Introduction
During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as
allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between the two
nations was a tense one. Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism
and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical, blood-thirsty
rule of his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans’
decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international
community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in
the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. After the war ended, these grievances
ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity. Post-war
Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fuelled many Americans’ fears of a
Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what
they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms build-up and
interventionist approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere,
no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians
believe it was inevitable.
The Cold War: Containment
By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best
defence against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” In 1946,
in his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005)
explained this policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force
committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent
modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]”; as a result,
America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant
containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” President Harry Truman (1884-
1972) agreed. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before
Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted
subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape
American foreign policy for the next four decades.
The Cold War: The Atomic Age
The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms
build-up in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report
known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use
military force to “contain” communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be
occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defence
spending.
In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic
weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly “arms
race.” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response,
President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more
destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “super-bomb.” Stalin
followed suit.
As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb
test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome
the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an
island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of
Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous
radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American
domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They
practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s
saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of
nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War
was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.
The Cold War Extends to Space
Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition.
On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched
Sputnik (Russian for “traveler”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first
man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s launch came as a
surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans. In the United States, space
was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American
tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the
Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7
missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–
made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.
In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S.
Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came
to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President
Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration,
as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space.
Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in
April 1961.
That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space,
President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the
U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction
came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11
mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the
Space Race for the Americans. U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate
American heroes, and earth-bound men and women seemed to enjoy living
vicariously through them. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains,
with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of
the communist system.
The Cold War: The Red Scare
Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a
series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United
States was alive and well.
In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie
industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another.
More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these “blacklisted” writers,
directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade.
HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive
activities. Soon, other anti-communist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph
McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in
the federal government. Thousands of federal employees were investigated,
fired and even prosecuted. As this anti-communist hysteria spread throughout
the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify
against colleagues and “loyalty oaths” became commonplace.
The Cold War Abroad
The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the
Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War
began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-
Western neighbour to the south. Many American officials feared this was the
first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that non
intervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea,
but the war dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.
Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy
faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs
invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to
prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial
“Third World” Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the
collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the
American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist
nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had
been committed to the survival of an anti-communist government in the region,
and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to
successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to
intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf. However, what was intended to be a
brief military action turned into a 10-year conflict.
The Berlin Airlift: The Berlin Blockade
The Russians were also concerned about a unified West Berlin: a capitalist city
located right in the middle of their occupation zone that would likely be
powerfully and aggressively anti-Soviet. They decided that something needed to
be done to stop this creeping unifictionism. They withdrew from the
Kommandatura and began a blockade of West Berlin, a maneuver that they
hoped would effectively starve the western powers out of Berlin. If West
Germany was to become its own country, they argued, then Berlin, located
more than 100 miles from its border, could no longer be its capital.
On June 15, 1948, the Soviet authorities announced that the Autobahn, the
highway connecting western Germany to Berlin, would be closed indefinitely
“for repairs.” Then, they halted all road traffic from west to east, and barred all
barge and rail traffic from entering West Berlin. Thus began the blockade of
Berlin.
As far as the western Allies were concerned, withdrawal from the city was not
an option. “If we withdraw,” said the American military commander, “our
position in Europe is threatened, and Communism will run rampant.” President
Harry Truman echoed this sentiment: “We shall stay,” he declared, “period.”
Using military force to strike back against the Soviet blockade seemed equally
unwise: The risk of turning the Cold War into an actual war—even worse, a
nuclear war—was just too great. Finding another way to re-provision the city
seemed to the Allies to be the only reasonable response.
The Berlin Airlift: “Operation VITTLES” Begins
It was quickly settled: The Allies would supply their sectors of Berlin from the
air. Allied cargo planes would use open air corridors over the Soviet occupation
zone to deliver food, fuel and other goods to the people who lived in the western
part of the city. This project, code-named “Operation VITTLES” by the
American military, was known as the “Berlin airlift.” (West Berliners called it
the “Air Bridge.”)
The Berlin airlift was supposed to be a short-term measure, but it settled in for
the long haul as the Soviets refused to lift the blockade. For more than a year,
hundreds of American, British and French cargo planes ferried provisions from
Western Europe to the Tempelhof (in the American sector), Gatow (in the
British sector) and Tegel (in the French sector) airfields in West Berlin. At the
beginning of the operation, the planes delivered about 5,000 tons of supplies to
West Berlin every day; by the end, those loads had increased to about 8,000
tons of supplies per day. The Allies carried about 2.3 million tons of cargo in all
over the course of the airlift.
Life in West Berlin during the blockade was not easy. Fuel and electricity were
rationed, and the black market was the only place to obtain many goods. Still,
most West Berliners supported the airlift and their western allies. “It’s cold in
Berlin,” one airlift-era saying went, “but colder in Siberia.”
The Berlin Airlift: The End of the Blockade
By spring 1949, it was clear that the Soviet blockade of West Berlin had failed.
It had not persuaded West Berliners to reject their allies in the West, nor had it
prevented the creation of a unified West German state. (The Federal Republic of
Germany was established in May 1949.) On May 12, 1949, the Soviets lifted the
blockade and reopened the roads, canals and railway routes into the western half
of the city. The Allies continued the airlift until September, however, because
they wanted to stockpile supplies in Berlin just in case the blockade was
reinstated.
Most historians agree that the blockade was a failure in other ways, too. It
amped up Cold War tensions and made the USSR look to the rest of the world
like a cruel and capricious enemy. It hastened the creation of West Germany,
and, by demonstrating that the U.S. and Western European nations had common
interests (and a common foe), it motivated the creation of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance that still exists today.
Cuban Missile Crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union
engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over
the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from
U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy
(1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his
decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was
prepared to use military force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to
national security. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the
brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban
missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also
secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.
Discovering the Missiles
After seizing power in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba in 1959, leftist
revolutionary leader Fidel Castro (1926-) aligned himself with the Soviet
Union. Under Castro, Cuba grew dependent on the Soviets for military and
economic aid. During this time, the U.S. and the Soviets (and their respective
allies) were engaged in the Cold War (1945-91), an ongoing series of largely
political and economic clashes.
The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations
after the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane making a high-altitude pass over
Cuba on October 14, 1962, photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic
missile being assembled for installation.
President Kennedy was briefed about the situation on October 16, and he
immediately called together a group of advisors and officials known as the
executive committee, or ExCom. For nearly the next two weeks, the president
and his team wrestled with a diplomatic crisis of epic proportions, as did their
counterparts in the Soviet Union.
A New Threat to the U.S.
For the American officials, the urgency of the situation stemmed from the fact
that the nuclear-armed Cuban missiles were being installed so close to the U.S.
mainland–just 90 miles south of Florida. From that launch point, they were
capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U.S. If allowed to become
operational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the
nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR), which up to that point had been dominated by the Americans.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had gambled on sending the missiles to Cuba
with the specific goal of increasing his nation’s nuclear strike capability. The
Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number of nuclear weapons that were
targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw the
deployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Another key
factor in the Soviet missile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U.S.
and Cuba. The Kennedy administration had already launched one attack on the
island–the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961–and Castro and Khrushchev saw
the missiles as a means of deterring further U.S. aggression.
Weighing the Options
From the outset of the crisis, Kennedy and Ex-Com determined that the
presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was unacceptable. The challenge facing
them was to orchestrate their removal without initiating a wider conflict–and
possibly a nuclear war. In deliberations that stretched on for nearly a week, they
came up with a variety of options, including a bombing attack on the missile
sites and a full-scale invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy ultimately decided on a
more measured approach. First, he would employ the U.S. Navy to establish a
blockade, or quarantine, of the island to prevent the Soviets from delivering
additional missiles and military equipment. Second, he would deliver an
ultimatum that the existing missiles be removed.
In a television broadcast on October 22, 1962, the president notified Americans
about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact the blockade
and made it clear that the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to
neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this public
declaration, people around the globe nervously waited for the Soviet response.
Some Americans, fearing their country was on the brink of nuclear war, hoarded
food and gas.
Showdown at Sea
A crucial moment in the unfolding crisis arrived on October 24, when Soviet
ships bound for Cuba neared the line of U.S. vessels enforcing the blockade. An
attempt by the Soviets to breach the blockade would likely have sparked a
military confrontation that could have quickly escalated to a nuclear exchange.
But the Soviet ships stopped short of the blockade.
Although the events at sea offered a positive sign that war could be averted,
they did nothing to address the problem of the missiles already in Cuba. The
tense standoff between the superpowers continued through the week, and on
October 27, an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and a
U.S. invasion force was readied in Florida. (The 35-year-old pilot of the
downed plane, Major Rudolf Anderson, is considered the sole U.S. combat
casualty of the Cuban missile crisis.) “I thought it was the last Saturday I would
ever see,” recalled U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009),
as quoted by Martin Walker in “The Cold War.” A similar sense of doom was
felt by other key players on both sides.
A Deal Ends the Standoff
Despite the enormous tension, Soviet and American leaders found a way out of
the impasse. During the crisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters
and other communications, and on October 26, Khrushchev sent a message to
Kennedy in which he offered to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for a
promise by U.S. leaders not to invade Cuba. The following day, the Soviet
leader sent a letter proposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in
Cuba if the Americans removed their missile installations in Turkey.
Officially, the Kennedy administration decided to accept the terms of the first
message and ignore the second Khrushchev letter entirely. Privately, however,
American officials also agreed to withdraw their nation’s missiles from Turkey.
U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925-68) personally delivered the
message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, and on October 28, the crisis
drew to a close.
The Close of the Cold War
Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began
to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the
world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy
instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the
United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a
trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the
same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”–”relaxation”–toward the Soviet
Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture
of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-
old threat of nuclear war.
Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald
Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that
the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a
result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist
governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it
was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador,
was known as the Reagan Doctrine.
Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet
Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and
growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-)
took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s
relationship to the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and
“perestroika,” or economic reform. Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned.
In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with
a non-communist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall–the most
visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over
two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at
Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991,
the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.
CONTENTS PAGE NO.
1 Introduction 1
2 The cold war: containment 2
3 The cold war extends to space 3
4 The red scare 4
5 The cold war abroad 4
6 The berlin airlift 5-7
7 Cuban missile crisis 8-11
8 The close of cold war 12
