Q: There was tremendous fear on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There is
this sense in the U.S. that as soon as the Soviet Union had enough bombs, then
that would be the last day of the United States. And the Soviets felt much the
same way.
DH: This is one of the most, to my mind, one of the most interesting, and one
of the trickiest issues in nuclear history...why people felt the sense of
danger and what danger exactly do they feel. For example, you see on the
American side the statements from those arguing for a crash program to develop
thermonuclear weapons, that it will be a disaster if the Soviet Union gets this
first. It's never spelled out what is the nature of the disaster. Does it
mean that the Soviet Union will attack the United States even though the U.S. has
far more atomic bombs? And on the Soviet side, what exactly is the fear? I
think it's not just a fear that [the Soviet Union] would be so weak militarily,
but [the US] will bring, fly over [the USSR] and drop bombs...
I think there was another fear. There was the kind of fear, symbolic fear,
that you know, if [the U.S.] show they're ahead, if they move ahead, then that
will have all kinds of dire political consequences because people will think
[the Soviet Union is] losing, we'll think we are losing. We will be
demoralized. And so it becomes a kind of a -- not very specific dread of
falling behind in the race, or on the American side, of being overtaken by the
Soviet Union. So I think that's important. You can't reduce it to just the
numbers of weapons and what the actual balance of force was on either side.
Somehow these weapons symbolized something much greater, not only, I think
power, economic power, and technological power, but also in a perverse way, the
health and viability of a particular social system, its capacity to mobilize
resources to do something as great at this.
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