1999 by Richard Nixon

or Moscow wields nuclear superiority would have decisively different consequences for the world.
    The United States is a defensive power. It has never been an offensive power. Circumstances, not a conscious plan, made the United States a superpower. If the Soviet Union had not threatened to subordinate Western Europe after World War II, the United States would have retreated into its prewar isolation. If itwere possible, most Americans would still like to return to the simpler days when the United States was on the periphery of world events.
    The Soviet Union is an offensive power. Its stated goal today is a communist world ruled from Moscow. No one in the nineteen countries dominated by Moscow would deny this. Not even the communists in Beijing—who were close allies with their comrades in Moscow for a decade—dispute this. The Sino–Soviet split occurred because the Kremlin leaders insisted that the Chinese submit to Soviet leadership. This does not imply that Kremlin leaders have the global equivalent of the Schlieffen plan secreted away in a Kremlin vault. Gorbachev does not want war. A world of charred cities and dead bodies is a dubious prize. But he does want to expand Soviet control by means short of war. The threat of nuclear war, implicit and explicit, is an indispensable instrument in this effort.
    Whether a defensive or an offensive power has nuclear superiority makes a profound difference. Superiority in the hands of a defensive power is a guarantee of peace; superiority in the hands of an offensive power is a threat to peace. Aggressors embark on war when they believe they hold a significant military edge. To preserve peace, a defensive power must be strong enough to convince potential aggressors that they cannot prevail by resort to arms.
    For a quarter century, from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, the United States had nuclear superiority. Western Europe remains free today because American nuclear superiority offset the Kremlin’s massive conventional superiority. At its peak in the mid-1950s American superiority served as a powerful deterrent to Soviet adventurism and aggression in other regions. No one in the Kremlin took it lightly when John Foster Dulles explained that the American doctrine of massive retaliation meant the United States would respond to communist expansionism “at a time and place of its own choosing.” Kremlin leaders knew that the time would be the twelve hours a B-52 needed to cross the Arctic and that the place would be Moscow.
    Nothing could have prevented the gradual erosion of American superiority. But the tendency among nuclear revisionists to downgradethe decisive role of nuclear diplomacy since 1945 contradicts history. American nuclear superiority was the key to the our success in the Korean War in the early 1950s, in the Suez crisis in 1956, in the Berlin crisis in 1959, and in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
    In the Korean War, America was fighting not only to repel communist aggression on the Korean peninsula but also to protect an unarmed Japan and to discourage Soviet and Chinese expansionism elsewhere in Asia. By 1953, after the Chinese intervention, the war in Korea had bogged down into a stalemate near the 38th parallel. With South Korea rescued, the American people soon tired of the continuing bloodshed and certainly would not consider an escalation in conventional U.S. forces. President Eisenhower also opposed a prolonged ground war in Asia. He therefore instructed John Foster Dulles to inform India’s ambassador to the United Nations, Krishna Menon, who had good relations with both Communist China and the Soviet Union, that the President’s patience was wearing thin and that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons in Korea. As a result, after a half year with Eisenhower in office, an armistice was signed in July 1953.
    In the Suez crisis, Eisenhower faced the threat of a Soviet intervention in the Middle East. After