The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity by Mastny Vojtech;

Author:Mastny, Vojtech;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195126594
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-03-07T10:11:03+00:00

Win the War at Home

In one of the Cold War’s many ironies, Western fear of Soviet threat increased just as Stalin’s rule was entering the stage of its terminal paralysis. The slowing down of hostilities in Korea had the paradoxical effect of generating the concern that Moscow was becoming more dangerous because of its presumed ability to convince enough people in the West that it was becoming less so. NATO suspected its design to expand its power by political means “whenever an opportunity is offered to do so without serious risks to its interests.”59 Even the perspicacious Kennan, while allowing for divisions of opinion in Moscow and ups and downs in Soviet estimates of the correlation of forces, tended to overstate the confidence with which the adversary was presumably acting. In his penetrating analysis of Soviet perceptions of the Western alliance, he correctly identified Stalin’s 1949 belief that capitalism was preparing for war but was politically in crisis,60 yet more questionably presumed that he was therefore ready to act upon the premise of the Soviet Union’s own ascendancy.61

In 1952 the Russians had growing reasons to be more concerned about the capabilities and intentions of the Americans than vice versa. In the spring, the first U.S. tactical nuclear arms were sent to Europe with the intention of being used if needed.62 In May Washington, exasperated by the communists’ procrastination in Korea and what Truman detested as their total “lack of honor and … moral code,”63 was again considering the deployment of atomic bombs in Asia. A war scare reappeared in Europe, although in its Eastern part, where many people regarded war as their only way to freedom, there was more excitement than fear about it. Rumors spread through the city of Prague, passing the word that the Americans were coming, maybe even “within the next two months.”64 The regime there became so edgy that it even put on public trial and sentenced to long prison terms a group of Boy Scout leaders for “hoping for war.”65

During that chilliest month of the Cold War, when East Germany was finally set on the road of Soviet “socialism,”66 orchestrated anti-American propaganda reached a level without “equal in viciousness, shamelessness, mendacity, and intensity.”67 This applied particularly to the charges that Washington had been conducting “bacteriological war fare” in Korea. It was not, although there had been enough secret U.S. research and experiments with biological weapons68 to make Stalin—with his own predilection for surreptitious methods of killing—hysterical if he was able to find out anything about what was going on.

New themes, alarming to Moscow, permeated the increasingly acrimonious U.S. presidential campaign. Even aside from the antics of the ludicrous Sen. Joseph McCarthy of the House Un-American Activities Committee, searching for such “traitors” as Acheson, anti-Soviet demagogy flourished. The Republicans demanded the repeal of what they denounced as the treasonable Yalta agreement, vowing to do away with what they lambasted as the Truman administration’s intolerably timid and bankrupt policy of Moscow’s mere containment and provide a more assertive substitute.

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