The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [243]
Soon after World War II, Winston Churchill, always good with a phrase, said that an iron curtain had fallen across Eastern Europe. He was more right than he may have imagined. Once the Soviets were in control of an area, no one and no information came out of that area again. Stalin, the so-called man of steel, had placed an iron curtain over his empire and that curtain would hang about until 1989.
Before and during World War II the Soviet Union developed clandestine cells and placed them throughout the world with the idea of spreading the communist revolution through subversion and violence. If these revolutions took control of many small nations, and perhaps a few large ones, the communists would control the world de facto if not directly. They also placed spies at the highest levels of governments all over the world. The Soviets were masters of the game and managed to insert spies into the uppermost levels of the Nazi, Japanese, British, and American governments. In the case of the American and British governments they penetrated to the heart of the espionage communities and even the counterespionage units of these democracies.
Communist spies in the American nuclear development program stole the secrets of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and gave them to the Soviets. The Soviets recruited many spies from the ranks of Britain’s top universities, mainly on ideological grounds, and simply waited until they entered the premier levels of government or technological work to extract secrets from them. The USSR placed spies at high levels of US Policy determination, in the US Treasury, and in many other important positions in the military and government bureaucracy. They even penetrated the American CIA and FBI, thereafter using these human resources to track what America knew about Soviet spies and to uncover American spies in the USSR. One spy was in the US Nuclear Submarine program and delivered to the Soviets complete details on how the US Navy was building super quiet submarines that were following the Soviet subs effectively. After these details were absorbed by the Soviets the United States could no longer track Soviet submarines, and many of these were nuclear missile submarines—also copied from American technological plans.
Throughout the Cold War the Americans were at a significant disadvantage in clandestine operations; and the Soviets easily matched the West’s technological miracles by simply stealing the technology. This saved the Soviets billions of dollars in development costs. It also kept the Soviets at par with the West militarily. Not only did the Soviets steal plans, they stole many of the actual technological units. As the Cold War progressed into the 1980s, President Reagan used this Soviet ability against the USSR by allowing them to steal purposely planted defective parts and computer chips used for operating complex equipment. Because the parts were designed to be defective and for the defect to be nearly impossible to unearth, tremendous damage was done to critical Soviet operations, such as their Siberian oil pipeline, by component failures. It was one of the very few American espionage successes during the Cold War.
The Cold War brought the United States and the Soviet Union into a dangerous and deadly arms race. Each nation constructed more and larger nuclear warheads, better missile delivery systems, better jet bombers and fighters, and a lot more. Submarines showed dramatic improvements, which included the ability for one ship to launch up to sixteen nuclear-armed missiles while submerged. These missiles were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) carrying multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads. Each ICBM could carry up to ten warheads and each were capable of being sent to a different target.