Who Pushed the Dominoes?
Rahul Dit, reporting from Joint Crisis Committee (JCC): North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), analyses how the world ended up in a situation of a nuclear crisis.
“Have you ever thought that if one thing had not happened, a whole set of things never would have either? Like dominoes in time, a single event kicked off an unstoppable series of changes that gained momentum and spun out of control, and nothing was ever the same again.”
Post the second World War, there were two primary superpowers in the world: the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). After the war was over, the Yalta and the Potsdam Conferences took place, where it was discussed that Germany would be divided into three zones, controlled by the USA, the USSR and the United Kingdoms of the Great Britain and the Northern Ireland (UK) respectively. Later, France was also given a portion from the existing zone. On 1 January 1947, the UK and USA joined their zones to form the Bizone or Bizonia and later on 1 June 1948 the, French zone was also added. This entire zone was called the Trizone and on 1 June 1948 it was named as the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). The Soviet-controlled area was named as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
Through comprehensive propaganda and use of force, Stalin was trying to put Germany under Soviet influence and extend his reach in Europe, following their agenda of communist expansion. This move can be explained by one quote by Vyacheslav Molotov: “What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany; what happens to Germany, happens to Europe.” Over time, Germany had become a central figure in Europe and everything that happened within Germany affected the whole of Europe. Therefore, East and West Germany became a playground for both the USA and the USSR; whoever won there got control over Europe.
Since the two countries involved were the major super powers, it became obvious that neither of the two would want the other to win. An open conflict was definitely not an option, as both the nations’ military forces were depleted and neither of them could afford another war. So, the solution seemed simple: wage a war behind the curtains; a war which cannot be seen by the public directly but exists, a war that puts the world security on a balance.
Coming to the Berlin Blockade Incident, the representatives of the three governments controlling West Germany constantly met in order to decide the future of West Germany, despite threats from the Soviets to ignore any resulting decisions made. Eventually, the London Agreement on German External Debts also known as (aka.) the London Debt Agreement decided that the total repayable amount by the Germans to be reduced to 50% of the original amount, to about 15 billion marks, stretching out over 30 years, which was a minor impact on the fast-growing German Economy. This agreement was made in 1953, and during this period Stalin and his military commanders, in order to force the Western Allies (US, UK and France) into line with wishes of the Soviets, started to regulate access to their side of Germany. Military and Passenger traffic was prevented from entering the Eastern Side. Every truck was searched and approved for travel via a Soviet Commander. On 2 April 1948, General Clay of American Military forces issued an order to halt all train and truck operations and it was decided that all the resources would be delivered via air. Although the Soviets opened the railways and roads, during this period, the flight operations were being harassed by Soviet Airforce by “buzzing” them. However, the Flight Operations managed to stockpile 18 days of resources before the actual blockade begun.
On 24 June, the Soviets severed land and water connections between the non-Soviet zones and Berlin. That same day, they halted all rail and barge traffic in and out of Berlin. The West answered by introducing a counter-blockade, stopping all rail traffic into East Germany from the British and US zones. Over the following months this counter-blockade would have a damaging impact on East Germany, as the drying up of coal and steel shipments seriously hindered industrial development in the Soviet zone. On 25 June, the Soviets stopped supplying food to the civilian population in the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin.
To counter this, the western allies decided to do an airlift to supply resources. No agreement was ever made on the use of airspace since an unarmed plane could not be stopped unless it was shot down. The Soviets could not afford to do that unless they wanted another World War, hence an airlift was the best idea. By the end of August 1948, after two months, the Airlift was succeeding. Daily operations flew more than 1,500 flights a day and delivered more than 4,500 tons of cargo, enough to keep West Berlin supplied, with supplies soon improved to 5,000 tons a day. The Soviet blockade of Berlin was lifted at one minute after midnight on 12 May 1949. A British convoy immediately drove through to Berlin, and the first train from West Germany reached Berlin at 5:32 A.M.
All these events highlight one thing, this war that has been raging is a war of ideologies, a war of greed and power. Both the nations’ actions are defined by their zeal to overpower the other. As the NATO meets, a wide range of questions rise in people’s mind as to how exactly this entire situation pans out.
The Axiomatic Bourgeois
“Laugh at the renditions of the soulful music, startle when the harmony falters.” Reporting from the Joint Crisis Committee (JCC): North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Sankalpa Sarkar frowns upon the ensemble paranoia harboured by the Union of Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) against a possible nuclear attack by the NATO.
If Sigmund Freud had been thrust onto the yardarm of apostolic pseudo-intellectualism and renegaded into shimmering prophecies, he might have whimpered while uttering his thirteenth commandment, “The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.” The mystique lurking behind the shadowy depths of aeonic perceptions of our hallowed egalitarianism is a blatant misappropriation of the genocidal realms of the machinery. Indeed, riddling the elitist incumbents in a vortex of paranoia and egoistic tremors, it is only a mere anecdote to the throbbing wounds laid bare by misplaced influence.
If at all, the toll of eroding fear echoing in the hearts of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) officers in the soul of the Kremlin would serve as nothing short of an aide-mémoire for “men who wield the sceptre”. The Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (Ракетно ядерное нападение) (acronymic famously as Operation RYaN) was in a nutshell the communal culmination of the Reaganite rhetoric which was founded on the crumbling credence among the Politburo officials of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that the United States of America (USA) had embarked on a Quixotic mission of asserting ascendancy over the Communist Eastern European nations. Yet, it would be an oxymoron in itself to ignore the tangential parallels that the American senators drew with the Soviet nuclear crisis of 1941. Traumatized by their inefficiency in pre-empting a German attack in June 1941, the Soviet Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov was resilient; once bitten, twice shy. If the Soviet Politburo was quaking in its shoes in a frantic bid to pre-empt a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) nuclear attack, the American statesmen, as intelligible as the exterior they donned, were inaudibly taking baby-steps towards diminishing Soviet influence on the back of the Soviet obsession with history. While Raegan’s predecessors had witnessed the Cold War as a fact of life, Raegan wielded the sceptre at the White House in a resilient bid to transcend it. Gritty and persevering, Raegan embarked on a Gaiseric quest to confront Soviet assertion in Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Asia. Amidst the chaos and cacophony, Raegan levelled fundamental critiques of both détente and arms control upon usurping power. The Soviet Politburo, reeling under a barrage of economic, military and partisan snags, were unnerved by Raegan’s brandishing of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and the heralding of a new era in space-based missile defines system in the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI).
If at all, the toll of eroding fear echoing in the hearts of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) officers in the soul of the Kremlin would serve as nothing short of an aide-mémoire for “men who wield the sceptre”. The Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (Ракетно ядерное нападение) (acronymic famously as Operation RYaN) was in a nutshell the communal culmination of the Reaganite rhetoric which was founded on the crumbling credence among the Politburo officials of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that the United States of America (USA) had embarked on a Quixotic mission of asserting ascendancy over the Communist Eastern European nations. Yet, it would be an oxymoron in itself to ignore the tangential parallels that the American senators drew with the Soviet nuclear crisis of 1941. Traumatized by their inefficiency in pre-empting a German attack in June 1941, the Soviet Minister of Defence Dmitry Ustinov was resilient; once bitten, twice shy. If the Soviet Politburo was quaking in its shoes in a frantic bid to pre-empt a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) nuclear attack, the American statesmen, as intelligible as the exterior they donned, were inaudibly taking baby-steps towards diminishing Soviet influence on the back of the Soviet obsession with history. While Raegan’s predecessors had witnessed the Cold War as a fact of life, Raegan wielded the sceptre at the White House in a resilient bid to transcend it. Gritty and persevering, Raegan embarked on a Gaiseric quest to confront Soviet assertion in Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Asia. Amidst the chaos and cacophony, Raegan levelled fundamental critiques of both détente and arms control upon usurping power. The Soviet Politburo, reeling under a barrage of economic, military and partisan snags, were unnerved by Raegan’s brandishing of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and the heralding of a new era in space-based missile defines system in the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI).
If the Soviet Politburo was startled by Raegan’s dogmatic slant, it was adept at camouflaging the flurry of covert operations that they authorized to pre-empt a NATO incursion. If the KGB and Politburo suffered from acute psychosis, the USA was agonized by their utter dearth of holistic realism, albeit with minimum repercussions owing to Raegan’s lies over the Aber Archer exercises after intel on Operation RYaN seeped into the porous walls of the Pentagon. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin seems to have taken archaic English maxims to heart for he firmly believed that a stitch in time saves nine. Unfortunately, in case of the Soviet Union, in their frantic efforts to make a stitch in time, they lost track of their raison d'être. If Operation Barbaorssa was a slap in the face of Soviet intelligence, the tantamounting catastrophe of The Third Reich was a moral victory for the Soviet Union. If the Kremlin were startled by the stark similarities between 1941 and 1983, it was owing to their phobia of self-realization. Akin to what the Soviet dogma screamed out loud, the Soviet leadership was convinced that American technology surpassed humanity and could perform miracles alien to humankind. Ironically, the Western media lampooned Raegan’s idea of SDI, labelling it as “Star Wars”. The White House was sceptical at this juncture—the Soviets feared what their kith and kin ridiculed. The Kremlin was convinced that the SDI would allow the NATO to violate their oblique no-first-use and would reiterate a policy of quid pro quo, while also defeating any Soviet nuclear counterstrike. Exacerbating the Soviet unease, the Soviet shooting of a South Korean airliner in September and the resultant American intervention induced the belief of American intervention in the Politburo. Rational as it may have been, the Soviets laboured under the schizophrenic delusion that the incumbents at the White House would actually act on the imputed American resolve to annihilate the USSR. Yuri Andropov, the erstwhile General Secretary of the KGB was a tacit hardcore whose stance remained unwaveringly fixated on American prowess and arrogance, often bordering on obsequiousness.
Obscuring the shambolic gegenpressing of ideologies by the Politburo, confirmation bias under the conduit of cognitive bias shrouded any perceptive epiphanies that the Soviets might have had regarding the United States’ designs prior to the Abel Archer exercises. The institutional bias that arose was owing to the singular infatuation of the Soviets in their belief that the USA would resort to quid pro quo in their attempts at resurrection of the status quo. If at all, the scarcity of Soviet agents who were skeptical of the Kremlin’s interpretation of the exercises were enforced into digging for evidence to support the Kremlin’s tacit imagination, swayed by their cognizance of rewards for doing so and penalties for violators. If the Soviets were unnerved by Reaganite rhetoric, the Americans were swayed by their iridescent scarcity of intelligence. If at all, the NATO is teetering on the precipice of vicious realism for Armageddon summons. Designs unfounded and plans half-baked, the world was peering over the edge of nuclear abyss; treading back towards détente is but buried in the realms of time.
(Edited by Harsha Sista.)
Game of Thrones
Rahul Dit, reporting from Joint Crisis Committee (JCC): North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), dwells on how the present nuclear crisis due to the clash of ideologies between the two super powers of the world affects the rest of the world.
After World War 2 ended, there were two major superpowers in the world, namely the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Both of them had the power and the technology to rule the world, but the recent war had depleted their resources and the manpower required to handle the important military assets. So, open warfare was not a feasible option at that moment of time, but the situation was clear; there could be only one superpower in the world and becoming the superpower at that time would make them the indirect ruler of the world.
An ideal country does not exist in this world. Every country wants to gain more power, with the differentiating factor being the degree to which the country follows it. It can be proved by analysis and comparison of the speeches delivered by John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev. USA had a deep contention with the Communist policies and believed in the free market policies while Soviets had a fixed policy of expansionism and wanted to put the entire world under the Soviet sphere of Communism. For the benefit of Germany, Germany was split into 4 zones and divided among the United States, United Kingdom, France and USSR. The United States wanted to maintain peace among the European Countries. Everything seemed fine until the greed and hunger for power started to come into play for both the countries. For USA, it was imperative to present a dominating presence in the world and the best way to do that was to find the strongest opponent and defeat them. Hitting two targets with a single arrow, USA would get the commanding presence, their ideology would be followed by European countries and they would be under the American Sphere of Capitalism.
When the Western Allied Forces decided to join hands to form Federal Republic and Germany (West Germany), they met regularly in order to decide the future of Germany. The idealistic approach towards peace prompted them to reduce the repayable amounts to the countries by 50% and stretched it out over 30 years, which had little impact on their fast-growing economy. This move was made to ensure an idealistic and humanitarian environment for West Germany to rebuild itself; however, there were ulterior motives of the USA to ensure another ally and the commanding presence of Germany in Europe gave access to USA. USSR could not let this happen as this was a blockage of their goals of expansionism and hence the clash of ideologies of both the nations. Direct confrontation was not an option, therefore both the countries resorted to indirect ways and icy international relations.
Over time, both the nations rebuilt their stockpiles of weaponry, making weapons of mass destruction. USA build its first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier capable of firing nuclear weapons just 12 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. It was called USS George Washington and was capable of carrying and firing 16 Polaris nuclear-tipped missiles. It had developed over 50 different types of aerial bombs. It had developed a system of self-correcting missiles which gave their missiles a first strike benefit and make them even more lethal. The Russians developed numerous weapons as well, mainly to be at par with the Americans. They developed the SS-20 (as was called by the NATO, real name was RT-21M Pioneer), an intercontinental ballistic missile, KAB-500L, a laser guided warhead and BETAB-500, a concrete piercing warhead.
USA conducted numerous operations, just to prove how vulnerable the USSR was. They had conducted many operations near key Russian bases and airfields. American Bombers would at time enter Soviet airspace and bank out at the last moment to test the Russian response system and to run an analysis on it. USA also deployed Pershing-2 Missiles into Western Europe within striking range of Russia, to counter their SS-20 missiles. USA also conducted the largest Naval Exercise also known as the Fleet-ex just to demonstrate its strength.
The Russian paranoia was an obvious thing; their early detection systems were malfunctioning and had given false alarms in two instances. The clear-headedness of the on-duty Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov saved the world from a nuclear war. Americans had deployed nuclear warheads to Italy and Turkey in response to which the Russians deployed nuclear warheads to Cuba. The Americans had established a naval blockade to prevent further transportation of warheads into Cuba. After tense negotiations, the blockade was finally removed. This confrontation of USA and USSR is considered to be closest the world had been to an all-out nuclear war.
Hence, as the military leaders sit and discuss about Abel Archer, the entire world watches for the Russian response. A nuclear war between these nations could lead to the annihilation of the entire world and the security of all nations near the possible areas of confrontations come under the threat of destruction. Hence, this clash of ego and ideology spread a fear of annihilation among the countries.
Reincarnated in Monochromaticity
“The meandering codicils fraught with conscientiousness”, as Dwight D. Eisenhower would lament was crumbled in black and white as Sankalpa Sarkar, reporting from the Joint Crisis Committee (JCC): North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) asserts the conundrum of strategic empathy which knocked on the world’s door late in 1983.
Standing on the pedestal of a Utopian structure of prudent coercive nationalism, Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defence of the United States of America (USA) would have dithered on the precipice of lingering renditions when he would lament, “If the Soviet Politburo had deployed their cognitive rationalism, this would not be a conflict of magnanimous proportions”. Come the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR: The Soviet Union), mud-flinging had metamorphosed from the apostolic spiritualism of a retinoic cliché to the gigantic benevolence of leftist hierarchy. Raising its head in a plethora of centrist ideologies, the rightist policies formed a blatherskite erotica of involuntary bruxism and strived with canorous emphasis to establish their sphere of influence. And thus, strutted the apostle, proudly on the brink of a crumbling foundation and proclaimed the degeneration of the philosophies of evolution.
If the realms had aligned into a vortex of corybantic gyrations, the Ronald Reagan administration would have been laid privy to a barrage of unintelligible paradoxes. Indeed, if the Politburo had exercised its perceptive facilities prior to the Abel Archer exercises, the intelligentsia at the Kremlin would be picking their fingernails over the incredulous dictum of confirmation bias which had threatened to blind the virtual stereopsis of the Soviet mindset. Veiling any discerning epiphanies that the Politburo might have harboured regarding the United States’ diplomatic endeavours in the lead up to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) exercises in 1983, the institutional predisposition that ascended owing to the conspicuous fixation of the Kremlin in their belief that the USA would violate their implicit no-first-use pact was unfounded in the paranoia that garnered pace as the Kremlin authorized the initiation of the Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie (Ракетно ядерное нападение) (acronymic famously as Operation RYaN). If at all, the scarcity of Soviet agents who were sceptical of the Kremlin’s interpretation of the exercises were enforced into digging for evidence to support the Kremlin’s tacit imagination, swayed by their cognizance of rewards for doing so and penalties for violators. The Politburo was tacit at this point, the stagnancy had been revulsed, the bells were tolling. If the Kremlin could be held liable to accusations of misguided pedantry, it was indeed justified on the face of the Politburo policies regarding the KGB. Revealing two contradicting facets of Soviet intelligence, KGB officers were held accountable for facts and held punishable for analysis, compromising the the Soviet intelligentsia within the ranks of the espionage officers. When a spike in classified decoded communication between London and Washington was detected, the Soviets elected to restrict their perceptive faculties to focus on a possible nuclear offensive by the NATO on the USSR. The KGB ascertained the abrupt upsurge in cryptic communiqué between the two close allies, USA and the United Kingdom (UK) as a sigil for an imminent nuclear attack by the NATO on the USSR under the shroud of the Abel Archer military exercises. Andropov and the KGB adjudicated the impending attack as a reiteration of the World War II policy of quid pro quo, obliquely and sternly revelled in by the Pentagon.
Strategic empathy waived off an epoch of tenacious persistence as the convex mindset of the officials at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), Pentagon and the Kremlin served to swerve the balance of armistice in a wanderlust pendulum. The 1970s was a decade of strategic and diplomatic stability for the Soviet Union. Détente eased the intensifying tensions with the USA; the implications of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) induced stability in the nuclear balance between the USA and the USSR by eliminating the quid pro quo incentive and establishing an implicit no-first-strike policy and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act legitimized the porous borders of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe. If the Politburo were heaving sighs of relief at the Kremlin, the storm was brewing far beyond the precipice of the teacup. For with the advent of the 1980s, the pillars of stability that the USSR had relied on were but a heap of musty ash. Having repudiated détente, the US perspective raised eyebrows at the Soviet adventurism in Africa and military intervention in Afghanistan, which shattered the Utopian ideology of the peaceful and mutual co-existence of the USA and the USSR. If the Americans had an illusory belief in the Soviet desperation and haplessness following the refutation, they were in for uncouth shock as the Soviets laboured under the delusion that the repudiation was an implicit result of the predictability of the détente. Pseudo-gratified by the sagacity of equivalence that the détente conferred unto them, the Politburo was woven into its own cocoon of quixotic misinterpretations as they recognized the demise of the détente as ominous. Reeling under a counter-reaction to the détente by the USSR, the USA and its Western allies resorted to their trump card- the Helsinki Final Act to assert leverage over the USSR on its deplorable human rights record. While the Kremlin had expressed ecstasy over the Helsinki Act in its infancy realizing the sphere of assertation in Eastern Europe it lent to USSR, the Politburo eventually succumbed to rationality as it came to despise the Helsinki Act for its comprehension on human rights, which the Soviet Union had regarded as inconsequential on the political spectrum during negotiation of the agreement. Rapid manoeuvres by the Pentagon resulted in dictums which led to a metamorphosis in US doctrines and policies, which were cannon fodder to Soviet paranoia such as the Presidential Directive 59 (July 1980), National Security Decision Directive 13 (October 1981) and Single Integrated Operational Plan (6 October 1983). If the United States had anticipated strategic empathy to label itself as a catalyst in armistice agreements, Ronald Raegan would have dropped his cup of tea as his rhetoric wavered unflinchingly in the rancid air around the Kremlin.
Sources:
1. https://www.fpri.org/article/2018/12/able-archer-at-35-lessons-of-the-1983-war-scare/
2. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/06/able-archer-almost-started-a-nuclear-war-with-russia-in-1983.html
3. https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nuclear-close-calls-able-archer-83
4. https://unredacted.com/2014/01/29/stasi-documents-provide-operational-details-on-operation-ryan-the-soviet-plan-to-predict-and-preempt-a-western-nuclear-strike-show-uneasiness-over-degree-of-clear-headedness-about-the-entire-ryan/
(Edited by Harsha Sista.)