Cold Only If You Were Standing in Europe

The phrase "Cold War" describes the experience of Europe and North America, where the confrontation stayed below the threshold of open fighting for forty-five years.

From Seoul, Hanoi, Kabul, Luanda, Maputo, Guatemala City or Phnom Penh, the period looks entirely different. Korea killed perhaps three million people. Vietnam and its extensions into Laos and Cambodia killed more. Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia in 1965-66: the aggregate death toll of the Cold War's hot wars runs into many millions.

It was a world war fought entirely in other people's countries, and the adjective is a piece of perspective masquerading as a description.

What kept it cold where it was cold was a genuinely novel piece of reasoning, and it is worth understanding properly because it is counterintuitive at every step.

Nuclear deterrence does not rest on having more weapons. It rests on having weapons that would survive an enemy first strike and could still retaliate. If your arsenal can be destroyed on the ground, it invites attack; if it cannot, attacking you is pointless. This is why the decisive innovations were not bigger warheads but submarines, hardened silos and early-warning systems: anything that guarantees an answer.

The strange corollary is that defending your cities is destabilising. A side that believed it could intercept a retaliation might conclude that striking first was survivable, which is exactly the calculation deterrence exists to prevent. This is why the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty deliberately limited defences: both sides agreeing to remain vulnerable, on the grounds that mutual vulnerability was what kept them alive.

How close it came is clearer now than it was at the time.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was resolved publicly by a Soviet withdrawal of missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The private component, the removal of American Jupiter missiles from Turkey, was concealed for decades so that Kennedy would not appear to have traded. Documents released since have revealed that on 27 October a Soviet submarine under depth-charge attack, out of radio contact and with its air running out, came close to launching a nuclear torpedo; it required the agreement of three officers, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, refused.

The system worked. It worked with less margin than anyone involved believed at the time, and it depended at least once on an individual declining.

For the states caught between the blocs, there was a third option, and it was a strategy rather than a bloc. The Non-Aligned Movement, prefigured at Bandung in 1955 and formalised in 1961, allowed India, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia and later many others to extract aid, arms, and diplomatic support from both superpowers by remaining genuinely uncommitted. It was never a coherent alliance, several members leaned heavily one way, and as a bargaining position for small states in a bipolar world it was a great deal more effective than picking a side.

The opposite arrangement, where both superpowers funded opposing factions inside one country, produced the century's longest wars, and the mechanism is straightforward. What normally ends a civil war is one side running out of the means to continue. External resupply removes that, so both factions can absorb defeat after defeat and keep fighting; the stakes become international, so neither patron can accept a client's collapse; and the original local dispute gets subordinated to somebody else's strategy. Angola's war ran from 1975 to 2002.

And then it ended, and the reason it ended is usually told wrong.

The version in which Western military spending bankrupted the Soviet Union has some truth in it and is not the main mechanism. The Soviet economy's core problem was that it could deliver steel, coal and missiles and could not deliver consumer goods, agricultural productivity, or (decisively, by the 1980s) the diffusion of information technology, which required exactly the decentralised copying and communicating that the system was built to prevent. Add Afghanistan, and the cost of subsidising eastern Europe with cheap energy.

But the specific thing that made 1989 happen was a decision. Every previous challenge in the bloc (East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1981) had been met with force or the credible threat of it. Gorbachev let it be known that Soviet troops would not intervene, and once that was believed, the regimes of eastern Europe discovered that they had no domestic basis for survival at all.

Six countries changed government in a few months, most of them without significant violence, because the guarantee that had held them in place was withdrawn. It is the clearest demonstration available that an empire can rest almost entirely on a belief about what would happen if it were tested.