The End of the U.S. Nuclear Monopoly

Abstract

Having set the scene with the preponderance of American power in the immediate years after World War II, this chapter examines Washington’s thoughts, perceptions, and responses emanating from the ending of America’s nuclear monopoly. Indeed, for those who accepted the full range of American Cold War assumptions, two events of late 1949 would shatter the dream of a stable East–West equilibrium. The Communist victory in China, adding perhaps a half billion people to the Communist bloc, loomed as a disastrous miscarriage of the U.S. policy of containment. Official rhetoric warned that Mao’s triumph exposed millions elsewhere to Chinese encroachments. If the Communist conquest of China elicited only a limited U.S. response, for countless citizens of the United States and Western Europe it vastly diminished the security of the non-Soviet world. But the worst was yet to come. In late August 1949, the explosion of a Soviet atomic device terminated abruptly the American atomic monopoly on which all Western military strategies against possible Soviet aggression relied.