In the 1950's, you had two delivery mechanisms for nuclear warheads: strategic bombers and liquid fueled rockets.
Strategic bombers were planes that dropped bombs; this was the delivery mechanism used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each superpower had thousands of bombers. In a nuclear war, they would be sent to fly over the other superpower and drop bombs. Anyone who has been on an international flight - even a supersonic one - could tell you that this would take a while.
Liquid-fuel rockets were early ICBMs. Their fuel was corrosive, which meant you couldn't store fuel in them. You had to actually fill the rockets up with fuel before you launched them. This meant that you couldn't really launch a surprise attack: you'd have to spend about a day fueling all of your rockets and THEN launch them. So if the other side saw you filling your rockets with fuel (say, from a spy plane or satellite), then they'd probably guess you were getting ready to nuke them. Why else would you be pumping a multi-million dollar asset full of corrosive liquid?
So a nuclear war in the 1950's would have looked a bit like this: the aggressor would start fueling their rockets and launch their airplanes. Hours before the first mushroom cloud, the other side would catch wind of this and launch their own planes and start fueling their own rockets (except that since the other side's rockets were probably aimed at your rockets, you'd be kind of screwed if you didn't catch them fueling in time). Each side would attempt to shoot down the bombers of the other side using fighter jets or missiles.
The important thing to take home about this is that in the 1950's, you could still realistically dream of WINNING a nuclear war. If you launched your rockets early enough to destroy the other guy's rockets before they could be fueled, AND if you managed to get your bombers not shot down while shooting down most of his bombers, you could reduce the other superpower to a smoldering ruin while only losing a few of your own major cities.
With each side able to be optimistic about their chances, they were free to escalate tensions.
But by the late 1960's, things had changed. There were two big innovations: the solid-fuel rocket and the ballistic missile submarine.
Missiles now had solid, non-corrosive fuel that could be stored inside the missile with no ill effects. So now, instead of spending hours filling your missiles in fuel, you could just press a button and send them on their merry way to Moscow or New York (it would take about 30-40 minutes for them to get there). And you now had submarines filled with nuclear missiles: submarines that could hide anywhere in the ocean. And you still had bombers.
This combination of bombers, missiles, and submarines is called the Nuclear Triad. With its advent, your chances of realistically winning a nuclear war dropped dramatically.
No longer could you hope to wipe out the other guy's missiles before they could launch. Even if they only detected your incoming missiles 5 minutes before impact, they still had time to press that button. The process could even be automated: a computer could be hooked up to seismic equipment and programmed to press the button for you if it detected seismic activity consistent with a nuclear holocaust of your cities.
Even if you DID destroy the other guy's missiles, you still had to shoot down his bombers AND sink all of his submarines. Basically, you would have to launch three separate attacks on the other superpower, each involving different strategies, equipment, and branches of your armed services, and win ALL of them. Failing to destroy even just one leg of the nuclear triad meant the destruction of your homeland.
With each side no longer having hope of winning a nuclear war, tensions relaxed. Beginning in the late 60's, you saw a series of arms control agreements in which both superpowers agreed to cut their arsenal or ban certain kinds of weapons. These treaties included the Nuclear Test Ban, SALT I, the ABM Treaty, and the INF Treaty from my last post.
Uh, Bruce, I think it's far easier to make the claim that the Cold War changed around 1963-ish than to claim that it necessarily got "gentler." Cold War-related conflicts after that date were plenty bloody, but they were fought by proxy forces of various kinds in places like Vietnam or Angola using conventional weapons rather than nuclear ones. The Cold War was very much not only about guys in Washington and Moscow staring each other down with missiles aimed at each other. It was a global conflict that, starting in the early 1960s, for reasons that go way beyond the invention of solid rocket fuel, got increasingly more global...
ReplyDeleteBy "gentler", I mean that there was less direct jostling between the superpowers. There were proxy wars sure, (and the less you can do directly against an opponent, the more you'll want to do via proxy) but you go from "We will bury you" in the 50's to detente in the 70's. Even during the 80's, Reagan sat down and made treaties with the USSR almost as frequently as he called them evil.
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