Q: There are clear signs after the first tests of the Soviet and American
superbombs, that both Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President Dwight
Eisenhower realized that there was no way of surviving a hydrogen bomb war.
And yet, the arms race continues. How do you explain that?
DH: I think there was by late 1955 an understanding by [Nikita] Khrushchev,
[President] Eisenhower, and by [British Prime Minister] Antony Eden, that a
nuclear war would really be a catastrophe for everyone. And I think, even more
important, each of them understood that the others also believed that. And
yet, the arms race continued. And I think this comes back to the question of
the symbolic importance of the weapons. The weapons were seen, I think, to
have political uses, apart from their use in war. So you might say, yes, you
know what, I'm going to have a nuclear war that would be catastrophic. But you
could still have a war of nerves. You could still engage in threatening
people, in you know, getting into crisis and saying, no, you better back down
or things will get out of hand, or you better back down, or I'll strike you
with nuclear weapons.
I think Khrushchev in particular saw nuclear weapons in that way. Especially
when, after February 1956, when [the Soviets] had the first test of a nuclear
warhead on a missile and they launched the missile with the warhead and it
detonated, you know, when it reached its target. And he went, a couple of
months later on a visit to Britain, there, I think he thought, right, I've got
something that's really useful here. I've got a nuclear armed missile. I can
use this to threaten people. In other words, what the Soviet Union had feared
in the late '40s, was the Americans are going to threaten us in this war of
nerves, in this kind of atomic diplomacy. And I think the Soviet view was, you
know, we were tough, we stood up to it, we did not give in. But now, we've got
the instruments in our hands to play this war. And we can play it better than
they can.
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