In reality, rather than banishing the conception of war, the Cold War powers adopted a strategy of “If you want (nuclear) peace, prepare for (nuclear) war.” It did not render strategic bases around the world obsolete. It absolutely did not involve the US or the USSR giving up their geopolitical dreams.
It worked. There were close calls (e.g. Petrov), suggesting it had a significant chance of failure. Attlee doesn’t predict a significant chance of failure; he predicts a near-certainty.
We don’t get to see the counterfactual where we tried things Attlee’s way, but it’s not at all clear it would have worked. My lay understanding of history is that a vision of resolving all conflicts peacefully led to the Munich agreement and ultimately the very war it had aimed to prevent.
Small quibble: I note that there is a difference between it worked and it failed to fail catastrophically. The current consensus among people who study the subject is that the latter describes reality.
This does not change Attlee being wrong, though. It just means the direction we went instead was wrong for different reasons.
The latter: nuclear deterrence failed in the sense that our models of the world were completely wrong; but they did not fail catastrophically in the sense that we wound up in a nuclear war. A common description of this is “failed to fail,” which is sort of like the operational version of “not even wrong” in math.
This is different from the plan working, which means our models were good enough that our actions caused nuclear peace.
This conclusion arose based in increased access to records and memoranda of Soviet leadership after the Soviet Union fell; what we discovered is that their leaders did not think or feel at all like we thought they did across multiple events.
Edit for sources you might be interested in: Book: The Great American Gamble, by Keith B. Payne. This is the best history I know of on the subject, and does a good job of distinguishing between things like why ideas that went into deterrence are wrong vs. how we commonly misinterpreted the ideas we were using even so.
Blog posts: Dominic Cummings, if you are interested in reading about a recent government official trying to shift beliefs within government based on this newer information. He’s a controversial personality, but the only personal perspective on this topic I am aware of.
How wrong is “completely wrong”? I’ve only read Cummings up to the paywall. His two examples are 1) that the USSR planned to use nuclear weapons quickly if war broke out and 2) that B-59 almost used a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re: 1), this is significant, but AIUI NATO planners never had all that much hope of avoiding the conventional war → nuclear war escalation. The core of the strategy was avoiding the big conventional war in the first place, and this succeeded.
Re: 2), Cummings leaves out some very important context on B-59: the captain ordered a nuclear attack specifically because he did not know what was going on and thought war might have already broken out. It’s scary that it happened, but it’s a huge leap to claim this falsifies the ‘myth’ of Kennedy successfully negotiating with Khrushchev.
Wasn’t Attlee wrong?
In reality, rather than banishing the conception of war, the Cold War powers adopted a strategy of “If you want (nuclear) peace, prepare for (nuclear) war.” It did not render strategic bases around the world obsolete. It absolutely did not involve the US or the USSR giving up their geopolitical dreams.
It worked. There were close calls (e.g. Petrov), suggesting it had a significant chance of failure. Attlee doesn’t predict a significant chance of failure; he predicts a near-certainty.
We don’t get to see the counterfactual where we tried things Attlee’s way, but it’s not at all clear it would have worked. My lay understanding of history is that a vision of resolving all conflicts peacefully led to the Munich agreement and ultimately the very war it had aimed to prevent.
Small quibble: I note that there is a difference between it worked and it failed to fail catastrophically. The current consensus among people who study the subject is that the latter describes reality.
This does not change Attlee being wrong, though. It just means the direction we went instead was wrong for different reasons.
Wait, latter or former? It doesn’t seem like nuclear nonproliferation and deterrence failed catastrophically?
The latter: nuclear deterrence failed in the sense that our models of the world were completely wrong; but they did not fail catastrophically in the sense that we wound up in a nuclear war. A common description of this is “failed to fail,” which is sort of like the operational version of “not even wrong” in math.
This is different from the plan working, which means our models were good enough that our actions caused nuclear peace.
This conclusion arose based in increased access to records and memoranda of Soviet leadership after the Soviet Union fell; what we discovered is that their leaders did not think or feel at all like we thought they did across multiple events.
Edit for sources you might be interested in:
Book: The Great American Gamble, by Keith B. Payne. This is the best history I know of on the subject, and does a good job of distinguishing between things like why ideas that went into deterrence are wrong vs. how we commonly misinterpreted the ideas we were using even so.
Blog posts: Dominic Cummings, if you are interested in reading about a recent government official trying to shift beliefs within government based on this newer information. He’s a controversial personality, but the only personal perspective on this topic I am aware of.
How wrong is “completely wrong”? I’ve only read Cummings up to the paywall. His two examples are 1) that the USSR planned to use nuclear weapons quickly if war broke out and 2) that B-59 almost used a nuclear weapon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Re: 1), this is significant, but AIUI NATO planners never had all that much hope of avoiding the conventional war → nuclear war escalation. The core of the strategy was avoiding the big conventional war in the first place, and this succeeded.
Re: 2), Cummings leaves out some very important context on B-59: the captain ordered a nuclear attack specifically because he did not know what was going on and thought war might have already broken out. It’s scary that it happened, but it’s a huge leap to claim this falsifies the ‘myth’ of Kennedy successfully negotiating with Khrushchev.