Many in the West questioned whether the United States still held an
edge in military technology, and the notion spread that there was a so-called
missile gap in which the Soviets held a sizable lead. Although Eisenhower
knew, thanks to U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union, that no
missile gap existed, he could not make this information public. Democratic
presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s charges of a missile gap therefore
might have swayed a close presidential election in November 1960, lost by
Republican Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president.
For NATO, the new missiles posed serious problems. In order to offset
its far smaller manpower strength, NATO members agreed to the placing of
missiles on their soil. This elicited fears in Europe that a Soviet preemptive
strike or counterstrike might wipe out sizable population centers. At the
same time, other Europeans questioned whether the United States would
actually risk nuclear attack on its own soil in order to defend Western Europe.
There were frequent protests against the placement of U.S. missiles in
Europe. Often these took on an anti-American tone, while the threat from
the Soviet Union was overlooked.
The irony was that at the same time Khrushchev trumpeted “peaceful
coexistence,” he also embarked on a period of “missile rattling,” threatening
on at least 150 different occasions the use of nuclear weapons against the
West. This included specific threats, such as noting that only ten nuclear
Course of the Cold War (1950–1991)
37
Nikita Khrushchev during a visit to the Simferpol space center in the Crimea, probably during the Vostok 3/4 mission in
August 1962. On the right is Major General Pavel A. Agadzhanov, flight director of Soviet manned space missions in the
1960s. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
warheads would render the entire island of Britain uninhabitable and threat-
ening the destruction of the Acropolis. Many feared that the unpredictable
Khrushchev might precipitously launch a catastrophic war.
In 1958 Khrushchev ushered in a period of acute tension when he re-
sumed the pressure on the Western powers over Berlin. Believing that he
was dealing from strength, he attempted to secure a Western withdrawal
from Berlin. The Soviet leader referred to the city as “a bone stuck in my
throat,” knowing that he could never stabilize East Germany until he could
stop East Germans from fleeing to West Berlin. Because the autobahn lead-
ing across East Germany to the Western zones of Berlin was the one place in
the world where armed Soviet and U.S. forces faced one another, the situa-
tion was very tense indeed.
In November 1958 the Soviets simply informed the Western occupy-
ing powers that they considered the agreements governing postwar Ger-
many to be null and void. Khrushchev demanded that Berlin be turned into
a demilitarized free city, and he gave a deadline of six months—to 27 May
1959—for resolving the situation. In February 1959 he threatened to sign a
separate peace treaty with East Germany that would give it control of access
routes into the divided city. East Germany might then choose to close the
routes, setting up the possibility of war should the West attempt to reopen
them by force.
To Western leaders, Khrushchev’s threats and posturing seemed remi-
niscent of Adolf Hitler’s threats before World War II, and they were deter-
mined not to yield to such pressure. In May 1959 the foreign ministers of the
Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France met in Geneva where,
until August, they endeavored to find a solution. Again there was no common
meeting ground, but the three Western powers stood united, which may have
given the Soviets pause. Khrushchev let his May deadline pass without tak-
ing action. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief as the Soviet leader
probably lost his one chance for nuclear blackmail.
Khrushchev was somewhat mollified by an invitation from Eisenhower
to visit the United States. The Soviet leader arrived in September 1959, just
as the USSR landed a probe on the moon. Khrushchev and Eisenhower held
extensive talks and actually generated a cordial, friendly atmosphere—the
so-called Spirit of Camp David. Khrushchev, for his part, denied that there
was ever any deadline over settling the Berlin issue. The two leaders also
agreed to hold a summit in Paris in May 1960 to discuss Germany. Eisen-
hower was scheduled to visit the Soviet Union shortly thereafter.
This thaw in the Cold War proved short-lived, if indeed it existed at all.
In any case, it was formally broken by the Kremlin following the 1 May 1960
U-2 Crisis, in which the Soviets shot down one of the U.S. reconnaissance
aircraft that had been making regular overflights of the Soviet Union. Assum-
ing that the plane and its pilot had not survived, Washington put out the story
that a “weather aircraft” had gone off course and was missing. The Soviets
then produced the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, trapping Washington in a lie.
An angry Khrushchev stormed out of Paris, torpedoing the summit only a few
hours after it began.
38
Course of the Cold War (1950–1991)
Neutralist leaders such as Nasser, Nehru, and Sukarno of Indonesia
attacked the West in the UN. Khrushchev also delivered a speech before
that body in September 1960. Strangely, he attacked the authority of the UN
and particularly Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, demanding that the
position of secretary-general be made into a troika of three individuals: one
representing the West, another the communist bloc, and the third the neu-
tralists. Such an arrangement would no doubt have weakened the authority
of the UN to act in crisis situations, and Khrushchev’s stance ended up alien-
ating the neutralists.
Khrushchev’s frantic leadership also created friction within the commu-
nist bloc. By 1960, a simmering dispute between the Soviet Union and
China erupted into full-blown antagonism—the Sino-Soviet split. Chinse
leader Mao Zedong had dutifully followed Moscow’s lead during the first
decade of the Cold War, but cracks then began to appear in the relationship.
For one thing, following the death of Stalin in 1953, Mao believed that he
and not the new Kremlin leaders was the logical spokesman for inter-
national communism. Mao was much more confrontational toward the
West than were the new leaders of the Soviet Union. Also, the Soviets had
refused to share advanced nuclear technology with China and expand mil-
itary aid. Then there was their 2,000-mile frontier—the longest in the
world—and disputes over Mongolia.
In the confrontation between the two largest communist powers, most of
the world’s communist states lined up behind Moscow. In Europe, Beijing
enjoyed the support only of Albania. By the spring of 1961 the split was
sufficiently pronounced for the Soviet Union to withdraw all its technicians
from China and cut off assistance to the PRC.
While this might have benefited the United States, leaders in Washing-
ton were in no position, either mentally or politically, to take advantage of the
split in the communist world. President Kennedy, who took office in January
1961, almost immediately faced a series of international challenges. The first
was the outbreak of fighting in Laos, where communist, neutralist, and right-
ist factions vied for power. Then in April 1961, U.S.-trained and -sponsored
Cuban exile forces landed on that island in an attempt to overthrow its now
avowedly communist leader, Fidel Castro. The operation, conceived and
largely planned under Eisenhower, was incredibly botched. Without air cover,
which Kennedy refused to provide, the Bay of Pigs invasion was doomed to
failure, and Kennedy was forced to take responsibility.
An apparently weakened Kennedy met with Khrushchev in June 1961 in
Vienna, where the Soviet leader renewed his pressure on Berlin. Attempting
to test the new U.S. administration, Khrushchev intimated that he wanted
the issue settled by the end of the year. Yet Khrushchev merely trotted out
the same demands, with the sole concession that Berlin might be garrisoned
by UN or neutralist troops. This time the Soviets began harassment of some
Allied air traffic into the city, and the East-West German border was for a brief
period almost completely closed. Again, the Soviet leader threatened the use
of nuclear weapons, asking the British ambassador why 200 million people
should have to die for 2 million Berliners.
Course of the Cold War (1950–1991)
39
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