James G. Hershberg

Peace Probes and the Bombing Pause: Hungarian and Polish Diplomacy During the Vietnam War, December 1965-January 1966

Archival materials from Budapest and Warsaw have shed valuable light on the role that Hungary and Poland played as intermediaries between Washington and Hanoi during the 37-day pause in the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam in December 1965January 1966. It is now possible to trace contacts between the East European countries and Hanoi and to see how the Hungarian and Polish governments coordinated their diplomatic activities with the Soviet Union. Although the new evidence does not reveal any missed opportunities in early 1966 for the opening of direct peace negotiations between Washington and Hanoi, it does cast doubt on the way that former U.S. officials and most historians have interpreted these events. Up to now, almost all accounts have dismissed Hungarys and Polands efforts as insincere and deceptive, and some observers have even questioned whether the two countries were genuinely in contact with North Vietnamese leaders. The documentary evidence leaves many questions unanswered, but it permits a far more nuanced assessment of East European diplomacy during the bombing pause.

‘High-Spirited Confusion’: Brazil, the 1961 Belgrade Non-Aligned Conference, and the Limits of an ‘Independent’ Foreign Policy during the High Cold War

The article recounts the story, hidden until now, of Brazils abortive attempt to send an observer to the September 1961 Belgrade conference – the founding gathering of the Non-Aligned Movement, a follow-on to the 1955 Bandung conference of newly-independent, decolonizing nations from Africa and Asia. Using declassified Brazilian as well as US and British sources, the article illustrates Washingtons ambivalence toward what it saw as the Brazilian governments flirtation with neutralism, and Rios difficulties in pursuing what it defined as a more ‘independent’ foreign policy – notwithstanding membership in a US-led hemispheric collective security bloc epitomized by the 1947 Rio pact and the Organization of American States. The article also touches on NAMs problems in expanding to Latin America, and the irritant to US–Yugoslav (i.e., Tito) ties caused by the issue of Brazilian participation.

The Cuban missile crisis

In October 1962, the Cold War endured its most perilous passage – and humanity survived its closest brush with the ultimate man-made catastrophe: a thermonuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union that could have incinerated scores of cities and killed half a billion people, rendered much of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable, lacerated industrial civilization, and stamped a lethal exclamation point on a century already twice bloodied by outbursts of global carnage that would now pale in comparison. On its surface, the Cuban missile crisis involved a single discrete set of circumstances: It stemmed from Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev’s secret dispatch of nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba and US president John F. Kennedy’s determination to reverse that deployment – and climaxed during the famous “13 Days” “eyeball-to-eyeball” ”on the brink” (the crisis birthed so many cliches that one can string them together to evoke it) extending from Washington’s detection of the missiles in mid-October to Khrushchev’s coerced consent to remove them on October 28. Yet, any serious analysis requires assessing how multiple narratives converged to bring the Cold War to its tensest apex. Most broadly, the crisis starkly dramatized the chasm between ends and means that Hiroshima portended for international affairs. Cuba itself represented a vital interest for neither the United States nor the Soviet Union; both proclaimed their ideological contest should be decided through gradual historical processes, not war; and both Khrushchev and Kennedy sought their political goals short of a hazardous military collision.

Collateral Damage? “Marigold,” Franco–American Relations, and Secret Vietnam Peace Diplomacy, 1966–1967

ABSTRACT The Vietnam War exacerbated the already tense relationship between Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon B. Johnson; and Franco–American relations reached a nadir in winter 1966–1967 when de Gaulle vetoed a proposed visit to Hanoi by Jean Sainteny, a former colonial official, who Washington had desired to probe North Vietnam’s position. This analysis adds a new wrinkle to the story. Building on research for Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (2012), the author reveals that French knowledge of only the Polish version of that peace initiative’s failure, fully blaming the Americans, further soured de Gaulle’s view of Johnson’s handling of the war and American sincerity in seeking peace. The analysis also unveils a new dimension of Henry Kissinger’s involvement in Vietnam diplomacy—prior to the Nixon White House—missing from earlier accounts.

Where the Buck Stopped: Harry S Truman and the Cold War

Book reviewed: Arnold A. Offner. Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953.

The war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Contra affair: Missing links?

Though they were crucial international events during the 1980s, the final decade of the Cold War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Contra affair are usually considered in isolation from each other. The present article draws together declassified evidence to trace previously ignored connections between them, demonstrating that the secret arms dealings with Iran carried out by the Reagan administrations National Security Council staff included provisions for Tehran to transfer some of the American weapons it received to pro-Iranian mujaheddin in Afghanistan, and that covert cooperation against the Soviets in Afghanistan constituted an important dimension of the clandestine dialogue carried on by US and Iranian representatives.

“Over My Dead Body”: James B. Conant and the Hydrogen Bomb

The U.S. government’s decision to develop the hydrogen bomb was a landmark of the nuclear arms race and a crucible of the science-military connection. Seeking a response to the unexpected and unwelcome news in the autumn of 1949 that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic device, and with it the four-year American atomic monopoly, U.S. policymakers stood at a crossroads. One path was chosen on January 31, 1950, after four months of intense, sometimes bitter, and mostly secret debate within an elite stratum of government and military officials, scientists, and congressmen, when President Harry S. Truman, rejecting the advice of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), endorsed a program to develop thermonuclear weapons. Despite its “minimalist” aspects (1), the outcome represented a clear victory for one faction of the policy elite and, at least potentially, a missed opportunity to restrain the nuclear arms race at a far lower level of destructiveness than in fact evolved. The decision, and the subsequent stripping of the security clearance of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the GAC chairman who had argued against the H-bomb, also dramatized the ethical and political tensions present at the intersection of science and technology, military policy and strategy, and national and bureaucratic politics, and they offer a cogent case study of the technological and political forces driving the arms race (2).