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The Cold War
1.0 Introduction
The Cold War is the name given to the negative relationship that developed between the West and the East (Communist) blocs, post World War II. The USA represented the capitalistic and democratic West, and the USSR was the main communist force. The Cold War came to dominate international affairs for decades and saw many major crises - the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam war, Hungarian crisis, and the Berlin Wall saga - being just some. For many, the fantastic growth in weapons of mass destruction was the prominent symbol of the cold war.
The USSR in 1945 was Russia post-1917 and included all the various countries that now exist individually (Ukraine, Georgia etc.). In the time period after the second world war, they were part of this huge country up until the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991.
Since the USA and USSR fought as allies during World War II against Germany (and Italy and Japan), it may seem that their relationship after the war would be firm and friendly. But this never happened due to severe ideological differences. The themes of democratic capitalism and socialistic communism just did not match.
Before the second world war, fearful of growing communist clout, America had depicted the Soviet Union as almost the devil-incarnate. The Soviet Union had depicted America likewise; so their 'friendship' during the world war was simply the result of having a strong mutual enemy - Nazi Germany. In fact, one of America's leading generals, George Patton, stated that he felt that the Allied army should unite with what was left of the Wehrmacht in 1945, utilise the military genius that existed within it (such as the V2s etc.) and fight the oncoming Soviet Red Army. Churchill himself was furious that Eisenhower, as supreme head of Allied command, had agreed that the Red Army should be allowed to get to Berlin first ahead of the Allied army. His anger was shared by Montgomery, Britain's senior military figure. Anyhow, the Red Army (Russia’s national army) marched into Berlin, leading to Hitler’s suicide.
The extreme distrust that existed during the war, continued well after it was over. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was distrustful of the Americans after Truman told him of a new terrifying weapon that he was going to use against the Japanese. The first time Stalin discovered what this new weapon could do was after the mass destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had happened.
Thus, as the second world war ended in 1945, both sides (US v/s USSR) distrusted the other. One had a vast army in the field (the Soviet Union with its Red Army supremely lead by Zhukov) while the other, the Americans, had the most powerful weapon in the world, the A-bomb. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they had no way of knowing how many of these bombs did America possess at that time!
2.0 CAUSES OF THE COLD WAR
As said, in 1945, the United States and Soviet Union were allies, jointly triumphant in World War II, which ended with total victory for Soviet and American forces over Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire in Europe. Within just a few years, however, wartime allies became mortal enemies, locked in a global struggle - military, political, economic, ideological - to prevail in a new "Cold War."
There has been a lot of debate among historians and political experts on which nation was primarily responsible for the Cold War.
The Soviets had reneged on their agreements to allow the people of eastern Europe to determine their own fate, by imposing totalitarian communist rule on territories who chose to fall behind the "Iron Curtain" (name given to the communist rule which was opaque).
The Americans ignored the legitimate security concerns of the Soviets and sought to influence the world with the atomic bomb. Furthermore, they relentlessly strived to expand their own international influence and market dominance by globalising their products and services.
2.1 The question of Poland
The tensions that would later grow into Cold War became evident as early as 1943, when the "Big Three" allied leaders - American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin - met in Tehran to coordinate strategy. Poland which was squeezed between Russia and Germany, became a topic for heated debate. The Poles, then under German occupation, had not one but two governments-in-exile - one Communist, the other anti-communist - hoping to take over the country upon its liberation from the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, the Big Three disagreed over which Polish faction should be allowed to take control after the war, with Stalin backing the Polish Communists while Churchill and Roosevelt insisting that the Polish people ought to have the right to choose their own form of government. For Stalin, the Polish question was a matter of the Soviet Union's vital security interests; Germany had invaded Russia through Poland twice since 1914, and more than 20 million Soviet citizens had already died in World War II. The Soviets suffered nearly sixty times as many casualties in the war as the Americans did. Stalin was determined to make sure that such an invasion could never happen again, and insisted that only a communist Poland, friendly to (and dominated by!) the Soviet Union, could serve as a buffer against future aggression from the west. Stalin's security concerns ran smack into Anglo-American values of self-determination, which held that the Poles ought to be allowed to make their own decision over whether or not to become a Soviet satellite.
2.2 The Yalta Conference
At Tehran, and at the next major conference of the Big Three at Yalta in 1945, the leaders of the US, UK, and USSR were able to reach a number of important agreements - settling border disputes, creating the United Nations, & organizing the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan. But Poland remained a vexing problem. At Yalta, Stalin insisted that "Poland is a question of life or death for Russia" and was able to win Churchill's and Roosevelt's reluctant acceptance of a Communist-dominated provisional government for Poland. In exchange, Stalin signed on to a vague and toothless "Declaration of Liberated Europe," pledging to assist "the peoples liberated from the dominion of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems." The agreements allowed Churchill and Roosevelt to claim they had defended the principle of self-determination, even though both knew that Poland had effectively been consigned to the Soviet sphere of interest. The provisional Communist government in Poland later held rigged elections (which it, not surprisingly, won), nominally complying with the Declaration of Liberated Europe even though no alternative to Communist rule ever really had a chance in the country.
In the end, the Yalta agreements were not so much a true compromise as a useful misunderstanding among the three leaders, though the usefulness was short-lived. Stalin left happy he had won Anglo-American acceptance of de facto Soviet control of Eastern Europe; Roosevelt and Churchill left happy they had won Stalin's acceptance of the principle of self-determination. But the two parts of the agreement were mutually exclusive; what would happen if the Eastern Europeans sought to self-determine themselves out of the Soviet orbit? Future disputes over the problematic Yalta agreements were not just likely; they were virtually inevitable.
2.3 Roosevelts' death
The likelihood of future conflict only heightened on 12 April 1945, when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt unexpectedly died of a brain hemorrhage. Vice President Harry S. Truman - a former Missouri senator with only a high-school education - who had served just 82 days as vice president and had not been part of FDR's inner circle suddenly became the President of the United States. Truman, who may not have ever known just how much Roosevelt had actually conceded to Stalin at Yalta, viewed the Soviets' later interventions in eastern Europe as a simple violation of the Yalta agreements, as proof that Stalin was a liar who could never be trusted. Truman quickly staked out a hard-line position, resolving to counter Stalin's apparently insatiable drive for power by blocking any further expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, anywhere in the world. Under Truman, containment of Communism soon came to dominate American foreign policy. The Cold War was on.
2.4 The revisionist view
In the early days of the Cold War itself, American historians would have answered, nearly unanimously, that the Soviets started the Cold War. Josef Stalin was an evil dictator, propelled by an evil Communist ideology to attempt world domination. Appeasement hadn't worked against Hitler, and appeasement wouldn't work against Stalin either. An innocent America had only reluctantly joined the Cold War to defend the ‘Free World’ from otherwise inevitable totalitarian conquest.
In the 1960s, a new generation of revisionist historians who were disillusioned by the Vietnam War and appalled by seemingly endemic government dishonesty of the US government started offering a very different interpretation. In this revisionist view they concede that Stalin may have been a Machiavellian despot but he was an essentially conservative one and more interested in protecting the Soviet Union (and his own power within it) than in dominating the world. Americans erroneously interpreted Stalin's legitimate insistence upon a security buffer in Poland to indicate a desire for global conquest; Americans' subsequent aggressive efforts to contain Soviet influence, to intimidate the Soviets with the atomic bomb, and to pursue American economic interests around the globe were primarily responsible for starting the Cold War.
More recently, a school of historians led by Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis have promoted what they call a "post-revisionist synthesis," incorporating many aspects of the revisionist critique while still insisting that Stalin, as a uniquely powerful and uniquely malevolent historical actor, must bear the greatest responsibility for the Cold War.
However the fact remains that World War II destroyed all other major rivals to American and Soviet power; the US and USSR emerged from the conflict as the only two nations on earth that could hope to propagate their social and political systems on a global scale. Each commanded powerful military forces; each espoused globally expansive ideologies; each feared and distrusted the other. Hence one can hardly be surprised that the Cold War happened.
3.0 IMPORTANT TERMS AND EVENTS OF THE COLD WAR
3.1 Containment
Containment was a foreign policy strategy followed by the United States during the Cold War. First laid out by George F. Kennan (an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist, and historian) in 1947, Containment stated that communism needed to be contained and isolated, or it would spread to neighboring countries. This spread would allow the Domino Theory to take hold, meaning that if one country fell to communism, then each surrounding country would fall as well, like a row of dominoes. This led to transformed fear of the USSR into a cohesive foreign policy. Adherence to Containment and Domino Theory ultimately led to US intervention in Vietnam, as well as in Central America and Grenada. Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union would take every opportunity to spread Communism into every possible "nook and cranny" around the globe, either by conquering neighboring countries or by subtly supporting Communist revolutionaries in politically unstable countries. Kennan also wrote, however, that the United States could prevent the global domination of communism with this strategy. He suggested maintaining the status quo by thwarting communist aggression abroad.
Kennan's containment doctrine rapidly became the root of the dominant U.S. strategy for fighting communism throughout the Cold War. Different presidents interpreted the doctrine differently and employed different tactics to accomplish their goals, but the overall strategy for keeping communism in check remained the same until the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, with USSR’s collapse. Kennan is best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War. (Interestingly, China with its communist ideology was nowhere a part of the Cold War, perhaps because its meteoric economic rise began only post 1979 economic reforms.)
3.2 The Truman Doctrine
The Truman doctrine refers to United States policy to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine was announced on March 12th, 1947 by US President Harry Truman in response to crises within Greece and Turkey nations which American believed were in danger of falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. The speech promised monetary aid and military advisors to Greece and Turkey, but the doctrine was expanded worldwide as part of the Cold War to cover assistance to all nations threatened by communism and the Soviet Union, involving the US with western Europe, Korea and Vietnam among others. This doctrine was developed in 1950 by NSC-68 (National Security Council Report 68) which assumed the Soviet Union was trying to spread its power across the whole world, decided that the US should stop this and advocated a more active, military policy of containment, fully abandoning previous US doctrines like Isolationism. The resulting military budget rose from $13 billion in 1950 to $60 billion in 1951 as the US prepared for the struggle.
Critics, both at the time and looking back in retrospect, have charged that Truman's adoption of the containment doctrine, coupled with his own Truman Doctrine, accelerated the Cold War by polarizing the United States and the USSR unnecessarily. Many have claimed that the United States might have avoided fifty years of competition and mutual distrust had Truman sought a diplomatic solution instead.
Defendants of Truman's policy, however, have claimed that the Soviet Union had already begun the Cold War by thwarting Allied attempts to reunite and stabilize Germany. Truman, they have argued, merely met the existing Soviet challenge. Other supporters believed that Truman used polarizing language in order to prevent U.S. isolationists from abandoning the cause in Europe. Whatever his motivations, Truman's adoption of the containment doctrine and his characterization of the Communist threat shaped American foreign policy for the subsequent four decades.
3.3 The Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, channeled over $13 billion to finance the economic recovery of Europe between 1948 and 1951. The Marshall Plan successfully sparked economic recovery, meeting its objective of ‘restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole’. The plan is named for Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who announced it in a commencement speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947.
At the time, Americans perceived the plan as a generous subvention to Europe. The Soviet Union, however, viewed the Marshall Plan as an attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of other states and refused to participate. Ultimately, the Soviets prevented Poland and Czechoslovakia from taking part, despite their eagerness to do so.
Revisionist historians have challenged the assertion that the plan represented American altruism. They have argued that the export of dollars to Europe kept the United States from backsliding into depression by providing a market for U.S. capital goods. The Marshall Plan, according to revisionists, allowed the United States to remake the European economy in the image of the American economy. The plan promoted European economic integration and federalism, and created a mixture of public organization of the private economy similar to that in the domestic economy of the United States. This reorganization of the European economy provided a more congenial environment for American investment.
3.4 NATO and the Warsaw Pact
With the mandate from the 1948 elections, Truman pushed ahead with his programs to defend Western Europe from possible attack. In 1949, on April 4th, the foreign ministers of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty. This was a result of the Berlin blockade which provided convincing evidence that in order to successfully deter the Soviets from further attack and aggression, an alliance was needed between nations of Western Europe and the United States of America. One of many agreements of the treaty stated that “an armed attack against one or more of the European signatories of the North American signatories would be considered an attack against all of them”.
The formation of NATO led to the formation of the communist Warsaw Pact, which was a response to the North Atlantic Treaty. The Warsaw Pact was a military treaty which bound its signatories to run to the aid of the other signatories, should any of them fall victim to foreign aggression. It was a military alliance of communist nations in eastern Europe. The Soviets intended that the Pact would serve as a military deterrent to the NATO nations and any plans they might have on attacking the Soviet Union or any of its allies.
Perhaps the greatest significance of NATO was the fact that it committed the United States to Western Europe and prevented U.S. conservatives in the future from isolating the United States from the world as they had after World War I. Outraged and threatened, the USSR and the Soviet bloc countries it dominated in eastern Europe made similar pledges of mutual defense.
3.5 The Second Red Scare
The fall of China (to Mao’s communists in 1949), the Soviets' development of nuclear weapons, and the crises in Europe all contributed to Americans' growing fear of Communism at home. Remembering the Bolshevik revolutionaries' cry for the global destruction of capitalism, frightened Americans began hunting for communist revolutionaries within the United States and elsewhere. President Truman had already created the Loyalty Review Board in 1947 to investigate all federal departments, and the State Department in particular, to uncover any hidden Soviet agents working to overthrow the government. The board went into overdrive at the end of the decade, and thousands of innocent individuals were wrongfully accused and persecuted as a result. Senator Joseph McCarthy went overboard in his identification and persecution of so-called ‘communists’ hidden in the USA. It was a sad period, which ended in 1954.
3.6 The Korean conflict
[ A quick summary of the Korean war : The division between north and south remains Korea’s enduring tragedy. It was imposed in 1945 by the Allied powers that liberated the country from 35 years of cruel Japanese rule. In 1950 it was almost erased by a wave of North Korean troops that swept down the peninsula under the command of Kim Il Sung, a Soviet-backed ruler who outlasted the Soviet Union itself! Another wave of troops, mostly American but fighting under the United Nations banner, then reversed the North Korean tide. Eventually the UN forces succumbed to a third wave of Chinese troops which drove them back to the 38th parallel, a latitudinal reference line that still divides the two Koreas. Everybody ended up roughly where they had started. ]
The outbreak of hostilities in Korea presented to the Truman administration a host of tricky questions: How could the West contain communist aggression in Korea without bringing in neighboring communist China? Could the United Nations function as a world policeman, or would the United States have to “go it alone” in Korea? And did an East-West confrontation have to escalate into “total war”, involving the use of atomic bombs, between the two competing blocs?
One of the questions was answered quickly. Hours after the invasion, the UN Security Council, which had the authority to deploy troops, passed a resolution calling for all UN nations to “render every assistance to the UN” in supporting the U.S. decision to defend South Korea. The Soviet Union, due to its protest of another issue, was absent from the Security Council meeting. By July, ground forces in Korea flew the UN banner instead of the American flag.
Between 25 June and 28 June the North Koreans overwhelmed the South's forces and captured Seoul, the South Korean capital. On 4 July, the US ground forces arrived. At first, however, MacArthur's men fared little better than the South Koreans: U.S. troops no sooner arrived than they began retreating, while the North's troops had overrun most of the South. Gen. Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said things were not “desperate but they are very serious”. Congressman Lloyd Bentsen, Jr. (D-Texas), drew cheers in the House of Representatives when he proposed that Truman demand that the North Koreans withdraw or the United States would use atomic bombs on their cities.
On 15 September MacArthur led a daring landing at Inchon, a port 150 miles behind the North Korean lines, taking the North by surprise. As a consequence North Korean forces rapidly retreated back toward the 38th parallel. In October South Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel. Till that point, the communist Chinese had not intervened, but American leaders were concerned that penetration too far into the North would draw the Chinese into the conflict. US forces also began crossing the 38th parallel, and the UN army was quickly approaching the Yalu river, the border between North Korea and China. Communist Chinese forces swarmed across the Yalu River on 26 November, and overnight the enemy armies increased by 2,75,000, also opening the possibility that millions more Chinese might reinforce those troops. Eventually numbering 2.1 million, the Chinese troops drove the UN forces back to the 38th parallel, where the war was stalemated.
3.7 Negotiating a peace
The United States stood on a threshold. It could have moved into a "total war" mode, deploying millions of soldiers and rationing materials. But it was doubtful that the American public would have supported another total-war effort so soon after World War II. Another alternative was to use atomic bombs to pound China and North Korea into submission; however, such a move was sure to have provoked a military response from the Soviet Union in support of the Communists. Or the US could negotiate a peace. Truman and the United Nations chose the latter alternative. Later, Republicans nominated former World War II general and NATO supreme commander Dwight D. Eisenhower for president, with former Red-hunter Richard M. Nixon as his running mate. Eisenhower's status as a war hero and Nixon's reputation for being tough on Communists gave the Republicans an easy election victory. They won the popular vote by a 7 million-vote margin and also won a landslide in the electoral college, with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson's 89.
By the time Eisenhower took the oath of office in 1953, American soldiers had been entrenched in Korea for nearly three years. In the time since MacArthur's final retreat to the 38th parallel, thousands more Americans had died without any territorial loss or gain. Eisenhower eventually brought about an armistice with North Korea, in part by making it known that he, unlike Truman, would consider the use of nuclear weapons in Korea. Despite the armistice, however, the border between North and South Korea has remained one of the most heavily fortified Cold War "hot spots" in the world for more than fifty years.
4.0 Eisenhower's "New Look"
With the Korean situation under control, Eisenhower set out to redefine the methods the United States used to contain communism. Of particular concern for Eisenhower was the cost associated with waging the Cold War. Worried that the Cold War might cripple the nation's economy or drive the U.S. into bankruptcy, Eisenhower introduced a new defense policy known as the “New Look”. Under the New Look, the US would rely less on costly conventional forces, such as ground troops and naval forces, and depend more on nuclear weapons, air power, and covert operations. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson summarized the new policy by suggesting nuclear weapons provided “more bang for the buck”. To emphasize the US commitment to the New Look, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, introduced the doctrine of “massive retaliation”. Under this doctrine, the Eisenhower administration implied that it would use nuclear force to protect US security & interests anywhere in the world. Through this approach, the US sought to discourage the Soviet Union from staging an offensive attack on US interests for fear of a massive retaliatory strike.
The new approach was a dangerous game of brinkmanship, one that involved convincing your enemy of your willingness to use nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State Dulles noted, “the ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war ... we walked to the brink and we looked it in the face”. To convince the Soviet Union of the United States' willingness to use nuclear weapons, Eisenhower and Dulles delivered dramatic speeches in which they described situations that would require the use of nuclear weapons. More importantly, Dulles stated that the U.S. would respond to Soviet aggression "at places and with means of our own choosing."
In another attempt to convince the Soviet Union of the United States' willingness to use nuclear weapons, American leaders educated Americans on how to survive nuclear warfare. Officials claimed that, with proper planning, survival was possible. Official government documents and magazines, including Popular Mechanics, included directions for building and stocking fallout shelters. Fallout shelters were designed to protect individuals from the effects associated with nuclear destruction. While most designs included just enough space for a family and their necessities, some resembled homes and included areas for luxuries, including pool tables and furniture. Most of these structures were built from concrete in the belief that the substance could protect individuals from nuclear fallout. US News and World Report claimed that a 32-inch thick slab of concrete could protect people from an atomic blast as close as 1,000 feet away. Also, Americans across the United States participated in Civil Defense drills. Children in public schools learned about the need to During duck and cover" drills a teacher shouted "drop" and the students immediately dropped into a kneeling position beneath their desks. Some schools even went so far as to issue identification tags to their students. Public schools also taught Civil Defense classes in which school children learned about radiation, as well as basic survival skills. Eisenhower also employed the CIA to tackle the specter of Communism in developing countries outside the Soviet Union's immediate sphere of influence.
Newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles (the secretary of state's brother) took enormous liberties in conducting a variety of covert operations. Thousands of CIA operatives were assigned to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and attempted to launch coups, assassinate heads of state, arm anti-Communist revolutionaries, spread propaganda, and support despotic pro-American regimes. Eisenhower began to favor using the CIA instead of the military because covert operations didn't attract as much attention and cost much less money. The result was the coup of Iran and Guatemala.
4.1 The Cuban missile crisis 1962
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 between US and USSR over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on the land of Cuba, just 90 miles from US 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 US 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 US agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the US promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey.
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. This was also the period of the Cold War.
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.
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 US. If allowed to become operational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the nuclear rivalry between the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 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 US 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 US aggression.
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 US 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. US 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. Both the Americans and Soviets were sobered by the Cuban Missile crisis. The following year, a direct "hot line" communication link was installed between Washington and Moscow to help defuse similar situations, and the superpowers signed two treaties related to nuclear weapons. The Cold War was far from over, though. In fact, another legacy of the crisis was that it convinced the Soviets to increase their investment in an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. from Soviet territory.
4.2 The Arms Race
Over the 20th century, many colourful terms have been devised by scholars to denote the arms buildup side of the cold war. Some of these are : The Arms Race, Balance of Power, Escalation, etc. Some of these served a sobering purpose, while others enraged many!
An arms race denotes a rapid, competitive increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military or naval power by rival states in peacetime. What it connotes is a game with a logic of its own. Typically, in popular depictions of arms races, the political calculations that start and regulate the pace of the game remain obscure. As Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., has noted, “The strange result is that the activity of the other side, and not one's own resources, plans, and motives, becomes the determinant of one's behavior”. And what constitutes the “finish line” of the game is the province of assertion, rather than analysis. Many have claimed that the likelihood of war increases as the accumulation of arms proceeds apace.
From the Cuban missile crisis, both sides learned that risking nuclear war in pursuit of political objectives was simply too dangerous. It was the last time during the Cold War that either side would take this risk. After the Cuban Missile crisis, the US and USSR still superimposed their competition on local conflicts in other parts of the globe.
On August 29th, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. This event ended America's monopoly of atomic weaponry and launched the Cold War. In the 1950s, The Arms Race became the focus of the Cold War. America tested the first Hydrogen (or thermo-nuclear) bomb in 1952, beating the Russians in the creation of the “Super Bomb”.
The political climate of the Cold war became more defined in January, 1954, when U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the policy that came to be known as “massive retaliation” - any major Soviet attack would be met with a massive nuclear response. As a result to the challenge of “massive retaliation” came the most significant by-product of the Cold War, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). [ For your information, India’s Agni V and Agni VI range are nuclear tipped ICBMs ]
The ICBMs were supported with the thermo-nuclear bomb (with a much greater destructive power than the original atomic bomb), inertial guidance systems (defines the difference between weight, the influence of gravity and the impact of inertia), and powerful booster engines for multistage rockets. As a result, ballistic missiles became sufficiently accurate and powerful to destroy targets 8000 km (5000 mi) away. For many decades, the ICBM remained key to United States' strategic nuclear arsenal.
In October 1961, The Soviet Union detonated a nuclear device, estimated at 58 megatons, the equivalent of more than 50 million tons of TNT, or more than all the explosives used during World War II. It was the largest nuclear weapon the world had ever seen at that time. The Tsar Bomba (King of the Bombs) is detonated after US and USSR agree to limit nuclear testing. It is the largest nuclear device ever exploded. Having no strategic military value, Tsar Bomba was viewed as an act of intimidation of the Soviets.
During the 1960s the theory of MAD was developed - Mutually Assured Destruction. This meant that if Russia attacked the West, the West would make sure that they would suitably retaliate i.e. there would be no winners.
- By 1981, USA had 8,000 ICBMs and USSR 7,000 ICBMs.
- By 1981, USA had 4,000 airplanes capable of delivering a nuclear bomb. Russia had 5000.
- USA defence spending for 1981 was $ 178 billion. By 1986, it was $ 367 billion.
- By 1986, it is estimated that throughout the world there were 40,000 nuclear warheads - the equivalent of one million Hiroshima bombs.
- British Intelligence estimated that just one medium sized H-bomb on London would essentially destroy anything living up to 30 miles away.
Confronted by such frightening statistics, world leaders had to move to a position where they trusted each other more. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s “detente” had been used to ease bad relations between the superpowers. This was to culminate in the Reykjavik meeting between presidents Reagan and Gorbachev that started real progress in the cut in nuclear weaponry in future meetings (if little was actually gained at the meeting in Reykjavik).
4.3 The Russian intervention in Afghanistan 1979
Afghanistan in 1979 was a perfect summary of the Cold War. From the West's point of view, Berlin, Korea, Hungary and Cuba had shown the way communism wanted to proceed. Afghanistan was a continuation of this.
In Christmas 1979, Russian paratroopers landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. The country was already in the grip of a civil war. The Prime Minister, Hazifullah Amin, tried to sweep aside Muslim tradition within the nation and he wanted a more western slant to Afghanistan. This outraged the majority of those in Afghanistan as a strong tradition of Muslim belief was common in the country.
Thousands of Muslim leaders had been arrested and many more had fled the capital and gone to the mountains to escape Amin's police. Amin also led a communist based government - a belief that rejects religion and this was another reason for such obvious discontent with his government.
Thousands of Afghanistan Muslims joined the Mujahdeen, a guerilla force on a holy mission for Allah. They wanted the overthrow of the Amin government. The Mujahdeen declared a jihad (a holy war) on the supporters of Amin. This was also extended to the Russians who were now in Afghanistan trying to maintain the power of the Amin government. The Russians claimed that they had been invited in by the Amin government and that they were not invading the country. They claimed that their task was to support a legitimate government and that the Mujahdeen were no more than terrorists.
On December 27th, 1979, Amin was shot by the Russians and he was replaced by Babrak Kamal. His position as head of the Afghan government depended entirely on the fact that he needed Russian military support to keep him in power. Many Afghan soldiers had deserted to the Mujahdeen and the Kamal government needed 85,000 Russian soldiers to keep him in power.
The Mujahdeen proved to be a formidable opponent. They were equipped with old rifles but had a knowledge of the mountains around Kabul and the weather conditions that would be encountered there. The Russians resorted to using napalm, poison gas and helicopter gunships against the Mujahdeen - but they experienced exactly the same military scenario the Americans had done in Vietnam. It was not a winning proposition.
By 1982, the Mujahdeen controlled 75% of Afghanistan despite fighting the might of the world's second most powerful military power. Young conscript Russian soldiers were no match against men fuelled by their religious belief. Though the Russian army had a reputation, the war in Afghanistan showed the world just how poor it was outside of military displays. Army boots lasted no more than 10 days before falling to bits in the harsh environment of the Afghanistan mountains. Many Russian soldiers deserted to the Mujahdeen. Russian tanks were of little use in the mountain passes. The United Nations had condemned the invasion as early as January 1980 but a Security Council motion calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces had been vetoed by Russia itself.
America put a ban on the export of grain to Russia, ended the SALT talks taking place then and boycotted the Olympic Games due to be held in Moscow in 1980. Other than that, America did nothing. One possible explanation giver for this is that the Americans knew that Russia had got itself into their own Vietnam and it also provided American Intelligence with an opportunity to acquire any new Russian military hardware that could be used in Afghanistan. Mujhadeen fighters were given access to American surface-to-air missiles - though not through direct sales by America.
Mikhail Gorbachev (the last communist boss) took Russia out of the Afghanistan fiasco when he realised what many Russian leaders had been too scared to admit in public - that Russia could not win the war and the cost of maintaining such a vast force in Afghanistan was crippling Russia's already weak economy.
By the end of the 1980s, the Mujahdeen was at war with itself in Afghanistan with hardline Taliban fighters taking a stronger grip over the whole nation and imposing very strict Muslim law on the Afghanistan population.
5.0 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the reins of power in the Soviet Union in 1985, no one predicted the revolution he would bring. A dedicated reformer, Gorbachev introduced the policies of glasnost and perestroika to the USSR.
Glasnost, or openness, meant a greater willingness on the part of Soviet officials to allow western ideas and goods into the USSR. Perestroika was an initiative that allowed limited market incentives to Soviet citizens. Gorbachev hoped these changes would be enough to fire up the sluggish Soviet economy. Freedom, however, is addictive.
The unraveling of the Soviet Bloc began in Poland in June 1989. Despite previous Soviet military interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland itself, Polish voters elected a non-communist opposition government to their legislature. The world watched with anxious eyes, expecting Soviet tanks to roll into Poland preventing the new government from taking power. Gorbachev, however, refused to act. Like dominoes, Eastern European communist dictatorships fell one by one.
By the fall of 1989, East and West Germans were tearing down the Berlin Wall with pickaxes. Communist regimes were ousted in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On Christmas Day, the brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were summarily executed on live television. Yugoslavia threw off the yoke of communism only to dissolve quickly into a violent civil war.
Demands for freedom soon spread to the Soviet Union. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania declared independence. Talks of similar sentiments were heard in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Central Asian states. Here Gorbachev wished to draw the line. Self-determination for Eastern Europe was one thing, but he intended to maintain the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he proposed a Union Treaty, giving greater autonomy to the Soviet republics, while keeping them under central control.
5.1 Mikhail Gorbachev
When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power of the Soviet Union in 1985, he instituted the policies of glasnost and perestroika in hopes of firing up the sluggish economy. What resulted from this taste of freedom was the revolution that ended the Cold War. That summer, a coup by conservative hardliners took place. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest. Meanwhile, Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian Soviet Republic, demanded the arrest of the hardliners. The army and the public sided with Yeltsin, and the coup failed. Though Gorbachev was freed, he was left with little legitimacy. Nationalist leaders like Yeltsin were far more popular than he could hope to become. In December 1991, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Russia itself declared independence and the Soviet Union was dissolved. Gorbachev was a president without a country.
Americans were pleasantly shocked, but shocked nonetheless at the turn of events in the Soviet bloc. No serious discourse on any diplomatic levels in the USSR addressed the likelihood of a Soviet collapse. Republicans were quick to claim credit for winning the Cold War. They believed the military spending policies of the Reagan-Bush years forced the Soviets to the brink of economic collapse. Democrats argued that containment of communism was a bipartisan policy for 45 years begun by the Democrat Harry Truman.
Others pointed out that no one really won the Cold War. The United States spent trillions of dollars arming themselves for a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union that fortunately never came. Regardless, thousands of American lives were lost waging proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam. Most Americans found it difficult to get used to the idea of no Cold War. Since 1945, Americans were born into a Cold War culture that featured McCarthyist witchhunts, backyard bomb shelters, a space race, a missile crisis, détente, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Star Wars defense proposal. Now the enemy was beaten, but the world remained unsafe. In many ways, facing one superpower was simpler than challenging dozens of rogue states and renegade groups sponsoring global terrorism. Americans hoped against hope that the new world order of the 1990s would be marked with the security and prosperity to which they had become accustomed.
6.0 EFFECTS OF THE END OF COLD WAR
NATO expanded eastwards into the former Warsaw Pact and parts of the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War.
Following the Cold War, Russia cut military spending dramatically, creating a wrenching adjustment as the military-industrial sector had previously employed one of every five Soviet adults, meaning its dismantling left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. After Russia embarked on capitalist economic reforms in the 1990s, it suffered a financial crisis and a recession more severe than the US and Germany had experienced during the Great Depression. Russian living standards worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth since 1999.
The aftermath of the Cold War continues to influence world affairs. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world is widely considered as unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower. The Cold War defined the political role of the United States in the post-World War II world: by 1989 the US held military alliances with 50 countries, and had 5,26,000 troops posted abroad in dozens of countries, with 3,26,000 in Europe (two-thirds of which in west Germany) and about 1,30,000 in Asia (mainly Japan and South Korea). The Cold War also marked the apex of peacetime military-industrial complexes, especially in the USA, and large-scale military funding of science. These complexes, though their origins may be found as early as the 19th century, have grown considerably during the Cold War. The military-industrial complexes have great impact on their countries and help shape their society, policy and foreign relations. Military expenditures by the US during the Cold War years were estimated to have been $8 trillion, while nearly 1,00,000 Americans lost their lives in the Korean War and Vietnam War. Although the loss of life among Soviet soldiers is difficult to estimate, as a share of their gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was far higher than that incurred by the United States.
In addition to the loss of life by uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia. Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises have declined sharply in the post-Cold War years.
The aftermath of Cold War conflict, however, is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure. Even the rise of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was attributed to the Afghanistan embroglio and its complex machinations.
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