V o L u m e I : a d

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

---