Research PaperAMERICAN STUDIES

The Cold War and Nuclear Fears

There is a lot going on in Cat’s Cradle, and one reading of a reasonable length cannot possibly touch on all the thematic possibilities the novel has to offer. This backgrounder, then, will focus on the Cold War, the bomb, and the cult of science as it developed in the 1950s and 1960s. You should feel free to pursue your own research on religion or other aspects of American life Vonnegut tackled in his novel.

RESEARCH PAPER BACKGROUND

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CAT’S CRADLE

Kurt Vonnegut in 1969www.gereport.com

SECTION 1

In 1961, Time magazine chose as its “man of the year” not an individual but “the American Scientist.” It was an indication of the wide-spread fascination with which Americans in the age of atomic weapons viewed science and tech-nology. Major medical advances accounted for much of that fascination. Jonas Salk’s vaccine to prevent polio, which the federal government pro-vided free to the public beginning in 1955, virtu-ally eliminated the disease from American life in a few short years. Other dreaded diseases such as diphtheria and tuberculosis also all but van-ished from society (at least for a time) as new drugs and treatments emerged. Infant mortality declined by nearly 50 percent in the twenty-five years after the [Second World] war; the death rate among young children declined significantly as well (although both such rates were lower in Western Europe). Average life expectancy in those same years rose by five years, to seventy-one.

But Americans were at least equally im-pressed by other scientific and technological inno-vations: the jet plane, the computer, synthetics, new types of commercially prepared foods. And nothing better illustrated the nation’s veneration

of scientific expertise than the popular enthusi-asm for the American space program.

The program began in large part because of the Cold War. When the Soviet Union an-nounced in 1957 that it had launched a satel-lite—Sputnik—which was orbiting the earth in outer space, the American government (and much of the public) reacted with alarm, as if the Soviet achievement was also a massive American failure. Strenuous efforts began to improve scien-tific education in the schools, to develop more re-search laboratories, and above all to speed the de-

Questions

1. As you read, think about the ways in which historical events and ideas inform Vonnegut’s novel.

2. Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963. What was the attitude of Americans toward science and scientists at that time?

3. How might the events of the Cold War have affected Vonnegut’s work?

4. Watch the two video excerpts (if you are not viewing this on an iPad you will have to click the youtube links), which feature material from the 1950s. What do they tell us about Americans’ fears?

Sputnik IImage: nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov

Science and the Cold War

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This reading is adapted from the 10th edition of American History: A Survey, by Alan Brinkley. It was published in 1999 by McGraw Hill College, located in New York.

velopment of America’s own exploration of outer space. The cen-terpiece of that exploration was the manned space program, estab-lished in 1958 with the selection of the first American space pilots, or “astronauts,” who quickly became the nation’s most revered he-roes. On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space (several months after a Soviet “cosmonaut,” Yuri Gagarin, had made a similar, and longer, flight). On February 2, 1962, John Glenn (later a United States senator) became the first American to orbit the globe (again, only after Gagarin had already done so)....

EISENHOWER, DULLES AND THE COLD WARThe threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union created a sense

of high anxiety in international relations in the 1950s. But the nu-clear threat had another effect as well. With the potential costs of war now so enormous, both superpowers began to edge away from direct confrontations. The attention of both the United States and the Soviet Union began to turn to the rapidly escalating insta-bility in the nations of the Third World.

Dulles and “Massive Retaliation”Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and (except for the president

himself) the dominant figure in the nation’s foreign policy in the 1950s, was John Foster Dulles, an aristocratic corporate lawyer with a stern moral revulsion to communism. He entered office de-nouncing the containment policies of the Truman years as exces-sively passive, arguing that the United States should pursue an ac-tive program of “liberation,” which would lead to a “rollback” of communist expansion. Once in power, however, Dulles had to de-fer to the far more moderate views of the president himself, and he began to develop a new set of doctrines that reflected the impact of

nuclear weapons on the world. The most prominent of those doc-trines was the policy of “massive retaliation,” which Dulles an-nounced early in 1954. The United States would, he explained, re-spond to communist threats to its allies not by using conventional forces in local conflicts (a policy that had led to much frustration in [the Korean War]) but by relying on “the deterrent of massive re-taliatory power” (by which he clearly meant nuclear weapons).

In part, the new doctrine reflected Dulles’s inclination for tense confrontations, an approach he once defined as “brinkman-ship”—pushing the Soviet Union to the brink of war in order to ex-act concessions. But the real force behind the massive retaliation

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President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969), at left, confers with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1888-1959).

Image: wikipedia

policy was economics. With pressure growing both in and out of government for a reduction in American military expenditures, an increasing reliance on atomic weapons seemed to promise, as some advocates put it, “more bang for the buck.”

At the same time, Dulles intensified the efforts of Truman and Acheson before him to “integrate” the entire noncommunist world into a system of mutual defense pacts modeled on NATO. The new alliances were, without exception, far weaker than the European pact. By the end of the decade, the United States had become a party to almost a dozen such treaties in all areas of the world....

Latin America and “Yankee Imperialism”World War II and the Cold War had eroded the limited initia-

tives of the Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America,1 as Ameri-can economic aid now flowed increasingly to Europe. Latin Ameri-can animosity toward the United States grew steadily during the 1950s, as more people in the region came to view the expanding in-fluence of American corporations in their countries as a form of im-perialism. Such concerns deepened in 1954, when the Eisenhower administration ordered the CIA to help topple the new, leftist gov-ernment of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, a regime that Dulles (responding to the entreaties of the United Fruit Company, a major investor in Guatemala fearful of Arbenz) argued was poten-tially communist.2 Four years later, the depths of anti-American sentiment became clear when Vice President Richard Nixon visited the region and was greeted in city after city by angry, hostile, occa-sionally dangerous mobs.

No nation in the region had been more closely tied to America than Cuba. Its leader, Fulgencio Batista, had ruled as a military dic-tator since 1952, when with American assistance he had toppled a more moderate government. Cuba’s relatively prosperous econ-omy had become a virtual fiefdom of American corporations, which controlled almost all the island’s natural resources and had cornered over half the vital sugar crop, and of American organized crime, which controlled much of the lucrative tourist industry. Be-ginning in 1957, a popular movement of resistance to the Batista re-gime began to gather power under the leadership of Fidel Castro. By late 1958, the Batista forces were in almost total disarray. And

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1 The Good Neighbor Policy was Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to improve the relation-ship between the United States and its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere.2 Guzman was not a communist. Nonetheless, the CIA-sponsored coup brought a right-wing dictator to power, and sparked a civil war in Guatemala that lasted until the mid 1990s, killing hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans.

These video clips were part of a movie called Atomic Cafe (1982), a documentary film which was a mash-up of post-World War II newsreels, ads, and civil defense films.

Movie 1.1 Excerpts from 1950s news reports on the hydrogen bomb.

If you are reading the pdf document, click here to view the movie on youtube.

on January 1, 1959, with Batista now in exile in Spain, Castro marched into Havana and established a new government.

At first, the American government reacted warmly to Castro, relieved to be rid of the corrupt and ineffective Batista and hopeful that Castro would be a moderate, democratic reformer who would

allow American economic activity to continue in Cuba unchal-lenged. But once Castro began implementing significant land re-forms and expropriating foreign-owned businesses and resources, Cuban-American relations rapidly deteriorated. Of particular con-cern to Eisenhower and Dulles was the Cuban regime’s growing interest in communist ideas and tactics. When Castro began accept-ing assistance from the Soviet Union in 1960, the United States cut back the “quota” by which Cuba could export sugar to America at a favored price. Early in 1961, as one of its last acts, the Eisen-hower administration severed diplomatic relations with Castro. The American CIA had already begun secretly training Cuban expa-triates for an invasion of the island to topple the new regime. Iso-lated by the United States, Castro soon cemented an alliance with the Soviet Union.

Europe and the Soviet UnionAlthough the problems of the Third World were moving slowly

to the center of American foreign policy, the direct relationship with the Soviet Union and the effort to resist communist expansion in Europe remained the principal concerns of the Eisenhower ad-ministration.

Even as the United States was strengthening [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)] and rearming West Germany, how-ever, many Americans continued to hope for negotiated solutions to some of the remaining problems dividing the superpowers. Such hopes grew after the death of Josef Stalin in 1953.... In 1955, Eisenhower met with the Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin, at a cor-dial summit conference in Geneva. But when a subsequent confer-ence of foreign ministers met to try to resolve specific issues, they could find no basis for agreement....

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Fidel Castro (1926- ) during his first visit to the United States as Cu-ban leader in 1959.

Image: wikipedia

The failure of conciliation brought renewed vigor to the Cold War and, among other things, greatly intensified the Soviet-American arms race. Both nations engaged in extensive nuclear testing. Both nations redoubled efforts to develop effective inter-continental ballistic missiles, which could deliver atomic warheads directly from one continent to another. The American military, in the meantime, developed a new breed of atomic-powered subma-rines, capable of launching missiles from under water anywhere in the world.

The arms race not only increased tensions between the United States and Russia; it increased tensions within each nation as well. In America, public concern about nuclear war was becoming a per-vasive national nightmare, a preoccupation never far from popular thought. Movies, television programs, books, popular songs—all expressed the concern. Fear of communism, therefore, combined with fear of atomic war to create a persistent national anxiety.

“FLEXIBLE RESPONSE” AND THE COLD WARIn international affairs as much as in domestic reform, the opti-

mistic liberalism of the [John F.] Kennedy... administration dictated a more positive, more active approach to dealing with the nation’s problems than in the past. And just as the new activism in domes-tic reform proved more difficult and divisive than liberals had imagined, so too it created frustrations and failure in foreign pol-icy.

Diversifying Foreign Policy... Kennedy remained committed to the nation’s atomic weap-

ons program. Indeed, he ran for president criticizing the Eisen-hower administration for allowing an imbalance of nuclear weap-ons (a “missile gap”) to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union. In fact, as Kennedy discovered even before the elec-tion, whatever missile gap there was favored the United States. but Kennedy insisted on proceeding with an expansion of the na-tion’s atomic arsenal nevertheless—and the Soviet Union, which several years earlier had slowed the growth of its own nuclear weapons stockpile, responded in kind.

Kennedy’s unhappiness with the Eisenhower foreign policy was not that it relied on nuclear weapons; it was that it developed too few other tools and thus had little capacity to respond to prob-lems for which nuclear weapons were inappropriate solutions. In particular, he was unsatisfied with the nation’s ability to meet com-munist threats in “emerging areas” of the Third World. In 1959, the Soviet Union had directed communist movements around the world to shift attention away from direct confrontations with the industrial powers of the West and towards “wars of national libera-tion” in less developed nations. Kennedy, similarly, concluded that the Third World would be the arena in which the real struggle

Movie 1.2 Civil Defense film from 1951

If you are reading the pdf document, click here to view the movie on youtube.

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against communism would be waged in the future. He gave enthu-siastic support to the growth of the Special Forces, a small branch of the army created in the 1950s to wage guerrilla warfare in lim-ited conflicts. Kennedy expanded the unit, allowed its members to wear distinctive headgear (thus giving them the informal name “the Green Berets”), and gave them an elite status within the mili-tary they had never had before.

Kennedy also favored expanding American influence through peaceful means. To repair the badly deteriorating relationship with Latin America, he proposed an “Alliance for Progress”: a se-ries of projects undertaken cooperatively by the United States and Latin American governments for peaceful development and stabili-zation of the nations of that region. Its purpose was both to spur social and economic development and to inhibit the rise of Castro-like movements in other Central or South American countries. Ken-nedy also inaugurated the Agency for International Development (AID) to coordinate foreign aid. And he established what became one of his most popular innovations: the Peace Corps, which sent young American volunteers abroad to work in developing areas.

The Bay of Pigs FiascoAmong the first foreign policy ventures of the Kennedy admini-

stration was a disastrous assault on the Castro government in Cuba. The Eisenhower administration had launched the project, and by the time Kennedy took office, the CIA had been working for months in Central America to train a small army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow the Castro regime.

Kennedy had misgivings about the project. But he believed that “communist domination in this hemisphere can never be nego-tiated” and that Castro represented a threat to the stability of other

Latin American nations, and so he accepted the CIA’s optimistic as-sessments of the chances for success and approved the invasion. On April 17, 1961, 2,000 of the armed exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, expecting first American air support and then a spon-taneous uprising by the Cuban people on their behalf. They re-ceived neither. At the last minute, Kennedy withdrew the air sup-port, fearful of involving the United States too directly in the inva-sion. (Air support would not likely have changed the result in any case.) The expected uprising did not occur. Instead, well-armed Castro forces easily crushed the invaders, and within two days the entire mission had collapsed. Kennedy somberly took responsibil-ity for the fiasco. But he refused to rule out further measures against the Castro regime. “We do not intend to abandon Cuba to the communists,” he said only three days after the Bay of Pigs.

Confrontations with the Soviet Union...The rising tensions [between the United States and the Soviet

Union] culminated [in October 1962] in the most dangerous and dramatic crisis of the Cold War. During the summer of 1962, American intelligence agencies had become aware of the arrival of a new wave of Soviet technicians and equipment in Cuba and of military construction in progress. On October 14, aerial reconnais-sance photos produced clear evidence that the Soviets were con-structing sites on the island for offensive nuclear weapons. To the Soviets, placing missiles in Cuba probably seemed a reasonable, and relatively inexpensive, way to counter the presence of Ameri-can missiles in Turkey (and a way to deter any future American in-vasion of Cuba). But to Kennedy and most other Americans, the missile sites represented an act of aggression by the Soviets toward

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the United States. Almost immediately, the president decided that the weapons could not be allowed to remain.

On October 22, after nearly a week of tense deliberations by a special task force in the White House, Kennedy ordered a naval and air blockade around Cuba, a “quarantine” against all offensive weapons. Soviet ships bound for the island slowed down or stopped before reaching the point of confrontation. But work on the missile sites continued. Preparations were under way for an American air attack on Cuba when, late in the evening of October 26, Kennedy received a message from [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev implying that the Soviet Union would remove the mis-sile bases in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. Ignoring other, tougher Soviet messages, the president agreed. Pri-vately, he also promised to remove American missiles from Turkey, a decision he had already reached months earlier but had not yet implemented. The crisis was over.

The Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since World War II. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been forced to confront the momentous consequences of war.

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American U2 spy plane surveillance photo of Soviet missile sites in Cuba.

Image: www.cas.sc.edu