives, aware of the threat of the mushroom cloud but not allowing it to dominate their existence, let alone reduce them to a state of hysteria. People acclimatized to fear. The dread of nuclear conflict was a latent presence rather than (apart from passing episodes) an acute anxiety. This allowed people to live with fear. It made them, for the most part, fatalistic about their survival in a world that might continue to exist without nuclear war. Some – how many is impossible to calculate – even no doubt welcomed the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides of the Cold War divide, seeing it as the best hope of avoiding a third world war. And in Western Europe at least people generally had other things on their mind – most obviously how to make the most of the remarkable upturn in economic prospects that was bringing about a dramatic improvement to their living standards.