Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Liviu Horovitz analyzing the stance taken by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her government in 1989–1990 toward the prospect of German reunification. Declassified archival documents and memoirs indicate that the British government's policy vis-à-vis Germany stemmed from a complex set of motives. Thatcher herself wanted to limit the power of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) within the European Economic Community (EEC), for fear that an increasingly dominant position by the FRG would hinder free-market policies and interactions within the EEC. British leaders had assumed that key allies, especially the United States and France, would support the United Kingdom in opposing German reunification—an assumption that proved to be unfounded. British officials also had assumed that the Soviet Union would forestall any radical change in East-Central Europe. Those expectations failed to materialize, but even as late as March 1990 Thatcher hoped that the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would join with her in thwarting German reunification. She continued to worry about the impact of German reunification on the EEC, and she also was concerned that recriminations in the USSR about the “loss” of Germany would jeopardize the political future of Gorbachev, with whom she had developed a close bond over the previous several years.The next article, by Gerard Sasges, focuses on the ruthless domestic policies of the Communist rulers of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) during the many years of warfare against South Vietnam and the United States. Because the geographic makeup of the DRV was conducive to hydroelectric power, the North Vietnamese regime emphasized hydroelectric development in its energy projects. With assistance from the Soviet Union and other Communist states, officials in Hanoi undertook massive hydroelectric programs in various regions of the DRV, often at appalling human cost. Vast numbers of North Vietnamese peasants were forcibly displaced to make way for giant hydroelectric facilities, causing immense loss of life and having disastrous effects on fertile agricultural areas. Some of the largest hydroelectric projects came under U.S. bombing attacks during Operation Rolling Thunder (the Johnson administration's prolonged aerial bombardment campaign designed to pressure the North Vietnamese regime to stop supporting Communist guerrillas in the South), but leaders in Hanoi pressed ahead regardless. Soviet personnel who played a crucial role in the construction and repair of damaged plants in the DRV were sometimes skeptical about the feasibility of projects, but they were never concerned when a project cost the lives of many North Vietnamese peasants or consigned countless others to destitution and misery.The next article, by Matthew Evangelista, discusses the rise of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement in Soviet Kazakhstan starting in 1989. Drawing on archival research, oral histories, memoirs, and other sources from several countries, Evangelista traces the origins and activities of this remarkable group, which sought to achieve a complete ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. Although anti-nuclear sentiment first gained expression in Kazakhstan in the early 1960s, the political opportunity structure in the Soviet Union at the time was extremely limited. Not until the late 1980s, amid the sweeping political and social changes implemented by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, could an informal group like the Nevada movement (as it was known for short) have taken shape in the USSR. The new group, named after the two main sites for nuclear weapons testing in the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, pursued contacts with U.S. anti-nuclear organizations, with key figures in Soviet Kazakhstan, and with Soviet and U.S. federal authorities to promote the goal of a complete cessation of nuclear testing. In discussing the fate and reach of the Nevada movement, Evangelista uses a “domestic structure” framework to compare the ability of groups in democratic and Communist countries to influence government priorities.The next article, by Rafael Pedemonte, examines how the splits within the international Communist movement in the 1960s—splits engendered by deepening animosity between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) from late 1959 on—affected relations between the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the Cuban Communist regime led by Fidel Castro. In the first several years after Castro and his far-left forces seized power in Havana, the PCF maintained friendly ties with the Cuban regime, which closely aligned itself with the Soviet Union. By the mid-1960s, however, the PCF–Cuban relationship was steadily deteriorating, in part because of tensions that arose between Cuba and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. Other far-left groups and politicians in France outside the PCF sought to forge closer links with Cuban revolutionaries to portray the PCF as out of touch with the radical turmoil of the time. But after the Soviet Union clamped down violently in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and restored its close alliance with Cuba, the PCF's ties with Cuba also markedly improved.The next article, by Akira Kurosaki, explores the origins of U.S. policy toward the spread of civilian nuclear energy programs and the sensitivity of nuclear reprocessing technology. Under the Atoms for Peace initiative (covered in great depth in the Summer 2023 issue of the JCWS), the U.S. administration under President Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged support for civilian nuclear programs in allied states and many other countries around the world. Technology for the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to generate plutonium for reactors was a key part of civilian programs, and Japan was among the leading developers of such technology. But the other side of Atoms for Peace was the adoption of safeguards to keep civilian nuclear technologies from being diverted to a weapons program. Japan undertook in-depth research and development on reprocessing technology in the 1950s and then began building its first reprocessing plant in the 1960s. Despite some qualms about the rapidity of Japan's progress with the sensitive technology, U.S. officials devised bilateral and multilateral safeguards that enabled Japan's program to move ahead while also fortifying Japanese contributions to Western defenses in the Cold War.The next article, by Minako Wakasugi, discusses why the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung backed away from plans to provoke a new war with South Korea in the mid-1970s. Having been emboldened by the Vietnamese Communists’ victory in their war against the United States, culminating in the U.S. Marines’ humiliating evacuation of Saigon in April 1975, Kim surmised that this was the appropriate time to pursue his goal of unifying the Korean peninsula under Communist rule. He traveled to the PRC, North Africa, and East European Communist countries seeking at least tacit approval of his plans for renewed military action. The trip initially seemed to fuel Kim's military ambitions, but when he arrived in Yugoslavia, he was at least as much concerned about persuading the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito to support North Korea's bid to be admitted into the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a group of mostly Third World countries co-founded by Tito. Tito informed Kim that he would back North Korea's quest to join the NAM, but this would be feasible only if the Korean peninsula remained relatively calm. Even though Kim sensed that prospects for victory against South Korea were better than at any time in the past, he agreed to put his military objectives on hold.The final main article, by Maja Lukanc, traces popular reactions in Poland in the late 1940s to the dramatic split that emerged between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia after the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, expelled Yugoslavia in June 1948 from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), the body established by the Soviet Union to control the activities of other European Communist parties. Until the time the expulsion was announced, Tito had seemed to be the most devoted follower of Stalin's system. The unexpected split confused many ordinary people in Poland, who did not know what to make of an event that seemed to raise doubts about the politics of the Soviet bloc. Drawing on formerly secret records of comments by ordinary Poles, as compiled by Polish Communist and state security officials, Lukanc illuminates the role of popular opinion in a Communist dictatorship and highlights the various factors—internal as well as external—that shaped public reactions and influenced the Polish regime in its subsequent policies toward Yugoslavia. For many ordinary Poles, Yugoslavia was—rightly or wrongly—an inspiring example of resistance to Stalinism.The issue then includes a forum discussing Maurice Isserman's recently published book, Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, which departs significantly from earlier books Isserman published on leftwing politics in the United States. Evidence that emerged from U.S. and former Soviet archives after the disintegration of the USSR convinced Isserman that scholars who had long taken a more jaundiced view of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), seeing it as dominated by the Soviet Union and actively facilitating Moscow's efforts to undermine the United States, had been correct in their fundamental arguments. We asked three distinguished scholars—Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Eric Arnesen—to offer their thoughts about Isserman's book and the growing areas of consensus that have emerged about the CPUSA.The issue ends with a review essay by Arthur M. Eckstein discussing a recent book by Daniel S. Chard focusing on U.S. counterintelligence efforts against Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups that operated in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s.