Customer Reviews

The Cold War: A History

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This book is more of an encyclopedic listing of major weapons systems deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union than a proper history. Such a reference is certainly needed and this one is pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately, what is really needed is a true encyclopedia, complete with photographs, diagrams and extensive cross-references. This book is not it. One gets the sense that Miller was originally trying to write something similar to the Janes series that he has worked on, but the publisher nixed the idea of a glossy, heavily illustrated reference book and wanted something that looked more like a conventional history.

Miller does provide comprehensive coverage of the topic and provides a lot of interesting details. There are also many useful tables and appendices at the back of the book.

Despite this wide-ranging coverage, however, Miller almost completely ignores the role of satellites during the Cold War. Although highly classified, they played significant roles in treaty verification and also improved stability. For instance, the "missile gap" of the early 1960s was eliminated by the first American reconnaissance satellites and as a result, the United States did not build thousands more ICBMs.

One thing that bothered me was the limited references provided for the information. He has only a handful of references for each chapter, despite the fact that the chapters are packed with information. This makes it impossible to look up further information (or check the information in the book). Where, for instance, does Miller get the reliability rates for the Navy's Polaris missiles? That's a fascinating detail, but I wanted to read more about it. Yet he has only two footnotes for the entire chapter.

Any author seeking to write a military history of the Cold War has undertaken a very formidable task. The intense and extensive military rivalry - and its related political, economic, and diplomatic competition - between the American and Soviet superpowers and their respective allies lasted nearly fifty years and was "fought" on practically every continent. So the fact that David Miller's The Cold War: A Military History is highly selective in the themes it addresses does not, in principle, trouble me. As a practical matter, that is the only way that a military history of the Cold War could be fit into one volume. But this book is not really history. It is, instead, a collection of relatively short essays, mostly about weapons and weapons systems developed and used to arm the Cold War military forces. As an introduction to those subjects, this book probably has some value, but it is not the narrative of Cold War military events which the title suggests.

I also take issue with the book's narrow focus: According to Miller, "central Europe best symbolizes what went on during the Cold War and is the most likely place for the fighting to have started." That assertion will come as a surprise to men and women who served in the American armed forces in Korea and Vietnam, as well as to their Soviet counterparts who served in Afghanistan. Miller's approach probably works for most of the period called the "high Cold War," which lasted from the first Berlin crisis in 1948 until the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But from that point in time until the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I would suggest that the Cold War in central Europe was relatively stable. In contrast, during the last three decades of the Cold War, there were serious and lengthy Cold War conflicts "by proxy" in Vietnam and Afghanistan, as well as "hot spot" crises elsewhere in Asia, as well as in Africa and central America. Any book purporting to be a general military history of the Cold War which focuses exclusively on central Europe is going to mislead, and that is precisely what I consider one of this book's most serious shortcomings. Miller's emphasis on events in central Europe also is of limited value because he devotes too much space to the possibility of conventional war. During the formative period of the Cold War, from the end of the Second World War in Europe until the first Berlin crisis, the Soviet Union maintained huge tank armies and infantry forces in eastern Europe. Precisely in order to deter conventional war, first the United States and, later, Great Britain and France, developed atomic weapons. We will never know, of course, what would have happened if the Soviet Union's tanks and infantry had invaded western Europe, but I believe it is virtually certain that the United States would have responded with strategic and/or tactical atomic weapons. Indeed, according to Miller, "at least in public, NATO regarded battlefield nuclear weapons either as a reasonable response to Soviet first strike or as a last resort in the face of imminent conventional defeat." Nevertheless, Miller deserves credit for making this significant point: "The perceived threat from the Soviet Union caused the European nations and those of North America to draw together through NATO in a way which had never previously proved possible, even in the face of war." Miller writes: "In the mass of documents released since the end of the Cold War, no evidence has been found of any Warsaw Pact defensive plans, except for a few formulated in the three final years, after President Gorbachev had insisted that the General Staff prepare them. Instead, all plans concentrated on a series of massive attacks, which were aimed at securing Soviet control of the entire west-European land mass." That is interesting! However, this next point demonstrates Miller's discussion of protracted conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations is superfluous. Miller writes: "According to Soviet and East German planning documents, the major plan for the Central Front aimed at reaching the German-French border in between thirteen and fifteen days, and then of overrunning France so that the leading troops arrived at the Atlantic coast and the Franco-Spanish border by the thirty-fifth day." Does anyone believe that the United States would have permitted the Soviet Union's tanks to race across Germany and then on to the Atlantic without using every weapon in its nuclear arsenal to prevent? When Miller decided to concentrate on weapons and weapons systems, in my opinion, he also should have decided to provide more information about their awesome expense because continuously developing and upgrading equipment was the key feature of the political economy of the Cold War. Only in his final chapter does Miller address "The Financial Cost," which may, in the long run, prove to be the most important aspect of the entire Cold War. But he provides virtually no details, except to state: "The true costs of defence equipment were virtually impossible to calculate." Miller concludes: "What was certain...as judged by the eventual collapse of the U.S.S.R., was that the cost proved to be unaffordable." I believe that will be one of the great historiographical debates of the coming century: Whether Soviet Communism was simply an ideology whose time came and went or whether the economic demands of the Cold War simply proved too much for the Soviet state to sustain? Furthermore, I believe Miller might have offered some comments about the nearly-indiscriminate distribution of weapons by the Cold War antagonists to Third World countries because I believe that is going to prove to be one of the most serious legacies of the Cold War.

I would recommend David Miller's The Cold War to novices and students who want some basic information about weapons, weapons systems, and their impact on certain issues of strategy. But, the title notwithstanding, this book is far from the final word on the Cold War's military history.

The author did a disservice to himself by incorrectly stating in the title of the book that it was a history of the cold war. The book is not, unlike the title might suggest, a history of the cold war. The book does not cover anything much outside of Europe and really does not touch on the political issues of the time.

What the book does give you is a very detailed and interesting review of the U.S., NATO and Warsaw Pact equipment, base structure and high level battle strategies for a war in Europe. The author has done a good amount of research on these topics and presents a very readable rundown of this information. If you are interested in these topics, especially the details on the equipment used then this book can almost act as a reference book. Overall it is a good book, good level of detail and written in a readable fashion.

I thought this was going to be a review of all of the military battles fought on both sides during the cold war. Instead, it is a very technical, statiscally oriented review of the US and Soviet capabilities during the cold war.

The author reviews events leading up to the creation of NATO and the Warsaw Pacts, the nuclear weapons available to both sides, the difficulties the Allies would have had if the Soviets had chosen to launch a conventional war and how difficult it would have been to keep any war conventional. The European response is discussed as well, their land would have been devestated in any confrontation.

There are many statistics about missles, ICBMs, submarines, planes, ships, tanks. One could take issue with these "facts" but the author admits that the data is based on the assumption of whoever is making the case. In the end, no one could win. I was often reminded of the movie "Wargames" where we learn the lesson you could play a game of global thermonuclear war, but there could never be a winner. A thought provoking book, a hard read due to all of the data and as other reviewers have noted, even then, some areas are overlooked.