An examination of the effects of the Cold War from a military standpoint describes the weapons, equipment, and armies of the superpowers, as well as how close they came to being used.
The end of the Cold War was as dramatic as it was unexpected. At the beginning of 1989 no one in their right mind would have predicted the demise of the Soviet empire, and yet by the end of the year almost every Warsaw Pact regime throughout eastern Europe had been toppled. Some isolated events of that year, such as the knocking down of the Berlin Wall and the execution of the Romanian dictator, Nicolai Ceaucescu, remain vivid, but a decade later it is hard to recapture exactly it felt like to be living under its shadow. The Cold War ended so suddenly that there was little time to absorb what its passing meant, and there's a tendency to play down the threats and to say that the danger really ended with the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
David Miller's history of the Cold War is a timely reminder that this was just not so. As the book's title suggests, Miller doesn't go in for any sociological or political analysis of the Cold War, restricting himself solely to a military analysis. At first this feels somewhat self-limiting and you yearn for a wider perspective; but as the book goes on, its narrow focus becomes compellingly powerful.
Miller spent 36 years in the army and he writes in the unquestioning style of someone who is well- acquainted with weapons of mass destruction. But to the lay person, much of what he writes will come as a shock. Most of us only got through the Cold War years thanks to an inbuilt capacity for self-deception. We knew that both sides had vast arsenals, but we managed to kid ourselves that even if the worst came to the worst and war did break out, we'd probably survive one way or another. Miller makes it abundantly clear that we wouldn't.
The Cold War presents a detailed catalogue of each country's military capacity; the conventional weapons alone make fearsome reading but we enter a different dimension when he moves on to nuclear capabilities. In the early 1960s, a UK think-tank predicted that a heavy attack on Britain would have killed 90 per cent of the population. Such an attack would have used only a fraction of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.
Successive governments' obsession with developing bigger and better military hardware was one of the defining characteristics of the Cold War, and yet by 1965 we all had more than enough weapons to wipe each out several times over. So why did we carry on? The simple answer is that the Cold War generated an irrational momentum of its own. Every nuclear scenario the experts came up with always ended in the same way--a holocaust with no winners- -and yet that did not stop politicians in both the East and West in publicly defending the legitimacy of the nuclear option. It was madness on a grand scale, with Joe Public the unsuspecting pawns.
Miller ends his fine book by declaring that it was only the skill of the military and political leaders that prevented war from breaking out, though the questionable trustworthiness of those leaders makes you feel lucky to still be here. --John Crace
