The United States, the balance of power, and World War II: Was Spykman right?

Security Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 365-406

  Art, Robert J ^a  

^a BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 29244437532     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410500323120     Document Type: Review

References (136)

1. See No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
2. No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II Ibid., 24-30.
3. No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II Ibid., 62.
4. There is a second possible scenario that Russett did not put forth. Under this scenario, Germany and Japan would have won a complete victory, vanquishing Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, but then they would have turned against each another and fought for the redivision of the Eurasian spoils. Neither, however, would have achieved a decisive victory, so both would have been consumed with either fighting each other or making preparations to fight each other. Under this scenario neither would have threatened the United States because they would be consumed with fighting each other.
5. Nicholas John Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942).
6. The crux of the analysis comes in chaps. 10-16. For Spykman's analysis of the shape of the future when America's victory was no longer in doubt, see Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944).
7. Spykman was also the most prominent member of the Yale school of international relations and was the first director of the Yale Institute of International Studies founded in 1935. Other famous members of the Yale school included A. Whitney Griswold and George T. Davies. This school stressed the role that power played in international relations because "international society is... a society without a central authority to preserve law and order, and without an official agency to protect its members in the enjoyment of their rights" [Spykman, America 's Strategy in World Politics, 7].
8. The Yale school also followed the lines of geopolitical analysis, which stressed the interaction between political and geographical factors in international relations. The most famous English practitioner was Haiford J. Mackinder, but the modern founders of that school are the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kiellen and the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel. For a good discussion of the meaning and origins of the geopolitical school, see Geoffrey Parker, Geopolitics - Past, Present and, Future (London: Pinter, 1998), chaps. 1 and 2.
9. For Lippmann's geopolitical analysis of World War II, see Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1944).
10. I adhere in the current policy debates on American grand strategy to the forward defense and selective engagement school. See Robert J. Art, A Grand Strategy for America (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
11. A blockade prevents goods from either entering the state being blockaded or from leaving it. An embargo is an edict of a government that prohibits the entry or departure of ships of commerce (its own or the enemy's) from its own ports or the ports of other territories that it controls. A state blockades the ports or airfields of the enemy state, but embargoes its own ports or airfields.
12. See the maps following pages 414 and 424 in Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics.
13. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 391-92, and 397.
14. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 412.
15. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 293. Spykman's discussion of raw materials needed for the war effort was based in part on an Army-Navy Munitions Board report, published 7 January 1939, that assessed the raw materials supply situation for the United States should war come. The Board identified three types of raw materials: strategic, critical, and essential. Strategic and critical materials are defined in the above text. The report defined essential raw materials as those that were neither critical nor strategic and included "those materials essential to the national defense for which no procurement problems in war are anticipated, but whose status is such as to require constant surveillance because future developments may necessitate reclassification as strategic or critical."
16. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 456.
17. The Equidistant Zone was Spykman's name for the part of South America that stretches from Patagonia to the bulge of Brazil, and by the southern part of the Equidistant Zone, he mean primarily Argentina. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 453.
18. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 454.
19. Spykman considered the Equidistant Zone to be the most important area of South America because it contained the most productive agriculture, the greatest military potential, and the greatest sources of needed raw materials. It was also the area "with the closest economic ties with Europe, and is the most skeptical about hemisphere solidarity" (Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics ibid., 407).
20. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 456.
21. Population and GDP figures are computed for 1938, the last year of peace, in order to avoid the distortions caused by the war. I have used the following sources to compute population, GDP, and territory of the 1942 German Empire and the putative quarter sphere: W. S. Woytinsky and E. S. Woytinsky, World Population and Production: Trends and Outlook (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1953), 7, 389, and 395;
22. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, 484-85, app. II;
23. Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10-11;
24. and Collier's World Atlas and Gazetteer (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1955), 8-9.
25. If we use John Mearsheimer's methodology, the ratio is 1:3.2. Mearsheimer uses a surrogate for wealth and GDP, which is the amount of iron/steel production and energy consumption produced by a country. In 1942, the German Empire (which includes Germany and the lands it conquered in Europe) had 23 percent of the relative share of wealth produced by it, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom combined, while the United States had 58 percent, the Soviet Union 7 percent, and the United Kingdom 9 percent. This yields a ratio of 23 percent to 74 percent, or roughly 1:3.2 in the allies' favor. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 73, table 3.4.
26. [This 1:3.2 ratio accords reasonably well with Harrison's 1942 GDP figures: the German Empire (figures only for Germany, France, and Austria) $1.235 trillion, the United States $1.235 trillion, the Soviet Union $318 billion, and the United Kingdom $353 billion. This yields a ratio of $560 billion to $1.9 trillion, or about 1:3.4. Harrison, The Economics of World War II, 10.
27. GDP figures for the German Empire in 1942 are difficult to come by due to the lack of data on GDP for the German occupied territories.] If we use 1938 GDP figures, then we get a GDP ratio of 1:1.6. The 1942 German Empire (in 1938 dollars) had a GDP of $60-65 billion, while the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States had a combined GDP of $100 billion. In assessing the 1:1.6 ratio, remember that the United States was still in depression in 138, whereas Germany was not. See Woytinsky and Woytinsky, World Population and Production, 389;
28. and Harrison, The Economics of World War II, 8. To arrive at an estimate of the GDP and population of the Soviet Union under Soviet control in 1942, I have relied on Harrison. I deducted the population of the German occupied part of the Soviet Union from the total allied population and one-third of the Soviet Union's 1938 GDP from the total allied GDP to account for Germany's partial conquest of the Soviet Union. Harrison gives exact figures for the number of Soviet citizens under German occupation in 1942 (in 1938 figures), but the figure for the Soviet GDP controlled by the Germans is in 1990 dollars. Thus, in order to estimate the part of the Soviet Union's GDP controlled by the Soviets, I have deducted a third of the Soviet Union's 1938 GDP from the allied total.
29. In 1938 dollars, the income of the quarter sphere would have been $78 billion while the income of the rest of the world, which the German and Japanese hegemons would have controlled in Spykman's scenario of the global blockade, would have been $182 billion, yielding a ratio of 1:2.3. See Woytinsky and Woytinsky, World Population and Production, 395. Again, remember that in 1938 the United States was still in the depression, whereas the Germany and Japan were not.
30. In making this comparison, I am employing John Stuart Mill's method of difference - cases similar in initial characteristics but different in their outcomes. There is, however, an added twist: one of the two cases is a hypothetical. Despite this, the comparison remains useful enough to enable us to locate the factors that account for the hypothesized difference in outcomes - the defeat of the German Empire and the presumed successful defense of the American quarter sphere. For an excellent primer on case comparison, see Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methodology for Students of Political Science (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 1997), memo 2.
31. Weapons production figures come from Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 331-32. Overy's book is a marvelous account of why the allies won World War II. The order of magnitude of allied superiority over Germany in weapons production generally accorded with the estimates of Alfred Mierzejewski, though he attributed a greater allied superiority in both population and productive capacity than I think the evidence warrants. Still, the fact of allied superiority is not in dispute, only the order of magnitude.
32. See Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 66.
33. See also R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
34. The statistics in this paragraph come from Overy, Why the Allies Won, 129, 131, and 321. Overy's assessment about the effects of strategic bombing on Germany differed from that of from Robert Pape, who wrote the best book we have on the effectiveness of strategic bombing in the twentieth century. Pape concludes that strategic bombing had little effect on Germany's economy and its ability to sustain the war effort. Pape, however, ignored Speer's evidence and also misses the diversionary effects of bombing.
35. See Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 281-82.
36. Overy, Why the Allies Won, 26, 31, 47, and 58. See chap. 2 for Overy's account of how the Battle of the Atlantic was won. For a full analysis of the submarine in twentieth-century warfare,
37. see Karl Lautenschlager, "The Submarine in Naval Warfare, 1901-2001," International Security 11, no. 3 (winter 1986-87): 94-141.
38. From 1940 through 1944, Britain imported about 146 million tons. See Kevin Smith, Conflict over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 249. Smith covers in detail the wartime needs of Britain, its shipping losses to German submarines, and British-American conflicts over the resupply of Britain.
39. The invasion of France required that the United States ship 9 million tons of supplies and 800,000 troops to Britain between January and June 1944. See Overy, Why the Allies Won, 146.
40. Overy, Why the Allies Won Ibid., 162 and 123-24. Overy recounted that it was technically feasible quite early in the war to put disposable, external fuel tanks under the wings of fighters to extend their ranges, but this was not done until much later because "for too long it was assumed that heavily armed bombers could defend themselves. In fact, bombers were like unescorted merchant ships: to deliver their bomb cargoes they needed to be convoyed" (ibid., 131). The extra tanks were put on the P-38 Lightning and the P-47 Thunderbolt and the range of both fighters was increased from 500 to 2,000 miles. By March of 1944, the P-51 Mustang with a maximum range of 1,800 miles came into the force and could accompany the bombers to Berlin and back.
41. See also Pape, Bombing to Win, 274.
42. To these four allied advantages we can add a fifth: deception. Operation Overlord (the Normandy invasion) was a much riskier affair than commonly thought and by no means assured simply because the allies had superiority in gross power. The commander of the Normandy forces, General Montgomery, told one of his commanders shortly after the invasion that had Rommel used his operational reserve, he could have defeated the allies on the beaches and driven them back into the sea, in spite of the fact that Rommel faced complete allied control of the air. Rommel had thirty-four divisions under his command to use against the five British and American divisions landing at Normandy, but Hitler refused to allow him to commit most of them against these five divisions because he was convinced that Overlord was a feint and that the main invasion force would come instead across the narrow neck of the English Channel, from Dover to Calais. Hitler therefore ordered Rommel to keep the 15th German army in the Calais area, awaiting the main attack. Only on 7 August 1944 did he allow Rommel to commit his reserves, but by then the allied foothold at Normandy was too firmly entrenched to dislodge. That Hitler thought Normandy a feint bespeaks of the success of the allied deception effort. Codenamed "FUSAG," this effort involved a ruse so elaborate that false troop camps were set up in southeastern England and one of America's best war fighters, George Patton, was put in charge of them. See Overy, Why the Allies Won, 150-64;
43. and Charles Cruickshank, Deception in World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), chap. 12.
44. I am indebted to Owen Cote of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program for pointing out to me the difference in effectiveness between horizontal bombing and dive bombing to sink ships and for educating me on the differences between the European and Pacific theaters during World War II regarding the effectiveness of land-based versus naval-based airpower. For a discussion of the merits of land-based versus carrier-based airpower, see Bernard Brodie, A Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), chaps. 6 and 8.
45. This book was later published as A Guide to Naval Strategy.
46. Quite early in World War II in the European theater, Germany demonstrated the lethality of long-range, land-based airpower against surface ships and especially merchant shipping. In 1941, Germany's land-based aircraft operating from continental coastal bases sunk over one million tons of British shipping, more than British shipyards could replace. See Overy, Why the Allies Won, 30. Japanese land-based airpower proved less effective in the Pacific against ships because of the large distances involved, the inability of the Japanese to defend everywhere, and the ability of the United States to mass carrier airpower at selected points to overwhelm Japanese land-based air assets. The United States created carrier task forces in the Pacific of a size and capability not seen in the European theater. I am indebted to Owen Cote for making me aware of the differences in the land- versus sea-based air situations in the Pacific versus the Atlantic theaters.
47. Also see Brodie, A Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy, chaps. 6 and 8.
48. See Alan S. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 1939-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 63;
49. and Overy, Why the Allies Won, 192. Woytinsky and Woytinsky report an even larger increase in America's GNP: from $67 billion in 1938 to $184 billion in 1944.
50. See Woytinsky and Woytinsky, World Population and Production, 383, table 180.
51. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, 294.
52. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 310-13.
53. Spykman chose the year 1937 as his baseline to evaluate the strategic raw materials situation of the United States for reasons he does not specify, but presumably it had something to do with avoiding the distortions caused by the mobilization and stockpiling efforts that began to take effect in 1938 and 1939. I follow his convention and use 1937 as the baseline for assessing the supply situation of the United States in my analysis.
54. The main sources used to reach the conclusion about quarter sphere self sufficiency are listed in table 1. Additional useful sources are Eugene Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1937);
55. John B. DeMille, Strategic Minerals: A Summary of Uses, World Output, Stockpiles, Procurement (New York; McGraw-Hill, 1947);
56. Arthur H. Westing, ed., Global Resources and International Conflict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action (New York: Oxford, 1986);
57. Kenneth A. Kessel, Strategic Minerals: u.s. Alternatives (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1990);
58. Lance N. Antrim et al., Strategic Materials: Technologies to Reduce us Import Vulnerability, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-ITE-248 (Washington, DC: OTA, May 1985);
59. G .A. Roush, Strategic Mineral Supplies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939);
60. Herman Kranold, The International Distribution of Raw Materials (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1939), especially the statistical tables;
61. and Henry William Spiegel, The Economics of Total War (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1942), chap. 8.
62. Sources: For columns 2 and 3, data for the year 1937 from Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, 302.
63. For column 4, (S) is data from Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, 279, 297-98, and 300-310;
64. (E) is data from Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials, 22, 25, 42-84, 92-102, and 172;
65. (BR) is data from H. Foster Bain and Thomas Thornton Read, Ores and Industiy in South America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), 58-159;
66. (BOM) is data from U.S. Bureau of Mines, Mineral Raw Materials, 2, 14, 139, and passim;
67. (VR) is data from W. C. J. van Rensburg, Strategic Minerals, 428 and 450.
68. Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials: A Study of America in Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 77 and 82. Canada also had molybdenum; in 1980, it was the second largest producer of molybdenum, the United States being first.
69. See Rae Weston, Strategic Materials: A World Survey (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 64-65.
70. DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 517-18.
71. The technique for making synthetic rubber was well known at the time, and included two basic ingredients, alcohol or oil. The United States put in motion its program for synthetic production in the winter and early spring of 1942. For details on of how the United States dealt with the cutoff of natural rubber from Southeast Asia during World War II, see Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), chap. 15.
72. Some sense of the savings to be gained by eliminating the use of chrome for non-essential purposes can be gained by looking at chromium use in the 1980s. Van Evera noted that 57 percent of American chrome consumption at this time went to produce stainless steel. Only about 20 percent of stainless steel, however, was used in environments where its use was considered critical; the remaining 80 percent was for convenience or decorative purposes. Restricting the use of stainless steel only to critical environments would eliminate 80 percent of stainless steel production, which, in turn, would reduce America's chrome consumption by 46 percent. See Stephen Van Evera, "Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesn't: American Grand Strategy After the Cold War," Security Studies 13, no. 2 (June 1990): 20.
73. Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials, 65;
74. and DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 118.
75. Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials, 68.
76. Emeny estimated that America's domestic reserves of low-grade ore in 1934 at 1,252,000 long tons, with an annual wartime use of 150,000 long tons per year, or enough for eight years if no substitution or recycling were instituted. Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials, 65.
77. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 69.
78. DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 119-20 and 122. During World War II the Bureau of Mines estimated that 60 percent of America's expanded wartime production in 1943 could have been met from only two low-grade ore areas, when normally domestic production supplied only 3 percent of domestic use.
79. U.S. Bureau of Mines, Mineral Raw Materials: Survey of Commerce and Sources in Major Industrial Countries (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), 28;
80. and W. C. J. van Rensburg, Strategic Minerals, Vol. 1, Major Mineral-Exporting Regions of the World (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 452.
81. Van Rensburg reported that these three countries in 1986 (then called Jamaica, Suriname, and Guyana) accounted for 18.8 percent of free world production of bauxite. Jamaica alone had 2 billion metric tons of bauxite reserves. Van Rensburg, Strategic Minerals, 450.
82. DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 84;
83. and Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 69.
84. DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 519.
85. Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials, 51.
86. DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 300-02.One source at the Bureau of Mines estimated America's manganese reserves could last between one and five hundred years at 1935-39 rates of consumption.
87. DeMille, Strategic Minerals, 308 and 311. In 1941, for example, DeMille reported that the United States imported 316,000 tons of manganese from Brazil and 243,000 from Cuba. In 1980, Brazil was one of the world's major producers of manganese.
88. See Weston, Strategic Minerals, 61.
89. In 1941, 45,000 tons of tin out of a total domestic use of 135,000 tons were used for tin plate. See De Mille, Strategic Minerals, 484.
90. Electrolytic tin-plating was developed during World War II, and this process saved between one-half and one-third the weight of tin compared to the previous methods. See De Mille, Strategic Minerals ibid.
91. De Mille, Strategic Minerals Ibid. In 1941, the United States consumed 135,000 long tons of tin, of which 45,000 went for tin plate, 28,000 for solder, 23,000 for bronze and brass, and 4,000 for foil. Substitutes for all these uses were or could have been found.
92. Michael Neufeld described the German army rocket program as follows: "... compared with Anglo-American conventional strategic bombing, the V-2's results were pathetic. The total explosive yield of all A-4s fired in anger was scarcely more than a single large RAF air raid!.. .The missile's psychological and material impact on the Allied war effort was equally unimpressive ... By the estimate of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, V-weapons production in 1944-45 alone cost the Third Reich the equivalent of twenty-four thousand fighters at a time when the annual aircraft production was only thirty-six thousand. In short, German missile development shortened the war; just as its [German] advocates said it would, but in favor of the Allies." See Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 273-74.
93. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), 28-29; also see 29-53 for the full details on the basic decision to launch the Manhattan Project.
94. See Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury NY: American Institute of Physics Press, 1996) for details on why the Germans made slow progress. After the war in Europe was over, Germany's nuclear scientists were stunned by the news about Hiroshima, given their own slow progress. They had not even built a self-sustaining nuclear reactor. I am indebted to Owen Cote for pointing out Bernstein's book to me. The Japanese apparently had an atomic weapons program, but it lagged far behind the German one, getting only as far as uranium separation on a laboratory scale. The United States was unaware of the program during the war and destroyed it during a bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1945.
95. See Dan Reiter, "Preventive Attacks against Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons Programs: The Track Record," in Striking Discourse: Preventive Military Force in U.S. Security Strategy, ed. William W. Keller and Gordon R, Mitchell, 97 (unpublished manuscript).
96. According to Stephen Schwartz, the United States spent just shy of $5.5 trillion dollars on its nuclear weapons program from 1940-1996, which is 29 percent of the $18.7 trillion of total military spending for the same period (both figures in 1996 dollars). See Stephen I. Schwanz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1998), 3. The 29 percent figure probably understates the percentage that nuclear weapons consumed of the total defense budget during the Cold War because of the huge costs of fighting World War II.
97. See Stephen I. Schwanz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 ibid., 4, table 1 for the breakdown on the costs of the nuclear program.
98. See Michael E. Brown, Flying Blind: The Politics of the U.S. Strategic Bomber Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 108. An Air Force press release in 1948 stated that the B-36 "was designed to carry 10,000 pounds of bombs 10,000 miles, and can carry up to 72,000 pounds of bombs shorter distances." Department of the Air Force, Air Information Division, Press Section, No. 37, press release, 5 September 1948,
99. quoted in Paul Y. Hammond, "Super Carriers and the B-36 Bombers: Appropriations, Strategy and Politics," in Harold Stein, ed., American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1963), 486 and 559. I am indebted to Owen Cote for making me aware that the B-36 bomber had intercontinental range.
100. The 5 September 1948 Air Force release also stated: "In tests during the summer [of 1948], a B-36 carried a sizeable 'useful' load of bombs approximately 8,000 miles, and later took off on a flight at a gross weight exceeding 300,000 pounds and flew approximately 6,000 miles at an average air speed of more than 300 miles per hour." Stein, American Civil-Military Decisions, 486.
101. See Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich for the history of the German rocket program.
102. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich Ibid., 138.
103. The transfer of German rocket technology to the United States was crucial in early Air Force work on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich Ibid., 271.
104. For good studies on America's land- and sea-based ballistic missile programs, see Ed Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976);
105. and Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).
106. Beard, Developing the ICBM, 154-55. A RAND report in February 1954 concluded that not enough funds were being expended on the ballistic missile program, that "excessively stringent performance requirements were making the weapon appear nearly impossible," and that both were producing no sense of urgency. The report also concluded that if performance requirements were relaxed, the presumed problems in guidance, propulsion, and reentry could all be solved within the limits of then current technology.
107. Beard, Developing the ICBM Ibid., 162-63.
108. Beard, Developing the ICBM Ibid., 61, 178, 193, 201, 204, 206, and chaps. 2, 3, and 7 passim.
109. By May 1948, after the Sandstone tests with atomic weapons demonstrated that new and lighter types of warheads were possible and practical and that there would be an era of nuclear plenty, there was no technological impediment to putting significant numbers of atomic warheads on land-based ballistic missiles. The development of thermonuclear weapons in 1952 made the task of fitting warheads on ballistic missiles even more feasible. Beard, Developing the ICBM Ibid., 141-42. The United States, however, would have had a harder time deploying a sea-based ballistic missile sooner than it did, although that program moved quite rapidly once it began. It took only about five years from when the program was started to when the first Polaris missile was deployed. The major constraint on the Polaris missile was fashioning a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on it. Land-based ballistic missiles were bigger and more powerful and could therefore carry a larger warhead. I am indebted to Harvey Sapolsky, director of MIT's Security Studies Program, for these details on the Polaris system.
110. On the subject of national competitiveness, see David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations - Why Some Nations Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998);
111. and Michael E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
112. See Art, A Grand Strategy for America, 124;
113. and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, various dates), table "U.S. Exports, Imports, and Merchandise Trade Balance."
114. For several of the raw materials that Spykman listed as strategic in 1942, the United States, after nearly forty years of production that included World War II and most of the Cold War, was still one of the world's major producers. This was true for tungsten, molybdenum, nickel, and mercury. See Weston, Strategic Materials, 83, 64, 67, and 63.
115. For a discussion of the possibilities for substitution and recycling of the most important industrial raw materials, see Weston, Strategic Materials ibid., chap. 4.
116. America's import dependence ran from 5 to 100 percent, depending on the mineral. See Kessel, Strategic Minerals, 16, figure 3, which is based on 1984 data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Mines. Kessel was not concerned with the amounts imported from Canada or the quarter sphere, but more generally with the areas from which the United States imported the twenty-nine strategic minerals. I have calculated these numbers for Canada and the quarter sphere from the Bureau of Mine's data displayed in figure 3. 70
117. Van Rensburg, Strategic Minerals, 380 and 395;
118. Raymond Mikesell, Non-Fuel Minerals: Foreign Dependency and National Security (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987), 181;
119. Weston, Strategic Materials, 51, 63, and 72. Much the same result is obtained by analyzing the data provided by Raymond Mikesell on the foreign origins of twenty-six non-fuel minerals that the United States imported: most of them could be found in Canada and the rest of the quarter sphere.
120. See Mikesell, Non-Fuel Minerals, 158, table 7-1. For a slightly more pessimistic picture of America's import dependence on a smaller number of non-fuel minerals,
121. see Mikesell, Non-Fuel Minerals, 177-81, app.;
122. and L. Harold Bullis and James E. Mielke, Strategic and Critical Raw Materials (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 106-26. In my view these two more pessimistic pictures do not take into account potential supplies from Cuba and Canada, the possibilities of substitution and conservation, and the bringing on line of poorer grade and hence more-expensive-to-extract U.S. supplies if that proved necessary.
123. Van Rensburg, Strategic Minerals, 68.
124. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, Annual Energy Review1991 (June 1992), 119 and 127;
125. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, Monthly Energy Review, September 1994, 42-43;
126. and Basic Petroleum Data Book, vol. 19, no. 2 (Washington, DC: American Petroleum Institute, July 1999), sec. 9.
127. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics, 454.
128. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 340.
129. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 334, 340-41.
130. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 457.
131. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics Ibid., 341.
132. George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 318-19.I am indebted to Christopher Layne for having pointed out this passage in Kennan's memoirs to me.
133. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), especially chap. 2. Mearsheimer is the most prominent and powerful exponent of this view.
134. Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Layne is the most prominent exponent of offshore balancing today.
135. Also see Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, chap. 10.
136. See Art, A Grand Strategy for America, especially chaps. 3 and 6 for elaboration of these points.