Penguin History of the United States of America (110 page)

So conference followed conference, each less successful than the last; no
peace settlement in Europe was ever agreed; new spheres of influence were claimed and appropriated by East and West, new crises erupted, and before very long a new arms race was developing. It was a melancholy outcome of the great anti-fascist struggle, and a confirmation of two of history’s more dismal lessons: that grand alliances rarely survive the shock of victory, and that great powers usually behave as rivals rather than as partners.

Geography explains the policies of all the Powers.

Napoleon

By 1948 what became known as the Cold War dominated diplomacy.
¹
Thenceforward all countries made their calculations, whether economic, military or political, from the basic assumption that the USA and the USSR were now enemies and might at any moment start to fight.

That the two superpowers (as they would come to be called) did
not
turn to battle for the solution of their difficulties is perhaps the most encouraging fact of modern times. Common sense had something to do with it. Just as Britain, Germany and France had at last learned, by very bitter experience, that the pleasures of war against each other were not remotely worth their cost, so the rulers of both the Soviet Union and the United States felt, in 1945 and 1946, that the last thing they wanted for their war-weary countries was another global conflict. Russia, indeed, was nearly prostrate, though American statesmen somehow could not believe it, or at least take it into account. She had lost twenty million lives and untold physical assets in the war. America, by contrast, was abounding: her total gross national product had gone up by 35 per cent since 1941. This prosperity, as well as the memory of nearly four years of grim warfare, made her people exceedingly reluctant to think about future battles, and her soldiers were anxious to put past battles behind them; they insisted on as rapid a demobilization as possible. By the autumn of 1946 all the enormous citizen forces which had won the war had been disbanded: it was the pattern of 1865 and 1919 all over again. This time the Americans were not isolationists: they had learnt that lesson very thoroughly. But they were inclined to put more trust in the efficacy of the United Nations and their own palpable goodwill than was realistic.

There was another reason for the good conduct of the powers. The war had not ended with a whimper. On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb had been dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 70,000 people, injuring 51,000 and destroying more than 70,000 buildings. Three days later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing nearly 40,000 people and injuring 25,000. On 14 August the Japanese government surrendered.

No Presidential decision in history has been more disputed than the decision to drop the bomb. Yet to President Truman at the time it seemed a straightforward matter (Harry Truman’s weakness was that he liked making decisions and tended to see them all as straightforward matters). The Japanese had been retreating steadily across the Pacific, but had defended each of their island strongholds with appalling tenacity, inflicting fearful losses on the Americans. The mere certainty of ultimate defeat was not allowed to demoralize a warrior people. The latest manifestation of their will to damage their foe was the coming of the suicide pilots, specially trained men who turned themselves and their planes into bombs, plunging down from the sky onto American ships with terrible effectiveness. It seemed all too certain to the US high command that there would be an equally stubborn resistance to any invasion of the Japanese archipelago, and that, without such an invasion of Japan proper, the war would never end. Casualties would probably be immense. When, therefore, the first experimental atomic bomb was successfully exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, the Chiefs of Staff instantly began to make plans for using it against Japan. Some of the scientists who had made the bomb thought it would be a better idea to use the weapon in a demonstration to convince the Japanese that they had better surrender; but no one could suggest how such a demonstration could be arranged, or how it could be made convincing: the desert at Alamogordo looked much the same after the test explosion as it had before. Whereas, to use the bomb against military targets in Japan would surely bring about a rapid surrender, which everyone deeply desired.

All the same, had Truman fully grasped what he was doing, he might have hesitated. Even as it was, when ordering the bombing he laid down that ‘military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.’ Unhappily he overlooked or refused to face the fact that the only worthwhile military objectives left were cities containing women and children, who therefore experienced what he rightly called ‘the most terrible bomb in the history of the world’ at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His ineffective squeamishness is rather puzzling: large-scale destruction of cities and civilians had been a characteristic tactic of the Second World War from its beginning, and the fire-raids on Tokyo (9 March 1945) were at least as horrible as the atomic attacks. To judge from his diary, Truman was in awe of the new weapon, but not enough to do any good. He did not
know about the long-lasting effects of nuclear radiation; even if he had it might not have made very much difference, so joyful was he at the idea of ending the war at a stroke. Nevertheless it was exceedingly unfortunate that no one rightly calculated the long-term military, diplomatic and social consequences of Hiroshima. That event proved that the possible results of applied research in modern warfare were limitless. It soon became evident that the very existence of the human race, and perhaps of all terrestrial life, was at risk; no nation wishing to protect its independence, it seemed, could be sure of doing so for long unless it possessed atomic weapons or had for its ally an atomically armed country.
²
Nor was the art of making atomic weapons beyond discovery by non-Westerners. The operations of various atomic spies may have shortened the period of America’s monopoly of nuclear arms, but it was not going to be a long one anyway, contrary to what almost all Americans were led to believe. The Soviet Union soon equipped itself with bombs of its own, and a great arms race was under way, one which continued for forty years and which dominated history in a way without parallel in the past.

For it turned out that there were few limitations to the ingenuity of American and Soviet scientists in devising weapons of horror. The rulers of each country, determined not to be vulnerable to blackmail (‘Do as I say or I’ll nuke you!’), poured out money and resources of all kinds upon their research establishments, and diplomacy was never able to catch up: prospects for agreed disarmament always lagged behind the latest devices. So the arsenals of terror filled up to bursting point, and the world grew steadily more dangerous, especially as lesser powers began to equip themselves atomically. Britain and France developed small but expensive nuclear armouries in order to convince themselves that they were still great powers; China armed later, in order to safeguard the balance of power in Asia; later still, other countries began to toy with the idea of atoms. The necessary technology grew cheaper and cheaper, more and more generally available; the moral sense dulled. The prospects of the nations darkened. Against these considerations can only be set the fact that so great was the fear of nuclear war that governments with the power to wage it behaved with great circumspection; crises which in earlier ages would almost certainly have brought on armed conflict were resolved peaceably; the uneasy restraint of the immediate post-war years persisted. It was a frail guarantee of the human future; but it held.

These developments foreclosed many choices for the Americans. Never again would they be able to rely, as they always had, on the wide oceans to keep them reasonably safe from attack, the less so as missile weaponry (another technological legacy of the Second World War) developed rapidly. Unless they felt they could trust Stalin and his successors not to abuse their opportunities (few Americans after 1948 were inclined to run that risk) they would have to maintain their alliances and their armed forces and continue in the arms race they had begun. Negotiated disarmament would probably remain a desirable but very distant goal. Never again could American diplomacy be idle; the responsibilities of great power burdened the country inescapably.

As a result the position of the army, navy and air force in American life changed permanently. Traditionally, the armed forces had never counted for much in peacetime, either with the politicians or the public. Now, as alarm about the Soviet Union mounted, so did the leverage of the generals and admirals. They quickly grasped that the best way of increasing the defence budget, and hence their own influence, was by sounding the alarm of war. They struck up alliances with industrialists (especially aircraft manufacturers) who were eager for orders. They quarrelled bitterly among themselves about the allocation of funds: navy against air force, both against the army. In 1948 the Director of the Budget commented that ‘the idea of turning over custody of atomic bombs to these competing, jealous, insubordinate services, fighting for position with each other, is a terrible prospect.’ But no Budget Director, no Secretary of Defense, no President, was ever able to discipline them for long: they had too many friends and clients.

The purely economic effects of the arms race were equally striking. For a quarter of a century (until the Nixon administration) a conscript army was maintained, much of it abroad, in such places as West Germany, Japan and South Korea. Great fleets patrolled the seas, the planes of the Strategic Air Command were constantly in the air, even after the rise of rocketry made them obsolescent, billions of dollars were spent on maintaining all these forces, on arming them and on developing new weapons for them. These expenditures remade the industrial map of the United States. Weapons research created new employment in a manner that left the memory of New Deal experiments in public expenditure far behind. Defence establishments of all kinds were allocated to regions which private enterprise might have left to stagnate: for example, the committees of Congress being usually dominated by elderly veterans of the Democratic South, their states and districts got the larger part of the federal largesse that was now flowing. Georgia, Texas and Florida began to bloom under a rain of dollars. Vast areas of New Mexico and Arizona were set aside for weapons testing. Where defence went, other industries and private investments followed: soon the economic gap between the South and the rest of the Union, which had endured since the Civil War, began to close, and the South-West became the most rapidly growing part of the country (South and South-West together were eventually known by a new name, ‘the Sun Belt’). California was the chief beneficiary of this new movement. Rich in good land, in oil, in minerals, and with a marvellous climate, it became the leader in the new high-technology industries. By 1960 it was outstripping New York and becoming the most populous state in the Union.

Yet even this result of the atomic bomb was not wholly good, for it created vast new interests which were conservative in outlook and, being based on arms expenditure, essentially militaristic. This was a quite unprecedented element in American society. Even if true peace returned there would be resistance in the Sun Belt to cuts in spending for defence; dollar-minded patriotism would see every move to achieve an understanding with America’s foreign rivals as dangerous trifling with the country’s safety; the prosperous clients of the warfare state would develop a certain indifference to the distresses of other parts of the country; and though the immense wealth generated would make life amazingly comfortable for most of the citizens, and would be spent lavishly on public enterprises, so that California, for example, was soon crowded with notable universities growing rich on contracts with the U S Defense Department, and possessed the most generous welfare arrangements in the world, nevertheless the distribution of wealth was still highly unequal. There were vast areas of indifferent housing in Los Angeles, increasingly inhabited by poor blacks. The middle classes, for all their public spirit, achieved a culture that was at best shallow and at worst vulgarly corrupting. The Golden State had always been a haven for exotic religions. In the new era many of them became mass affairs, peddling doubtful comforts to the gullible. These new cults had none of the grim frontier strength of primitive Mormonism; they were tailored, rather, to a consumer society with a taste for cheap salvation.

In the 1940s none of this could be foreseen. America stood almost alone in a ruined world. Her good luck was indeed astonishing, and later events become a little more comprehensible if we assume that, consciously or not, many Americans felt uneasy, or even guilty, about being so uniquely lucky. Of course they told themselves and everybody else that their success was the reward of virtue. Henry Luce, the publisher of
Time, Life
and
Fortune
magazines, had complacently proclaimed the opening of ‘the American century’ while the war was still being fought. The ‘American Way of Life’ (another cliché of the period) was vindicated with every bottle of Coca-Cola sold. Nevertheless, Americans were often intensely apprehensive about the future. Meantime the post-war depression which everyone had expected did not occur. Millions of veterans returning from the war were only anxious to settle down and raise families. Their demands for housing, medical care, college education, cars, washing-machines and well-paid employment were transmitted to the federal government through the American Legion, the Veterans’ Administration and other such bodies; Washington showed itself anxious to oblige by making large funds available, and thus a huge consumer boom was stimulated.
³
It was assisted by the fact that during the war the Office of Price Administration had largely succeeded in holding down prices while wages rose and went into savings, for there were then few goods available for consumer purchase. Now, as industry returned to peacetime production and began to pour out goods, it was discovered that the masses had the money to buy them. Nor did the good times cease (though they occasionally faltered) when the impetus of demobilization was exhausted: between 1947 and 1960 personal disposable income went up, in real terms, by 17 per cent, while the population increased from 141 million to 181 million. A steadily expanding market, a steadily improving standard of living for all and only trifling inflation seemed to be the new law of nature. Encouraged by the prospect of an endless boom, moneylenders grew amazingly confident. By the mid-fifties they were regularly lending former GIs the entire purchase price of houses, and most cars were bought on credit – $100 down and three years to pay. All this stimulated the boom still more. American prosperity became the wonder of the world. In the mid-forties, while Europe starved and (in the winter of 1947) froze; while revolution marched across China, which had not known peace for over thirty years; while the British Empire in India came to an end amid great bloodshed; while Stalin prepared to consolidate his new empire in Eastern Europe by the tried methods of police terror; and while dictatorships rose and fell as usual in Latin America, the citizens of the United States began to enjoy a generally diffused well-being which eclipsed even the experiences of the mid-twenties.