Reading 9: The Cold War In a Nutshell

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.
Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled 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 buildup 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 defense
against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” his famous “Long
Telegram” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained 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.” 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 thinkingwould
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
buildup 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 defense 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 “superbomb.” 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 “traveling companion”), 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, 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 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 anticommunis t
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
anticommunist 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 neighbor to the
south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign
to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent
the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended
in 1953.
In 1955, The United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to
remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense
organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East
Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under
Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.
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 anticommunist
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 spiraled into a 10-year conflict.
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 mili tary 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 noncommunist 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.