The Cold War

The Berlin Wall opened twenty years ago today. If it did not mark the end of the Cold War, it was certainly the beginning of the last chapter.

I grew up during the Cold War. When I was a child, at one point the United States and the Soviet Union came within an eyelash of fighting a nuclear war. Before my time, there were two serious confrontations that had the possibility of sparking a general war. There were lesser confrontations via proxies for many decades, wars which overall killed millions of people and maimed millions more.

Both sides tried to foment trouble in each other's sphere of influence. People who ranted and raved about the Soviets backing national liberation movements conveniently forgot about the CIA's arming guerrilla groups in the Baltics, the Adriatic and in eastern Europe in the late `40s. At the same time that the Soviets were sending missiles to Cuba, the US had Jupiter missiles in Turkey.

American and Soviet citizens lived for decades under the threat of a nuclear war and, due to the severe ecological damage that a full-blown nuclear war would have caused, so did everyone else. Some American planners believed in the possibility of a limited nuclear war. Soviet doctrine was to respond to any nuclear attack with an "everything in the air" counterattack. Both nations were absolutely paranoid at the idea of a surprise attack from the other. That was understandable, when one considers that both nations were brought into World War II as a result of surprise attacks. For at least 29 years, an American aerial national command post was in the air for every hour of that time (Operation Looking Glass). The navy had companion "TACAMO" aircraft in the air for control of missile submarines. The Soviets had Mertvaya Ruka, a system to guarantee that the order would be given to retaliate in the event of an American surprise attack.

Both sides had intelligence successes and failures. Each side had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons ranging from micro-nukes with a yield of ten tons of TNT to megaton-yield city-busters (the really big ones in the ten+ megaton range could only be delivered by aircraft, which had a low probability of success).

I served in the navy during the Cold War. We had missile submarines near the Soviet Union. The Soviets had missile patrols in the western Atlantic. Soviet and American naval forces played some pretty rough games in the 1960s, resulting in collisions at sea and "shouldering", where destroyers would come up alongside each other and try to shove the other one off course. Both sides recognized that the possibility of an accidental war resulting from such games was too high; in 1972, the two navies entered into the Agreement for the Prevention of Incidents On and Over the High Seas, an agreement that was scrupulously honored by both navies for the remainder of the Cold War.

The preparation on both sides was deadly serious, as both sides regarded each other as the future enemy. The Western Berlin Garrison had a wartime mission that could be boiled down to two words: Die bravely. The NATO forces in Germany had a mission of to hang on until reinforcements could arrive (or things went nuclear). Both sides had enough chemical nerve agents to turn most of Europe into a dead zone. Life during the Cold War was to live with the knowledge, however much wanted to bury it, that if things went horribly wrong, we all had less than an hour before civilization basically ended.

20 years ago, it all began to wind down. Within a year, the continuous Looking Glass flights were ended. Within three years, the continuous TACAMO flights ended. Roughly 40% of the navy's combatant fleet was sent to the ship-breakers (or sunk in exercises as targets). Virtually all of the navy's repair ships, the destroyer and submarine tenders, were scrapped or sunk. The Soviet navy basically ceased to exist. The Strategic Air Command, which at one point in the 1950s consumed 2/3rds of the US defense budget, was abolished.

It was over. It was over without the two nuclear superpowers ever going directly to war against each other. Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War unleased lesser evils and instabilities. Yugoslavia fell apart in a series of brutal civil wars. There seem to be more and more "failed states" or ones that are on the verge of failing. The Islamic fighters who were armed and provisioned by the Americans to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the mujaheddin celebrated for bringing the Red Army to its knees, evolved into al Qaeda and the Taliban. Saddam Hussein did not understand that the Soviets and the Americans were ending their enmity, as he apparently thought that the traditional East-West stalemate would prevent a firm response to his invasion of Kuwait. The Armenians and the Azerbaijanis went to war. Separatist movements and small wars broke out in Georgia and Chechnya. We've gone from worrying about nuclear annihilation to worrying about small cells with truck bombs or "lone-wolves" armed with a couple of handguns.

The Cold War was economically wasteful, as are all wars. But the Cold War also jump-started space exploration in a way that would have never happened without it. The Cold War was the reason for the creation of the Internet, which started life as the ARPAnet, a redundant computer network which was created to provide redundant communications in the event of a war.

Undoubtedly there are those in both Russia and the United States who are nostalgic for the sense of purpose and the rough stability of the Cold War. Ten years after the Berlin Wall opened up, those folks seemed to be crazy. 20 years on, maybe not so much.