Jeremi Suri

The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969

On the evening of October 10, 1969, Gen. Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), sent a top secret message to major U.S. military commanders around the world informing them that the JCS had been directed “by higher authority” to increase U.S. military readiness “to respond to possible confrontation by the Soviet Union.” The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was ordered to stand down all aircraft combat training missions and to increase the number of nucleararmed B-52 bombers on ground alert. These readiness measures were implemented on October 13. Even more dramatic, on October 27 SAC launched a series of B-52 bombers, armed with thermonuclear weapons, on a “show of force” airborne alert, code-named Giant Lance. During this alert operation, eighteen B-52s took off from bases in California and Washington State. The bombers crossed Alaska, were refueled in midair by KC-135 tanker aircraft, and then oew in oval patterns toward the Soviet Union and back, on eighteenhour “vigils” over the northern polar ice cap. Why did the U.S. military go on a nuclear alert in October 1969? The alert was a loud but secret military signal ordered by President Richard Nixon. Nixon sought to convince Soviet and North Vietnamese leaders that he might do anything to end the war in Vietnam, in accordance with his “madman theory” of coercive diplomacy. The nuclear alert measures were therefore speciacally chosen to be loud enough to be picked up quickly by the Soviet Union’s intelligence agencies. The military operation was also, however, deliberately designed to remain secret from the American public and U.S. allies. InThe Madman Nuclear Alert

Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?

Despite the many books and articles written about the end of the Cold War, scholars have not produced a truly international history f this seminal event. This article shows how some of the most important monographs on the end of the Cold War can be synthesized to yield a preliminary account. In particular, the article outlines an interpretation that connects the immediate crisis of the early 1980s, long-term ideological and institutional trends, and transformational choices made from 1985 to 1991. N single decision or variable brought the Cold War t an end. Personalities, trends, and institutions interacted to create an outcome that few predicted.

America's Search for a Technological Solution to the Arms Race: The Surprise Attack Conference of 1958 and a Challenge for “Eisenhower Revisionists”

The allure of Dwight D. Eisenhower for historians emerges largely from the former president’s profundity and subtlety of character. Unlike his more straightforward predecessor, Harry S. Truman, the heroic general approached foreign affairs with thoughtful, informed goals and aspirations, often disguised by ambivalent and apparently passive public positions. Richard H. Immerman and Fred I. Greenstein have written at length about the perspicacity of Eisenhower’s analysis of the nuclear revolution and his “hidden-hand” leadership. Ingeniously, the so-called revisionists argue, the president used threats, covert activities, and restraint in different circumstances to produce one of the most successful and cost-efficient foreign policy records of any American commander in chief. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War observers have trouble arguing with Eisenhower’s alleged boast: “The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened – by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.”

Revitalizing the U.S. National Security Strategy

Strategy is an act of imagination. That is the fundamental insight from Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian theorist who in his classic book, On War, wrote: “... if the whole is to be vividly present to the mind, imprinted like a picture, like a map, upon the brain, without fading or blurring in detail, it can only be achieved by the mental gift that we call imagination... If imagination is entirely lacking it would be difficult to combine details into a clear, coherent image.” Strategic planning is important because it forces a fragmented policy bureaucracy to think imaginatively about how the world works and what their nation can achieve. Strategic planning creates space for leaders to articulate priorities and match diverse capabilities to overarching goals. When done well, it allows powerful governments to become forward-looking international agenda-setters, avoiding the all-too-frequent tendency to react to emerging crises in piecemeal fashion. Strategic planning sees order and opportunity in the chaos and threats of daily politics. Clausewitz famously called this the “inward eye” (coup d’oeil) of leadership. Imagination does not necessarily correlate positively with power; in fact, the two attributes might have an inverse relationship in the modern world. The history of the last quarter-century shows that the United States has had trouble imagining how to use its power to promote order in an increasingly complex

Detente and human rights: American and West European perspectives on international change

Observers of international relations frequently assume that human rights challenge realpolitik. This article shows that in the context of negotiations about European security in the early 1970s, the two went hand-in-hand. Despite significant transatlantic differences, Americans and Europeans conceptualized human rights as products of the Cold War, and principles for assuming more order and stability in the international system. Human rights discussions and agreements were not designed to end the Cold War in the 1970s. This analysis challenges assumptions about the absence of human rights in détente, and the alleged connection between the Helsinki Final Act and the Revolutions of 1989. The anti-Cold War quality of human rights activism in the 1980s was not present a decade earlier.

The Cold War, Decolonization, and Global Social Awakenings: Historical Intersections

Edward Said’s shadow hovers around all contemporary studies of imperialism. The late literary scholar’s penetrating analyses of how condescending assumptions about the ‘Orient’ infected Western thought have forced scholars to meditate on the power inequalities and prejudices inscribed in the basic discourses of international relations. Western concepts like democracy, liberty, and justice are, according to Said, freighted with deep assumptions about Western superiority and Eastern subservience. Said blames intellectuals, in particular, for legitimizing imperial discourses that, in turn, legitimize imperial practices. Said’s scholarly work, though largely focused on the nineteenth century, has enormous implications for the history of the post-1945 world. The United States, according to Said, resurrected all of the old ‘Orientalist’ tools in its management of a repressive Cold War empire:

Conflict and Co-operation in the Cold War: New Directions in Contemporary Historical Research

In recent years historical scholarship on the Cold War has moved in many new directions. Scholars, notably John Lewis Gaddis, Melvyn Leffler, and Vladislav Zubok, have produced narratives that cover the entire period, integrating archival sources from various societies and re-examining long-standing questions about origins, duration, costs, and consequences in light of this evidence. We now have deeply considered histories of the entire Cold War. Other historians, particularly Odd Arne Westad, Piero Gleijeses, Chen Jian, and Mark Bradley, have examined how ‘third world’ societies, despite their relatively weak international position, influenced the dynamics of the Cold War. We now have histories of the Cold War that are truly international in scale and scope. Perhaps most controversially, another group of historians has focused on the role of non-traditional actors operating across societies and regions. For Martin Klimke, David Ekbladh, Bradley Simpson, Matthew Connelly, Andrew Rotter, and myself, among others, the story of the Cold War involves a contested re-definition of power through the deployment of new ideas, institutions, and technologies that do not match the lines of state authority on our maps of

Counter-cultures: the rebellions against the Cold War order, 1965–1975

In The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan’s 1963 attack on domesticity – the author describes how she “gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while…came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.” Despite the outward appearances of wealth and contentment, she argued that the Cold War was killing happiness. Women, in particular, faced strong public pressures to conform with a family image that emphasized a finely manicured suburban home, pampered children, and an ever-present “housewife heroine.” This was the asserted core of the good American life. This was the cradle of freedom. This was, in the words of Adlai Stevenson, the “assignment” for “wives and mothers”: “Western marriage and motherhood are yet another instance of the emergence of individual freedom in our Western society. Their basis is the recognition in women as well as men of the primacy of personality and individuality. Friedan disagreed, and she was not alone. Surveys, interviews, and observations revealed that countless women suffered from a problem that had no name within the standard lexicon of society at the time. They had achieved the “good life,” and yet they felt unfulfilled. Friedan quoted one particularly articulate young mother: I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do – hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, running PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn’t leave you anything to think about – any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality.

The Cultural Contradictions of Cold War Education: The Case of West Berlin

The history of the Cold War in the 1960s is a history of disillusionment and unintended consequences. Writing in the aftermath of this turbulent decade, sociologist Daniel Bell observed that the promises of liberal capitalism in the twentieth century – individual enterprise, extensive wealth creation and technological progress – had produced their own internal detractors. Many of the young beneficiaries of capitalist enterprise, wealth and technology in the most prosperous Western societies no longer wished to support this system of relations. Raised in privilege, Bell’s students at Harvard and other universities felt free to reject dominant political and economic institutions in search of cultural alternatives that emphasized more transcendent values. The very successes of capitalism undermined its hold on the minds of young men and women who took their high standard of living for granted. Modern societies confronted, in Bell’s famous phrase, ‘the cultural contradictions of capitalism’. Bell’s analysis remains powerful, but it suffers from a neglect of the Cold War context that framed the development of capitalist institutions after 1945. Soviet–American rivalry transformed capitalism. Confronted by a communist adversary that appeared capable of endless ‘crash’ production programmes, the US government and its allies pushed for rapid advances in science and technology. To stay ahead of Soviet slave labour, Americans emphasized innovation, with generous federal support. Recent studies of the US ‘military-industrial complex’ have highlighted this point, particularly as it relates to the ways American policy makers contributed to a culture of inventiveness rather than enforced regimentation in the industrial facilities, military institutions and universities funded for anti-communist purposes. The inventiveness financed during the Cold War gave the United States a tremendous long-term advantage in its competition with