The Cold War

The Cold War is the name given to the relationship that developed primarily between the
USA and the USSR after World War Two. A clash of very different beliefs and ideology –
capitalism versus communism – each held with almost religious conviction, formed the basis
of an international power struggle with both sides vying for dominance, exploiting every
opportunity for expansion anywhere in the world.

During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against
the Axis powers. (Germany, Italy, and Japan) 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.
Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials’ bellicose
rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to international relations. By the
time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense 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.”

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.

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, PresidentJohn 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 food 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.

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

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 anticommunist 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 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 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 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 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.