Western intelligence, the Soviet threat and NSC-68: a reply to Beatrice Heuser

Abstract

In her article on the early history of the Cold War, Beatrice Heuser throws out at a challenge to those of us who have, over the past few years, cast doubt upon the idea that the USSR represented a serious military threat to the West after the Second World War. Basing her argument upon ‘American intelligence estimates’ as well as other sources, she attempts to show that Western policy-makers, hither to much criticized by many academic analysts for having exaggerated Soviet capabilities and over-dramatizing its intentions, had good reason to be fearful of the Soviet Union. ‘American and British governments’, according to Dr Heuser, ‘had information which led them to fear Soviet aggression in Europe and elsewhere’ after 1948. In the light of this information—not to mention the North Korean attack upon the South—rearmament, she argues, ‘may well have been an appropriate response to the Soviet threat’. It certainly ‘worried Stalin’ and possibly prevented Soviet aggression in Europe. It was, in short, a reasonable response to a real problem and probably contributed (although by how much can never be known) to the successful containment of the USSR. NSC-68 may not have been such a flawed document after all.