Frequent readers of this web site will find that this is an unusual posting because it is a combination review and commentary. I took that approach because I disagree with the basic premise of the book that stated simplistically, the Soviets did not present the threat that was advocated by U.S. policy.  My disagreement with the premise of the book does not diminish its importance. There is, in my opinion, immense value in a healthy argument about whether the U.S. rearmament was the primary cause of the Cold War or whether the Soviet Union would have taken full advantage if that policy hadn’t blunted their efforts. I’m thrilled Truman was convinced that FDR’s trust of Stalin was misplaced and that containment of the Soviets was needed.

Back to a stab at a review, the book was written by Curt Cardwell, and he has some serious disagreements with the U.S. policies about the intentions of the Soviet Union before the beginning of the Cold War. Briefly, the National Security Council (NSC) issued a series of documents that gauged the intentions of the Soviet Union in the mid-1940s to early 1950s. Those who advocated that the Truman administration must take a hard line against the Soviet Union were primary authors of the policy statement titled NSC 68. The doctrine in that paper was approved by Truman and resulted in a massive rearmament program by the U.S. beginning in 1950. It was the culmination of several Top Secret documents advocating that the ultimate objective of the U.S.S.R. was world domination and that the U.S. was required to aggressively build military strength to prevent the Soviets from pursing that goal.  Cardwell strongly disagrees. He thinks the real purpose of NSC 68 was to protect free market capitalism. I disagree. I offer that the Soviets had blockaded Berlin, exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, the Chinese Communists had taken control of China, North Korea had invaded the South, and the Chinese had entered the Korean War before NSC 68 was finally approved. Those events and actions indicate the Soviets were, in my opinion, interested in expanding their area of control. 

One of the reasons I read the book was that I continue to seek information about the U.S. decision to build the Rocky Flats Plant where I worked helping produce plutonium components for nuclear weapons. The decision to build the plant was made during the time that NSC 68 was being debated and finally approved by Truman. I did find at least a sliver of information. There was a discussion in 1949 during preparation of NSC 68 whether conventional weapons might be more important in a future conflict than nuclear weapons. Minutes of the meeting recorded Secretary of State Dean Acheson saying (on the subject of a possible international agreement not to use nuclear weapons), “… (If) for a variety of reasons we wish to agree with the Russians not to use the bomb such a decision would make rather awkward a request of Congress for additional appropriation to make more bombs we weren’t going to use…”

Selected quotes from the last couple of pages of the book summarize the author’s position. It was “not the Soviet Union but the problem posed by getting Congress to fund foreign economic aid to cope with the dollar gap (balance of trade inequities) that gave birth to the notion…that the Soviet Union was determined to conquer the world and had to be stopped…The multilateralists opted to escalate the Cold War through massive rearmament and to expand American power abroad…Was it worth it?…It is impossible to know what would have happened…if NSC 68 had never been implemented. We will never know if world trade would have closed down…if western Europeans and the Japanese would have adopted communism and formed an alliance with the Soviet Union.  What would have happened to the United States? Would it have been forced to adopt some kind of state economic planning that curtailed the ‘free enterprise’ system…?”

The last paragraph of the Conclusion presents the opinion that there would have been no Cold War if the U.S. had not accepted the position that the Soviets were antagonists. The Soviets, in the opinion of the author, did not want a cold war and hoped for a postwar peace. He doesn’t hold them blameless, although they had security issues they believed were “…a matter of life and death.”  The West had the goal “…to preserve the free enterprise system at home by establishing multilateralism abroad. The result was a long, drawn out Cold War.”

You will read long discussions that U.S. policy was centered on economic concerns created by the “dollar gap.” World War II had weakened the world economy to the point the U.S. did not have healthy trading partners and there was a wide imbalance in the balance of trade. The “…Cold War developed less to ‘contain’ the Soviet Union than to ensure the survival of (the) ‘global…economic regime’…” “For the fact of the matter is that in the early Cold War, the Soviet Union was ‘containable’ whereas the dollar gap was in effect, not.”

A quick summary of the 52 page NSC 68 is that “…the United States and its allies had to embark on a ‘rapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength in the free world’ in order to prevent the Soviet Union from fulfilling its design for world conquest.” “NSC 68 contributed significantly to the conventional and nuclear arms races, primarily when Truman made the decision to pursue development of the hydrogen bomb and greatly increase the U.S. military budget.” A link is provided to those who want to read the actual paper declassified from top secret.

The author writes that he believes “…the evidence contained in the book needs to be taken seriously and not rejected out of hand based on ideological predilections.” He writes, “If the argument, and the evidence used to back it up, is flawed, let that be challenged. But let’s stick to the evidence.”  I do not intend to challenge the author restricted to the references he cites, but I do disagree with the primary interpretation based on other information that is not cited. The first book I would recommend to anyone who doesn’t believe the Soviets were interested in world domination is “Venona” by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. That book documents the massive espionage assault by the Soviets that was in full effect within all areas of the U.S. government and military (and the Manhattan Project) in the early 1940s even while the Soviets were allies of the U.S in World War II. That book observes, “The Soviet assault was of the type a nation directs at an enemy state that is temporarily an ally with which it anticipates future hostility.The Cold War was not a state of affairs that had begun after World War II but a guerrilla action that Stalin had started years earlier.”

I will not dispute economics was (and should be) a primary consideration in establishing foreign policy. I just happen to not trust that the Soviet Union would have been satisfied with what they had in the Iron Curtain and beyond if the Truman Doctrine had not contained them. I expect the twenty-five million or so Soviets who died from starvation, purges, or in gulags in the Soviet Union under Stalin would, if they could, warn that trusting “Uncle Joe” had peaceful, or less than aggressive, intentions would be unwise.