Cold War

The Cold War (Russian: Холодная Война Kholodnaya Voina; Chinese: 冷戰) refers to the protracted geostrategic, economic and ideological struggle that emerged after World War II between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States of America, supported by their respective alliance partners. The Cold War endured over four decades, from circa 1947 until the decline and eventual collapse of East European and Soviet Communism in 1989. The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of the conflict.

Consistent allies of the Soviet Union during the Cold War period included Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and other members of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon in Eurasia, together with the nations of Mongolia, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam further afield. Erstwhile close Soviet allies, the People's Republic of China and Albania promoted their own versions of Communism and either opposed or adopted alternatives to many key Kremlin policies from 1960 onwards.

Consistent allies of the United States during the Cold War period included Britain, West Germany and other members of NATO (the so-called "Western Alliance"); the members of CENTO, SEATO, and ANZUS; and the nations of Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

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 widely called the "Cold War" on the grounds that it did not involve direct armed conflict (by contrast, a so-called "hot" war) between the primary contestants of the Soviet Union and the USA. The Cold War was instead prosecuted by varied means that included diplomatic maneuvering, economic pressure and selective aid, economic and technological rivalry, intimidation, propaganda, and indirect proxy wars. Importantly, although lacking direct conflict between the superpower protagonists, the Cold War period also simultaneously witnessed the largest arms race (both conventional and nuclear) in history, leading to widespread global fears of a potential nuclear war, that never happened.

Historical overview

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.

Crisis and Escalation (1953-1962)

Arms Race

 Stalin began a nuclear program in 1943, under the direction of secret police chief Beria; 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 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.

Legacy

Despite the rapid collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the period 1989-1991, several countries (primarily in east and south-east Asia) retain Communist identities to the present day, espousing Marxism-Leninism as a fundamental political philosophy and retaining a one-party political structure in which institutions of the party and the state remain intimately interconnected. In order of longest existence, these countries (and their ruling parties) are:

• the People's Republic of China (since 1949); Communist Party of China
• the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) (since 1948); Korean Workers' Party
• the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam) (since 1976), previously, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) (since 1950; Communist Party of Vietnam
• the Republic of Cuba (Cuban Revolution in 1959, socialist state declared in 1961); Communist Party of Cuba
• the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) (since 1975); Lao People's Revolutionary Party

While these countries share a similar system of government and political philosophy, each has adopted highly divergent economic policies over the past 15 years, several even incorporating elements of capitalism within their state economies. It is widely perceived, however, that the more purist of these states have retained a Cold War outlook of continuing antagonism with, and suspicion of, the West; North Korea and Cuba are commonly understood to be fulfilling this role, compounded by both diplomatic and geopolitical isolation (whether externally- or self-imposed). China retains an ambivolent approach to engagement with the West and neighbours such as India and Japan; many observers view its apparent rise to superpower status in the early twenty-first century as eventually threatening a new Cold War, based on its projected economic and military rivalry with the United States of America.

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
• 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, Allen Lane, 2005.
• Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford University Press, 1998. 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
• Charles W. Kegley Jr., ed., The Long Postwar Peace. 1991:
• Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, (2005)
• Kort, Michael. The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (1998)
• LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992 7th ed. (1993)
• Lundestad, Geir. East, West, North, South: Major Developments in International Politics since 1945 Oxford University Press (1999).
• Mitchell, George. The Iron Curtain: The Cold War in Europe (2004)
• Ninkovich, Frank. Germany and the United States: The Transformation of the German Question since 1945 (1988)
• Paterson, Thomas G. Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (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
• 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)

External links

• the Cold War Museum

• the Cold War International History Project