Paper bear; a real conspiracy between frenemies

 

I just heard a passing reference to something which reminded me that everything you (think) you know really can be wrong. Hugely and dangerously wrong. 

Back in the Cold War, specifically in the late 1950s and early '60s, the Missile Gap was a thing. The idea that the Soviet Union had an overwhelming numerical superiority in nuclear missiles. It was a notion largely kicked off by some boastful comments of Khrushchev's which were probably intended as an unsubtle bluff to warn off the US. 

 The US media and military-industrial complex picked up Khrushchev's ball and ran with it:

 "Over six columns starting on January 23 [1960], [US journalist Joseph] Alsop laid out the case for believing the Soviets were well ahead in missile development. He built his argument on Power's premise that with 150 ICBMs and 150 intermediate-range missiles firing on European targets, the Soviets could destroy all of NATO's nuclear weapons. He then set out to explain that if the Soviet missile factories were as efficient as the factory that produced SAC's Atlas rockets, then Khrushchev would have 150 ICBMs in ten months. Alsop charged the Eisenhower administration with playing Russian roulette in refusing to accelerate the arms race because of lack of firm proof that the Soviets had as many missiles as they could have."

"The public controversy was actually only the tip of the iceberg, for the real sparks flew within the American intelligence community, particularly between the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. Air Force analysts claimed that there could be hundreds of Soviet ICBMs, whereas CIA analysts argued that there were no more than a dozen.

We now know that there were only four."

It's worth pausing to let the weight of that fact sink in. A nuclear arms race fueled by a public and military perception that other side had hundreds of ICBMs when, in fact, it had four. 

Eisenhower was damn right to speak up about the malign influence of the military-industrial complex. 

There are two aspects of this story which seem to illustrate more general truths:

1. There are plenty of flat-out insane conspiracy theories swirling around these days, which deserve to be mocked and rejected. But the example of the illusory Missile Gap shows that sometimes, some  groups of insiders really can engineer real conpiracies against the laity

2. Sometimes, the aggressive interests of deadly enemies coincide in ways which make the world a far worse place for the majority who are just trying to get on with their lives without harming anybody. Khrushchev wanted to signal strength, in order to make his enemies fear him and leave him alone. The US military-industrial complex needed a credible threat in order to maintain its power, influence and funding. In a sense, both frenemies got some of what they wanted, while an emergent threat to the entire human race, in the form of a nuclear arms race grew out of both sides' attempts to bolster their own positions. 

There's a similar symbiosis between, for example, violent terrorist organisations, trying to provoke states into a backlash which they hope will validate the terrorists' cause and recruit more followers, and states' military-industrial-security complexes, which grow and become more powerful, the greater the perceived terrorist threat.

Sources: Dwayne A Day at The Space Review and Eric Alterman at Media Matters, reviewing Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.