The Twilight Struggle by Hal Brands

Author:Hal Brands
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300250787
Publisher: Yale University Press

A second aspect of U.S. strategy was using technology to conquer secrecy. The Kremlin’s veil of isolation permitted it to either mask or exaggerate its military strengths. This could be a critical asset when assessing the military balance was vital and avoiding surprise attack was paramount. America could hardly emulate Soviet practices. “Thanks to our habit of publicizing everything,” Ike said in 1953, “it was so much easier for the Soviets to find out what they needed to know about our capabilities.”43 Instead, America maximized its own asymmetric advantage. “What saved us,” DCI James Schlesinger later remarked, “was our adoption of technology.”44

This intelligence offset strategy was there from the start. During the early Cold War, when America’s human intelligence capabilities were basically nonexistent, Washington used SIGINT—which capitalized on advantages in science, technology, and mathematics—to narrow the deficit. Under the VENONA program, Army codebreakers uncovered Soviet espionage in America. In 1946, SIGINT helped reveal how serious the Soviet threat to Turkey was. And in 1951, communications intercepts reassured Truman that the Soviets would not attack Western Europe while U.S. forces were bogged down in Korea. Thereafter, Truman and his successors aggressively expanded America’s global SIGINT partnerships, marrying technological superiority to the benefits of genuine multilateralism.45

The NSA soon built an intelligence empire second to none. That agency employed more holders of advanced degrees in mathematics and electronics than any other entity. It developed a global network of ground intercept and monitoring stations. During the 1950s, specially equipped surveillance planes mapped Soviet air defenses; by the 1970s, a combination of SIGINT satellites, communications intercepts, and other tools allowed the NSA to track Moscow’s most sophisticated military capabilities and detect signs of any major mobilization or attack.46 Throughout the Cold War, SIGINT illuminated the dark interior of the Soviet bloc.

Yet the payoff from using technology to penetrate secrecy was greatest in the 1950s and 1960s. American knowledge of Soviet military programs was very limited then, creating severe analytical problems. The United States found itself vulnerable to cheap gimmicks, as when the same Soviet bombers repeatedly flew past the U.S. embassy on May Day, 1955, to create the impression that the overall fleet was several times its actual size.47 The intelligence deficit also rendered Washington susceptible to worst-case analyses after unexpected shocks, such as the launch of Sputnik. When systematic information is lacking, nuggets of data—however misleading—take on outsized importance.

During the 1950s, Washington was thus gripped by fears of a bomber gap and then a missile gap. The Air Force warned that the Soviets might have 1,000 ICBMs by 1962; the CIA projected a lesser, but still terrifying, American inferiority.48 “Strategic missiles will surely replace the manned bombers, as the longbow replaced the knights’ swords,” journalist Stewart Alsop warned. America would be like “the mounted French knights at Crécy, sword in hand, facing the skilled British bowmen killing them at will.”49 That prospect created psychological leverage for Khrushchev and left skeptics—namely Eisenhower—struggling to make the case that America was not headed for disaster.

Eisenhower tried to solve this problem through mutual transparency.

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