Epilogue: What the Cold War cost

By Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing

The Cold War was a confrontation between military giants. A balance of terror preserved the world's peace. But the balance was struck at a ludicrously high and costly level; both the United States and the Soviet Union equipped themselves with thousands more nuclear missiles than were needed for self-defense, or to deter the other. Those weapons, added to conventional armaments, cost the superpowers trillions of dollars; much of this money was wasted, and could have been diverted to other social needs, though we do not know that it would have been. Each side could regard some crucial part of the cost as essential to containing the other.

In 1955 President Eisenhower, the only professional soldier among America's postwar presidents, warned, "The problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." One estimate shows that some $8 trillion ($8,000,000,000,000) was spent, worldwide, on nuclear and other weapons between 1945 and 1996. At their peak, the world's nuclear stockpiles held 18 billion metric tons of explosive energy: 18,000 megatons. Today, they still hold 8,000 megatons. Compare these totals with the entire explosive energy released by all bombs dropped in the Second World War (6 megatons); in the Korean War (0.8 megatons); in Vietnam (4.1 megatons).

Total Soviet expenditure during the Cold War is hard to quantify; records are inadequate. But Eduard Shevardnadze reckoned that perhaps as much as 50 percent of Soviet national product was spent on defense, on arms and the armed forces, depriving the Soviet people of a better life.

In the United States, according to government figures, expenditure on national defense, which had peaked as a proportion of gross domestic product during the Second World War at nearly 40 percent, ran at over 10 percent in the 1950s, 9 percent in the 1960s, and declined to around 5 percent in the 1970s, the years of dŽtente. It rose steeply again, however, in the 1980s to over 6 percent. And in real terms it ran at $400 billion annually, in 1996 dollars, during Korea, Vietnam, and the second half of the 1980s, when it contributed to overall budget deficits.

The United States ended the Cold War a superpower still, with a booming economy. But the poor of the United States, and of the world, could certainly have used some of the resources committed to Cold War armaments, if government had so willed it. Martin Luther King Jr. complained that Lyndon Johnson's promise of a Great Society was lost on the battlefields of Vietnam.

A continuing cost will be that for cleaning up weapons-related nuclear pollution. Estimates of what this will cost in the United States range from $100 billion to $400 billion. In Russia and the old U.S.S.R., the problem is intractable; they simply will not be able to deal with it.

Above and beyond the dollar cost is the cost in human lives. Though a nuclear catastrophe was averted by the balance of terror, the Cold War's shooting wars did take their toll in death: millions in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan; hundreds of thousands in Angola; tens of thousands in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Ethiopia; thousands in Hungary and Romania. Civilians accounted for more deaths than soldiers in uniform. Men and women died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall; strikers were shot in Poland; protesters were crushed by Soviet tanks in Prague; rebels were killed in Budapest; worshippers were gunned down on cathedral steps in San Salvador. Some of the wars people perished in, post-colonial struggles, would have happened anyway. But the Cold War made each local conflict it touched even more deadly. Covert actions by intelligence services killed tens of thousands more.

The Cold War stifled thought; for decades the people of Eastern Europe, living under a tyranny, were, someone said, "buried alive" -- cut off from and, as they felt, abandoned by the West. When the chance came, Germans, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians all rejected communism. So too did the peoples of the Americas; in Nicaragua the Sandinistas held free elections and lost them. Given the choice, people chose democracy. Only Fidel Castro in Cuba, the great Cold War survivor, kept the Red flag flying and the cause of socialist revolution alive.

China is the great question mark of the 21st century: What will China do? The world's most populist nation is still ruled by a Communist autocracy, though no longer along Marxist-Leninist lines. Will China succeed in reconciling Communist ideology with a free market? Will the Communist Party monopoly of power be broken there also?

A safer world

Although no new world order is in place, the world is far safer for the Cold War's ending, despite continual outbreaks of ethnic slaughter. It is hard now to realize or recall it, but whole generations in our time lived with the fear that one crisis or another -- in Korea, Vietnam, Berlin, Cuba, the Middle East -- might trigger a nuclear holocaust, as the two great power blocs clumsily breathed defiance, dug their heels in, took stances, refused to yield. The world too often went to the brink.

And always, more omnipresent than we ever realized, was the chance of nuclear accident. More than once, as we know now, we came close. Fear was routine, endemic. Children who grew up in the '50s and '60s remember the air-raid shelter and the precautionary drills -- "Duck and Cover." Chernobyl revealed how inadequate such precautions would have been. Parents in many countries remember that when the world news grew dimmer, they looked at their children and at each other and hoped they would all live to see another day. That fear has been lifted from us.

The balance of terror worked because, when it counted, those in command, on both sides, put humanity's interests higher than short-term national, political or strategic advantage. But although they might have known what they were doing in any crisis, we, at the time, were unsure of the outcome.

For 45 years the peoples of the world held their breath, and survived.

Excerpted with permission from "Cold War: An Illustrated History," the companion book to the COLD WAR series. Sir Jeremy Isaacs is executive producer of COLD WAR. Taylor Downing wrote and produced two episodes of the series. Together they wrote the companion book.