The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [244]
As the Soviet warheads grew in power, the United States constructed hardened underground missile silos with the capability to withstand an atomic blast and still fire back. America maintained a number of B-52 bombers aloft at all times to enable them to attack the Soviet Union after an atomic attack on the United States and its airfields. The United States also placed missiles into mobile launchers and constantly drove them around the nation to make targeting them all but impossible. Another tool in the arsenal of second strike capability was the so-called doomsday tapes. It is said the hardened missile silos had computers which, once enabled, would fire their missiles at some predetermined future date even if everyone in the silo (or even the United States) was dead. As eerie as it may sound, everyone on earth could be dead from the nuclear war and months or years later the computers would still be launching continued atomic attacks on smoldering enemy landscapes.
The entire point to all of this military expenditure on the American side was to ensure the ability to strike back at the USSR after a surprise atomic attack on the United States. Much of this fear of a surprise attack was left over from Pearl Harbor and the resolve of the United States to never allow that kind of attack to happen again. In addition, the United States did not trust the Soviets or Stalin. They equated Stalin to Hitler, and the United States was determined to avoid any hint of appeasement. The name for this fantastic deterrent capability held by the Soviets and the United States was Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). [335]A fitting name, but what was amazing about the entire philosophy is—it worked. War itself was not banned by the atomic bomb; however, no nuclear exchange has taken place (yet) so a crazy sounding policy has worked for sixty-five plus years.
From 1945 to 2010, the United States of America exercised a strong stabilizing force on the world. For over fifty years the USA held the line against communism, aggression, and instability. In 2010, forces within the nation are eroding its ability to stand firm against new threats. As the United States shrinks from its former position of insuring stability the world will go through many changes akin to the withdrawal of Great Britain from the world stage after 1945, but with no nation to step into the void as a replacement. Instability and chaos may well result from the resulting world realignment.
Truman: Neophyte Cold Warrior
1945 to 1952
Truman adopted a policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union and the communist threat. George Kennan, a State Department analyst, outlined this policy in 1947. Kennan assumed the Soviet Union would do everything in its power to spread communism. The purpose of the containment policy was to stop the USSR from spreading communism through invasion or subversion. To forward this policy, Truman gave aid to Greece in its war against communist insurgents, instituted the Marshall Plan to revitalize Western Europe, helped reconstruct West Germany to offset Soviet power, and fought the Korean War to repel a communist invasion. His problems included the loss of China to the Reds, large numbers of Soviet spies in the US Government and military, and his failure to remain ready to fight conventional wars.
During the Truman administration an American senator, Joe McCarthy, started a well publicized “commie hunt” within the US Government. Many of his accusations were challenged at the time, but a short window of opportunity opened for US intelligence when they broke the Soviet codes and began uncovering information about Soviet spies in the United States. The Verona decrypts proved