ARMS RACECold War Arms-Control Pioneers Perhaps Weren’t Peacemakers We Thought They Were
Nuclear-age historian argues scientists who backed arsenals as deterrent aided military-industrial complex, hampered disarmament.
Keeping the peace in the Cold War was a matter of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, with both the U.S. and Soviet Union racing to develop and amass ever more deadly weapons to keep the other at bay and maintain an uneasy status quo.
The problem, according to Benjamin Wilson, was the chief proponents of that early brand of arms control, an elite group of science advisers, “wore a progressive face” but ended up “protecting existing structures and domestic arrangements, foreclosing the possibility of more radical transformations.”
That’s the argument Wilson, an associate professor of the history of science, makes in his new book, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex.
In this edited interview, Wilson discusses the doctrine of “strategic stability” and the downside of the American cultural myth of the independent scientist who saves society from itself.
The book takes a look at the narrative that grew up around the arms control movement. Can you describe it?
In the 1950s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union started building these big arsenals of intercontinental bombers and ballistic missiles that could carry out devastating attacks very quickly.
But strategists realized that there could be a political or military crisis where tensions are extremely high, and one side gets convinced the other side might attack, so it seems prudent to attack first. Or there could be a mishap, like a blip on a radar screen that looks like an attack.
Strategic stability is a condition where neither side would ever strike first, even if it might ordinarily be tempting to attack. Stability theory says you should put your missiles in hardened silos and submarines where the enemy can’t find them, so even if there is a crisis or an accident, both sides will know that they can retaliate even if they’re attacked first. ___________________________________
“Many of the arrangements that I uncovered and analyzed in my book were hidden from the public, so it could take a future historian to build an accurate understanding of whatever is going on right now.”
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The standard narrative from the Cold War says that strategic stability was a natural and inevitable idea and was dictated by the logic of strategy.
