Arms Race
The nuclear arms race was central to the Cold War. Many feared where the Cold War was going with the belief that the more nuclear weapons you had, the more powerful you were. Both America and Russia massively built up their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Arms race definition, competition between countries to achieve superiority in quantity and quality of military arms.
An arms race denotes a rapid increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military power by rival states in peacetime. The first modern arms race took place when France and Russia challenged the naval superiority of Britain in the late nineteenth century. Germany’s attempt to surpass Britain’s fleet spilled over into World War I, while tensions after the war between the United States, Britain and Japan resulted in the first major arms-limitation treaty at the Washington Conference. The buildup of arms was also a characteristic of the Cold War between the U.S. And the Soviet Union, though the development of nuclear weapons changed the stakes for the par. Over the past century, the arms race metaphor has assumed a prominent place in public discussion of military affairs. But even more than the other colorful metaphors of security studies–balance of power, escalation, and the like–it may cloud rather than clarify understanding of the dynamics of international rivalries.
An arms race denotes a rapid, competitive increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military or naval power by rival states in peacetime. What it connotes is a game with a logic of its own. Typically, in popular depictions of arms races, the political calculations that start and regulate the pace of the game remain obscure. As Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., has noted, “The strange result is that the activity of the other side, and not one’s own resources, plans, and motives, becomes the determinant of one’s behavior.” And what constitutes the “finish line” of the game is the province of assertion, rather than analysis. Many onlookers, and some participants, have claimed that the likelihood of war increases as the accumulation of arms proceeds apace. A close examination of the historical evidence reveals a different picture.
Political purposes almost always drive and govern arms races. It is common for a major race to be initiated by a state interested in changing the political status quo. In some cases, the response of states content with the status quo is swift and resolute, but in other cases it is constrained by domestic political or economic considerations or diverted by diplomatic calculations. The course of an arms race has frequently exacerbated a sense of rivalry and occasionally even determined the timing of a war; but most often it has ended in a political settlement between rivals or in a decision by one side to moderate its buildup.
The first competitive buildup in which contemporaries used the arms race metaphor seems to have been the naval rivalry in the late nineteenth century, in which France and Russia challenged Britain in the context of acute tensions over colonial expansion. The British responded with a determination to remain masters of the seas. The ultimate result was not war, but rather an Anglo-French political settlement in 1904 and an Anglo-Russian rapprochement in 1907 against the background of a rising German threat.
The German challenge to Britain in the early twentieth century involved the most famous naval arms race of all. As the post-Bismarck political leadership decided that Germany must become a world power, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was able to justify building a large German battle fleet. When the British finally responded, the upshot was a competition that fit an action-reaction model more closely than any other arms race. The Germans in the end could not keep up, because of domestic difficulties in raising taxes and pressures to give greater priority to spending on the army. Though the naval arms race did poison Anglo-German relations, it was the actions of the German army, not the German navy, that ultimately produced war in 1914.
A third major naval arms race, involving the United States, Britain, and Japan, erupted at the end of. It was fueled by Japanese efforts to expand their political influence in East Asia and by an American attempt to gain greater political leverage over Britain.
This was a race that, for financial reasons, none of the participants wanted to run very far. It ended at the Conference of 1921-1922 with the first major arms-limitation treaty ever and a new political settlement for East Asia. Was there, then, no truth at all in the 1925 verdict of a former British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that “great armaments lead inevitably to war”? In fact, an arms race among European armies had some part in the outbreak of World War I. In the July crisis of 1914, German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg took greater risks in brinkmanship than he might have otherwise done, because of a presumption that Russia’s stepped-up efforts to improve its military capability meant Germany would be in a stronger position to win a war in 1914 than later.
Similarly, was in a rush to attack France in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941, partly because of the dynamics of an arms race that he had started in the 1930s. Held back by domestic financial constraints, Britain and France had lagged behind. But they, and Germany’s other adversaries, had accelerated their rearmament in the late 1930s, and Hitler moved forward his program of conquest lest the German lead be overtaken. Japan, too, succumbed to “now or never” calculations in 1941. Its naval leaders appreciated that the Japanese navy had gained a lead over the U.S. Pacific Fleet in every class of warship, but that a massive American naval program begun in 1940 would leave them far behind by 1943.
Coupled with the effects of an American oil embargo against Japan, this playing out of the dynamics of an arms race helped to prompt an attack on the United States in December 1941 (see, Attack on). But in this case, as in the two European wars, hegemonic political ambitions fueled the conflict. Leads and lags in an arms race against a background of a hegemonic struggle characterized the as well, but the deterrent effect of weapons of mass destruction made “now or never” calculations much less tempting for the superpowers of the nuclear age. The arms competition between the United States and the Soviet Union did not fit an action-reaction model very well.
For domestic political and economic reasons, the United States was slow to rearm in the late 1940s even as it perceived hegemonic ambitions on the part of the Soviets. After the United States did greatly increase its nuclear and conventional arms during the, the Soviet leadership for its own domestic reasons made only a partial response. When from the mid-1960s the Soviets undertook the most massive peacetime military buildup in history, the United States chose to disengage somewhat from the race.
Mutually Assured Destruction
Not until after 1979 did it reassess its posture. The new qualitative improvements embodied in the last American arms spurt of the Cold War made Soviet military leaders nervous and helps explain why they were willing in the mid-1980s to accept the new ideas promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev in hopes of raising the technological level of Soviet society. The arms race that had produced the greatest anxiety among contemporaries ended in the most astonishing political settlement of the past century. The Reader’s Companion to Military History. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The Cold War The seeds of hostility between the United States and the USSR began near the end of World War I. The Bolsheviks (later Communists) overthrew the existing Russian government. In December 1922 began the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under Communist control. The United States refused to recognize the Soviet state until 1933.
The profound ideological differences between the USSR and the United States were problematic and made worse by Joseph Stalin, who ruled the USSR from 1929 to 1953 as a ruthless dictator. In July 16, 1945, the creation of the first atomic bomb came to fruition in the United States and was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico at a site called 'Trinity'. The atomic bomb had two objectives: a quick end of World War II and possession by the US (and not USSR), would allow control of foreign policy. In 1947 president Harry S.
Truman authorized U.S. Aid (The Truman Doctrine) to anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey. The policy was expanded to justify support for any nation that the U.S. Government considered to be threatened by Soviet expansionism. This policy, known as the containment doctrine, was aimed at holding back and restricting the spread of Communism world wide.
Containment quickly became the official U.S. Policy towards the USSR.
In the meantime, the Russians obtained top secret blue prints of the original Trinity design. On August 29th, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. This event ends America's monopoly of atomic weaponry and launches the Cold War.
In the 1950's, The Arms Race became the focus of the Cold War. America tested the first Hydrogen (or thermo-nuclear) bomb in 1952, beating the Russians in the creation of the 'Super Bomb'. The political climate of the Cold war became more defined in January, 1954, when U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the policy that came to be known as 'massive retaliation' - any major Soviet attack would be met with a massive nuclear response. As a result to the challenge of 'massive retaliation' came the most significant by-product of the Cold War, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). The ICBM's were supported with the thermo-nuclear bomb (with a much greater destructive power than the original atomic bomb), inertial guidance systems (defines the difference between weight, the influence of gravity and the impact of inertia), and powerful booster engines for multistage rockets.
As a result, ballistic missiles became sufficiently accurate and powerful to destroy targets 8000 km (5000 mi) away. For more than thirty years, the ICBM has been the symbol of the United States' strategic nuclear arsenal. In October 1961, The Soviet Union detonates a nuclear device, estimated at 58 megatons, the equivalent of more than 50 million tons of TNT, or more than all the explosives used during World War II. It is the largest nuclear weapon the world had ever seen at that time. The Tsar Bomba (King of the Bombs) is detonated after US and USSR agree to limit nuclear testing. It is the largest nuclear device ever exploded. Having no strategic military value, Tsar is viewed as an act of intimidation by the Soviets.
The Cuban Missile Crisis The most serious Cold War confrontation between the United States and the USSR that took place in October, 1962. Discovered that the Soviets were in the process of positioning nuclear missiles in Communist Cuba. The United States sends naval blockade to stop Soviet ships carrying missiles to Cuba. October, 22, U.S.
Military alert is set at DEFCON 3 and Castro mobilizes all of Cuba's military forces. October, 24, Soviet ships reach the quarantine line, but receive radio orders from Moscow to hold their positions while being backed up by a Soviet submarine. JFK concludes that if we invade in the next ten days, the missile base crews in Cuba will likely fire at least some of the missiles at US targets. October, 25, American military forces are instructed to set DEFCON 2 - the highest ever in U.S.
October, 26, Khrushchev receives a cable from Castro urging a nuclear first strike against the US in the event of an invasion of Cuba. October, 27, while one U-2 spy plane accidentally flies into Russia, another is shot down over Cuba. October, 28, the crises ends. In a speech aired on Radio Moscow, Khrushchev announces the dismantling of Soviet missiles in Cuba and does not insist on his demands concerning the removal of U.S. Missiles from Turkey.
From the Cuban missile crisis both sides learned that risking nuclear war in pursuit of political objectives was simply too dangerous. It was the last time during the Cold War that either side would take this risk. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and USSR still superimposed their competition on local conflicts in other parts of the globe. In Africa, newly independent nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, received military backing and other assistance from the United States and the USSR. American-Soviet competition in the Third World intensified once again, this time during the civil war in Angola and the Somali-Ethiopian war over the Ogaden region. During this phase of the Cold War, Communist Cuba played a significant role alongside the USSR, while the Chinese, now deeply wary of the USSR, participated on the side of the United States.
The early 1980s was a final period of friction between the United States and the USSR, resulting mainly from the Soviets' invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to establish a Communist regime. In 1983, president Ronald Reagan announces the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Commonly known as Star Wars, SDI is envisioned as a satellite-based nuclear defense system, which would destroy incoming missiles and warheads in space. August 1985, the Soviet Union announces a nuclear testing moratorium. December 1987, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S.
President Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces - the first arms accord signed by both Moscow and Washington that calls for the elimination of an entire class of weapons - intermediate-range missiles. July 1991,the United States and the Soviet Union sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Act.