Cold War

The Cold War (Russian: Холодная Война Kholodnaya Voina) was the protracted economic and ideological struggle from about 1947 to 1991 between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States, supported by their alliance partners. Although World War III was a constant threat, nuclear weapons were never used. The major were localized to Asia, the Korean War of 1950-53, and the Vietnam War of 1965-75. Armed conflicts on a much msaller scale took place in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It ended with the collapse of East European and Soviet Communism in 1989. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the final end of the conflict.

Consistent allies of the Soviet Union during the Cold War period were East Germany Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria together with Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba further afield. Former close Soviet allies, the China, Albania, Yugoslavia and Romania promoted their own versions of Communism and either opposed or adopted alternatives to many key Kremlin policies from 1960 onwards.

Major allies of the United States during the Cold War included Britain, Canada, West Germany and other members of NATO (the "Western Alliance"); and the nations of Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Saudi Arabia and Israel were important informal allies.

Beyond these broad groupings, many other countries—including such strategically-important states as the Yugoslavia, Switzerland, India, Sweden and Finland—conspicuously maintained their neutrality during the conflict; some of them tried to form a third bloc, the "Non-Aligned Movement."

The struggle was called "cold" because there was no direct armed conflict, although there was always a fear that large scale nuclear warfare could erupt and devastate the world. The Cold War was prosecuted by varied means that included proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam, diplomatic maneuvering, economic pressure and selective aid, economic and technological rivalry, intimidation, propaganda. The Cold War witnessed the largest and most expensive arms race (both conventional and nuclear) in history.

Origins

The First Cold War (1947-1953)

The crisis finally came in 1947, when the bankrupt British Treasury could no longer continue to help Greece fight a civil war against Communism. In 1945-47, London repeatedly warned Washington that Moscow was no longer a friendly bear but a dangerous adversary. Former Prime Minister Churchill warned Americans about the "Iron Curtain" in 1946. His Labour Party successor, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, was dedicated to both socialism and anti-communism. Even more than Churchill his government urged America to take the lead to stop the expansion of Communism.

For Americans at the time, and for historians since, the question was whether the Soviet Union was expressing traditional Russian national policies, which were expansionist but were not anti-capitalistic and which could in theory be reconcilable with American and British goals. Or did the Politburo really believe in its Communist rhetoric which depicted capitalism as the perpetual enemy, and western nations as stooges of capitalists. Post-Communist scholars in Russia point out that the intellectual framework used by Stalin and his inner circle was "extremely primitive" and will not sustain deep analysis in the first place, and suggest that the terror Stalin induced in even his highest officials has to be emphasized. The dictator himself was a tired old man by 1949, deeply suspicious of everyone around him, more arbitrary than ever.

To the extent that Communism drove Moscow's policies, coexistence was impossible. Some commentators vigorously insist that Stalin, Molotov et al were just ordinary Russians interested in protecting the motherland, with no real commitment to Communism. If that were true, the critics reply, Stalin and his Politburo made one of the greatest and most sustained mistakes in world history by repeatedly talking up Communism, denouncing capitalism, and supporting Communist movements in countries far from mother Russia. There is no doubt that Stalin always wanted control over the western border regions, including Poland and the Baltics. Was the goal a buffer against German militarism or against western capitalism? If Stalin could have enhanced and protected Russian interests by accepting capitalism and democracy in Eastern Europe, ask the critics, why did he reject that option and instead engage in a military confrontation with the one nation in the world, the United States, that was stronger? The refusal to allow the satellites to participate in the Marshall Plan was undoubtedly predicated on a fear of capitalism, and more generally of western liberalism that involved freedom of speech and democracy. If German rearmament had been the true fear, then it perhaps would have been possible in the late 1940s to strike a deal with Washington, London and Paris to keep Germany disarmed. But Stalin rejected such proposals because the quid involved capitalism and freedom in Germany.

The opponents then became "the West" or "the Free World" or NATO versus "The East," "Communism," "Soviet bloc," or "Warsaw Pact." Before the 1960s, the confrontation was "bipolar," since it seemed the Communist nations were in lock-step agreement, presumably because of Stalin's control. After 1960, however, the Communist movement split when China sharply attacked Stalin's successors for losing the revolutionary fervor of Marxist- Leninism.

Communists had already seized most of eastern Europe (except for Czechoslovakia, which fell in 1948.) Like London, Washington began to visualize a replay of the late 1930s, with an equally evil Communist dictatorship playing the Nazi role. Above all it seemed necessary to avoid another "Munich"--the 1938 deal that encouraged Hitler to try to take over Europe. The danger now was that Moscow had a grand scheme to take over the world, step by step, slice by slice. Washington would have to act. In March 1947, President Truman urgently warned that the US had to provide financial, political and military aid to Greece and Turkey to fight Communism. Although Secretary of State George Marshall said the "Truman Plan" aid was for humanitarian reasons, his deputy, Dean Acheson, convinced Congress that a Soviet threat to American security had to be countered immediately. Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg agreed with Acheson, repudiated his isolationist past and shepherded the necessary legislation through a Congress controlled by the GOP. In June, 1947, Marshall proposed the Marshall Plan of massive ($12 billion) economic aid to war-torn Europe. Moscow refused to participate in the Marshall Plan, and prohibited its satellites from taking American money. In 1949, the US helped create NATO, an alliance against the USSR, and Moscow responded with its own alliance (the "Warsaw Pact").

The pro-Stalinist interpretation of causes of the Cold War blamed the USA entirely. It argued that monopoly capital (big business) controlled Washington, that American militarists without provocation encircled the Soviet Union with hostile alliances, and that the West had undertaken a hopeless effort to stay the inexorable movement of mankind toward socialism. Some observers (on both sides) noting Russia's horrible experience with two German invasions, felt that Stalin was trying to create a friendly buffer zone to protect the homeland. The pro- Stalinist interpretation became defunct with the disappearance of the USSR in 1991, but it still appears in older books. No one any longer sees the Soviet Union as an essentially self- contained and defensive nation; the Communists who ran every facet of life in the U.S.S.R. did hate and fear capitalism for ideological reasons quite detached from the interests of Russia.

There was no dispute between Stalin and the U.S. in the mid 1940s about the need to keep Germany demilitarized. Finland (a Nazi ally) and Austria (a part of the Third Reich after 1938) were permanently neutralized after the war by mutual consensus, and became democratic, capitalistic nations. Neutralization of all of central Europe was not acceptable to Stalin, because of the risk the people would choose democracy and capitalism. Stalin believed in the goal of world Communist revolution--only he redefined it to emphasize the central role of the Soviet Union. He motivated leftists across the globe--and frightened rightists- -by the theme that the expansion of Soviet power was the same as the expansion of the workers' revolution. As Stalin said in 1927: “An ‘’internationalist’’ is one who unreservedly, without wavering, without conditions is ready to defend the USSR, because the USSR is the base for the world revolutionary movement."

The basic cause of the Cold War was Western outrage at Moscow's brutal takeover of eastern Europe (especially Poland) and the creation of compliant satellites. Vyacheslav Molotov, the long-term foreign minister who enthusiastically carried out Stalin's policies, ruminated years later about Stalin's actual motivations and western reactions:

They were of course bitter about us; but we had to consolidate our conquests, create our own socialist [East] Germany. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia--they were feeble, we had to restore order everywhere. Squeeze out capitalist regimes. That's the "Cold War." Of course, you have to know when to stop.... I think Stalin observed strict limits.

Americans reluctantly accepted the Cold War--a war fought with huge defense budgets, global propaganda campaigns, hard- bargaining diplomatic missions, entangling military alliances, and deadly serious training for a real war. On the home front, US did not leverage its industrial resources into military might until 1950. Psychologically, however, the nation armed itself. Actual or supposed supporters of Communism were ousted from the military, federal state and local government, labor unions, political parties, colleges and schools, and even from Hollywood. A large internal security system, headed by J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., closely monitored the potential for sabotage and espionage. The discovery that Stalin's spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project and that its technological discoveries had been given to Russian bomb builders, sent a shock through the West, and played ,a part in the rise of Richard Nixon to prominence (1948) and the election of Eisenhower to the presidency (1952).

In 1948 Mao Zedung's Red Army drove Chiang Kai-sheck's Nationalists off the mainland; they held tenuously to the island of Taiwan (Formosa). The victory of intensely anti-western Communists in China, despite a decade-long American effort that had cost billions of dollars, underscored the urgent need of the Truman Administration to come up with a strategy that would stop Communist expansion. Democrats and liberals, fearful of the political damage that would accrue to being seen as "soft on Communism," took increasingly strong anti-Communist positions. Henry Wallace (Roosevelt’s Vice President 1940-44) argued in 1946 for friendly relations (what later would be alled "detente") with Moscow. The left tried to defeat Truman in 1948 by running Wallace as a third party candidate and promoting friendship with the Soviet Union. State by state, city by city, union by union the Democratic regulars isolated and defeated the Wallaceites and forced them out of the Democratic party and out of the major labor unions. To everyone's surprise, Truman won defeated Dewey and won reelection; Democrats concluded that they needed a hard- line anti-Soviet foreign policy to win elections.

NSC 68

NSC-68 (1950) was a hard-line response by the Truman Adminsitration to the Korean crisis. It was drafted by Paul Nitze and approved by President Truman as official national strategy, It called for partial mobilization of the U.S. economy to build armaments faster than the Soviets. The assumption was the takeover of China, invasion of South Korea and threats to Vietnam demonstrated a drive for world dominance by the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. A three-part response was needed to strengthen Europe; weaken the Soviet Union economically; and to strengthen the United States both militarily and economically. The NSC-68 economic strategy was a tripling in U.S. military spending to be maintained as long as necessary. The short-term effect would be to greatly strengthen U.S. military capabilities and force the Soviets to strain its weaker resource base in order to follow suit. NSC-68 predicted the Soviet Union would soon fall behind the United States in military preparedness, because its output capacity was half or less that of the United States. The United States was sure to win the armaments race because of its greater ability to produce. Eisenhower thought the program was too expensive and shifter reliance away from expensive Army divisions to inexpensive missiles.

CIA in 1950s

The Central Intelligence Agency, was created in 1947 out of remnants of the OSS, a World War II operation. Americans, still mesmerized by the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, welcomed the new spy agency because it seemed to promise the nation would always stay on alert. Congress supported covert action, even though Roscoe Hillenkoetter (director 1947-50) and Walter Bedell Smith (director 1950-53), both military men, showed little interest. The CIA's budget was minuscule ($5 million) until NSC-68 in 1950 provided blueprints for an active role for covert operations. President Eisenhower, by contrast, demanded more covert activities and Allen Dulles (director 1953-61) obliged. Congressional support for more aggressive policies increased throughout the 1950s.

Allen Dulles (head 1953-61) became the trusted adviser on what was going to happen in the world to President Eisenhower and to his brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State. The CIA gathered information and provided written assessments of the capabilities and intentions of all world leaders. Its regular briefings gave each president the sense that he knew exactly what was happening across the globe. Like ingenious prognosticators through the ages, the CIA's predictions seemed highly explicit yet never could quite be pinned down. They failed to predict any of the major surprises of the postwar era. On the other hand, estimates of the performance of the Soviet economy proved much more accurate than the information Moscow itself possessed. The CIA had a few spies in the Kremlin, but decided to rely more on high technology. It used the Lockheed U-2 jet, which could fly at very high altitudes, to take good pictures and collect electronic signals. One was shot down in May 1960, which led to the cancellation of a summit between Eisenhower and Khruschev.

Covert operations

Dulles devoted 80% of his much enlarged budget ($82 million) to covert (secret) operations to contain Communism. CIA money subsidized anti-communist intellectuals and strengthened liberal political parties across Europe and the Third World. Striking low-cost successes early on reinforced the CIA's mastermind image. CIA-supported political parties defeated the Communists in Italy and France in the late 1940s. A handful of agents provided assistance to opposition groups which forced anti-American prime ministers out of office in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954).

In Guatemala in 1954 the CIA operation was marked by chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the operation's first stages, the Agency's poor understanding of the intentions of the Guatemalan Army, the local communist party (the Guatemalan Labor Party), and the government, the hopeless weakness of invasion leader Carlos Castillo Armas's troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat. Just as the entire operation seemed hopeless, and before there were any significant violent attacks on it, the leftist Guatemalan government suddenly, inexplicably collapsed and a pro-American government took over.

In 1960-61, the CIA sensing that Fidel Castro's new Communist regime in Cuba was fragile, organized and trained 1400 Cuban exiles to invade. They inadequate military support but were too few in number--and Castro's hold was too strong. The invasion in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs Invasion was a total fiasco. The CIA explored ways to assassinate Castro (using an exploding cigar, for example) and other opponents, but never actually assassinated any leading figure anywhere. Castro turned to the Soviets for more help, and Khrushchev in 1962 sent medium-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting much of the U.S., which led to the major Cuban Missile Crisis,

Soviet KGB

On the other side was the Soviet KGB; CIA counterintelligence tried to neutralize it and other hostile agencies, like the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), East Germany's Stasi and Cuba's DGI. As the the retired head of the K.G.B.'s first chief directorate, Leonid Shabarshin, later explained:

"The essence of the KGB's active undertakings was to inflict political and moral damage on our basic opponent, the United States. . . . [so] We compromised political figures, organs of the press, and Americans whose activities were in some way unwelcome [to the Soviets]."

The KGB veteran revealed that every "active measure" against the enemies of the Soviet Union abroad was submitted by KGB to the Politburo "and was implemented only with its permission. The results of the action were also reported to the Politburo." Which side performed better remains an open question.

Arms Race

Stalin began a small nuclear program in 1943, under the direction of secret police chief Beria. After the Americans used atomic weapons against Japan in 1945 Stalin greatly increased the priority of his program. Russian scientists took the lead, aided by many Germans scientists and engineers who had been captured in 1945. In 1949, using high-quality blueprints of the American bomb provided by Klaus Fuchs and other spies, the Soviets exploded their first bomb--and exploded as well American complacency about a nuclear monopoly. The US responded by turning its hand-crafted bomb construction system into an assembly line, and by examining the possibilities of a vastly more powerful nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb.

Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who ran the science part of the wartime Manhattan Project, strenuously tried to stop the H-bomb project. He matched wits with physicist Edward Teller, who insisted the H-bomb could and should be built. Teller won and Oppenheimer was forced out of the AEC after he was charged with being a security risk. By the early 1950s the Soviets had a nuclear arsenal plus long-range bombers, though lacking the sort of overseas bases the US possessed, it remained weaker in global capabilities.

By 1957 when American Strategic Air Command (SAC) was finally up to speed, and an air defense network or radars and fighters was in place to defend American cities from Soviet bombers, an entirely new challenge appeared. The Soviets launched Sputnik, the first earth satellite, thus demonstrating a stunning technological leap to a frightened world. Some of the Russian success was due to the work of captured German scientists, (true also for the US), but Moscow had built up enough rocket, satellite and nuclear expertise of its own to challenge the US on equal terms in space. By 1960 the USSR was building intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with hydrogen-bomb warheads that could not be intercepted. Americans (notably Senator John F. Kennedy) warned of a "missile gap." Before Sputnik the US had underrated the intense Soviet effort to build their own nuclear weapons, and intercontinental bombers and missiles to deliver them. A strong commitment to the tradition of human pilots in the cockpit diverted the Air Force from developing of its own long-range missiles. Nevertheless it used its claim to control the "aerospace" mission to inhibit the Army or Navy from building long-range rockets. Finally the Air Force saw the need for rocketry, and working closely with civilian aerospace firms it gave President Kennedy a more powerful arsenal of ICBMs than Khrushchev could command. A space race ensued--with both nations directing all their resources to scientific achievements with obvious military implications. In 1969 American astronauts landed on the moon, proving conclusively that American technology had regained a decisive lead in space. Indeed, in almost all areas of science and technology, especially computers, the US totally dominated the globe in the 1960s.

NATO nuclear strategy debates during the Cold War oscillated between two main themes: the theme of pure nuclear deterrence, to dissuade the Soviet Union from launching any attack whatsoever on NATO territory, and the theme of a mixed conventional and nuclear deterrence, whose proponents argued that a conventional defense against minor or even medium-sized aggression was necessary as an all-out nuclear response was not credible in such circumstances. Western planners increasingly doubted that the USSR would deliberately start a world war. Moscow might, however, start a war with the aim of a limited conquest, in the hope that NATO would not dare respond with nuclear escalation. NATO found a compromise between the two strategic themes by mainly focusing on how to convince Moscow that it had miscalculated: in case of a Soviet attack, NATO planned to use sub-strategic nuclear weapons to force the Soviet Union to terminate the aggression, unless it wanted all-out world war.

By 1960, many American opinion leaders came to believe, mistakenly, that the Soviet Union had larger stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles than did the U.S. This "missile gap" thinking climaxed during John F. Kennedy's campaign for president in 1959 and 1960, when he undercut Richard Nixon by charging the U.S. was falling behind. The fear ended in October 1961 when Kennedy officials, having already decided on a major defense buildup, declared that there was no gap.

Maintenance (1962-1969)

Vietnam

Vietnam (and neighboring Laos and Cambodia) became a major battleground in the Cold War as early as 1945, when the U.S. helped the French reestablish control and drive out the Communists under Ho Chi Minh. The Communists gained a secure base to the north in 1959 when China became Communist. The French military efforts were ineffective and, after the fall of the major outpost at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a new leftwing French government came to terms with the Communists at the Geneva Conference in 1954, and pulled out. Ho and the Communists took over the northern provinces, North Vietnam, while an anti-Communist government under the Catholic Diem family took over in the South. Communist guerrilla attacks threatened to destabilize South Vietnam, so the Eisenhower administration sent in 900 advisers and large sums of economic aid. Kennedy drew the line more firmly. Tolerating the assassination of Diem, he sent in 16,000 advisers who tried to retrain and use the SVN (South Vietnam) army, with scant success. With the Communists on the verge of victory, Lyndon Johnson sent in American troops in large numbers--over 500,000 by 1968, plus many more in nearby airbases, especially in Thailand. Containment policy forced Johnson to stop Communist expansion, despite the heavy cost. When Communists attacks (called the Tet Offensive) in early 1968 discredited Johnson's policies, he was forced to drop out of the presidential race. Republican Richard Nixon came to power with the goal of downplaying containment, retraining the Vietnamese so they could fight their own war and the US could leave. He removed the American ground troops, while keeping air power in operation, and achieved a peace agreement in early 1973.

See Vietnam War

Indonesia, 1965

A major turning point in Asia came in 1965 when Indonesia threw off the Sukarno regime, which was pro-Communist; the new Suharto regime destroyed the Communist party, killing tens of thousands of members. The CIA had sponsored a failed uprising in 1958, but the U.S. had no hand in the 1965 events. US covert action was either ineffective or only hastened the inevitable.

Fiction, film and popular culture

Russian

Russian science fiction emerged from a prolonged period of censorship in 1957, opened up by de-Stalinization and real Soviet achievements in the space race, typified by Ivan Efremov's galactic epic, Andromeda (1957). Official Communist science fiction transposed the laws of historical materialism to the future, scorning Western nihilistic writings and predicting a peaceful transition to universal communism. Scientocratic visions of the future nevertheless implicitly critiqued the bureaucratically developed socialism of the present. Dissident science fiction writers emerged, such as the Strugatski brothers, Boris and Arkadi, with their "social fantasies," problematizing the role of intervention in the historical process, or Stanislaw Lem's tongue-in-cheek exposures of man's cognitive limitations.

Legacy

Despite the rapid collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the period 1989-1991, several countries retain Communist identities to the present day, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos.

Select Bibliography

For a much more detailed guide see Cold War, Bibliography

• Ball, S. J. The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (1998), British perspective
• Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (2007) excerpt and text search
• Boyle Peter G. American-Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism. 1993.
• Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1989)
• Clarke, Bob. Four Minute Warning: Britain's Cold War (2005)
• Crockatt Richard. The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941-1991. 1995.
• Friedman, Norman. The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War. (2000)
• Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War. A New History, 2005. excerpt and text search
• Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford University Press, 1998. excerpt and text search; also online edition
• Gaddis, John Lewis. Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States. An Interpretative History 2nd ed. (1990)
• Gaddis, John Lewis. Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987)
• Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982) online edition; also excerpt and text search
• Kegley Jr., Charles W. ed., The Long Postwar Peace. 1991:
• Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, (2005) excerpt and text search
• Kort, Michael. The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (1998)
• LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992 9th ed. (2002) excerpt and text search
• Leffler, Melvyn P. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (2007) excerpt and text search
• Lundestad, Geir. East, West, North, South: Major Developments in International Politics since 1945 Oxford University Press (1999).
• Ninkovich, Frank. Germany and the United States: The Transformation of the German Question since 1945 (1988)
• Powaski, Ronald E. The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (1998) online edition
• Sivachev, Nikolai and Nikolai Yakolev, Russia and the United States (1979), by Soviet historians
• Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2004), Pulitzer Prize; excerpt and text search
• Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973, 2nd ed. (1974)
• Westad, Odd Arne The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (2006) excerpt and text search
• Zubok, Vladislav M. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007)

External links

• the Cold War International History Project

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