Cold War

For other uses, please see Cold War (disambiguation).

The Cold War (Russian: Холодная Война Kholodnaya Voina) was the protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between a worldwide military alliance of capitalist states led by the United States and a rival alliance of communist states led by the Soviet Union. It lasted from about 1947 to the period leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. Between 1985 and 1991, Cold War rivalries first eased and then ended.

The global contest was popularly named The Cold War because open hostilities never occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead, the "war" took the form of an arms race involving nuclear and conventional weapons, networks of military alliances, economic warfare and trade embargos, propaganda, espionage, and proxy wars, especially those involving superpower support for opposing sides within civil wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most important direct confrontation, together with a series of confrontations over the Berlin Blockade and the Berlin Wall. The major civil wars polarized along Cold War lines were the Greek Civil War, Korean War, Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War, along with more peripheral conflicts in Angola, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

The greatest fear during the Cold War was the risk it would escalate into a full nuclear exchange with hundreds of millions killed. Both sides developed a deterrence policy that prevented problems from escalating beyond limited localities. Nuclear weapons were never employed as weapons during the Cold War.

The Cold War cycled through a series of high and low tension years (the latter called Détente). It ended in the period between 1989 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and later the Soviet Union. Historians continue to debate the causes in the 1940s, and the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Historical overview

Origins

Main article: Origins of the Cold War (—1947).

Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union resumed after World War II ended in 1945. They escalated in 1945–1947. Historians differ, but the usual starting year is 1947 for the Cold War that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall (Nov 11, 1989) or the Collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991.

Historians looking at the Soviet Union perspective take two approaches, one emphasizing the primacy of Communist ideology, the other emphasizing the historical goals of the Russian state, specifically hegemony over Eastern Europe, access to warm water seaports, and the defense of the Orthodox Christians and Slavic peoples. The roots of the ideological clashes can be seen in Lenin's seizure of power in Russia (the Bolshevik Revolution of October-November 1917). Walter LaFeber stresses Russia's historic interests, going back to the Tsarist years when the United States and Russia became rivals. From 1933 to 1939, the United States and the Soviet Union had a sort of détente, but relations were not friendly. After the Soviet Union and Germany became belligerents in 1941, Roosevelt made a personal commitment to help the Soviets (Congress never voted to approve any sort of alliance). The wartime cooperation was never friendly. For example, Stalin was reluctant to allow United States forces to use the Soviet Union's bases. Cooperation became increasingly strained by February 1945 at the Yalta Conference, as it was becoming clear that Stalin intended to spread communism to Eastern Europe (which he succeeded in doing) and then, perhaps, to spread communism to France and Italy.

In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, working as a Cipher clerk in a Soviet Embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, defected from the Soviet Union with 109 documents of Soviet Espionage activity in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Gouzenko Affair changed Western perspective of the Soviet Union as a friend to an enemy. Many people credit this event as the trigger to the Cold War.

Economic determinists, such as William Appleman Williams, emphasize United States economic expansionism as the roots of the Cold War.

These geopolitical and ideological rivalries were accompanied by a third factor that had just emerged from World War II as a new problem in world affairs: the problem of effective international control of nuclear energy. In 1946, the Soviet Union rejected a United States proposal for such control, which had been formulated by Bernard Baruch on the basis of an earlier report authored by Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, with the objection that such an agreement would undermine the principle of national sovereignty.

Global Realignments

In this period, the Cold War began in 1947 and continued until the change in leadership for both superpowers in 1953 - from Presidents Truman to Eisenhower for the United States and from Stalin to Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

Events include the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Blockade and Berlin Airlift, the Soviet Union's detonation of its first atomic bomb, the formation of NATO and (later) the Warsaw Pact, the formation of West Germany and East Germany, the Stalin Note for German reunification and superpower disengagement from Central Europe, the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War.

The American Marshall Plan intended to rebuild the European economy after the devastation incurred by the World War II in order to thwart the political appeal of the radical left. For Western Europe, economic aid ended the dollar shortage, stimulated private investment for postwar reconstruction and, most importantly, introduced new managerial techniques. For the United States, the plan rejected the isolationism of the 1920s and integrated the North American and Western European economies.

Escalation and Crisis

This period existed between the change in leadership for both superpowers in 1953 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Major events included the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in particular, the world came to the brink of a third (nuclear) world war when the Soviet Union installed medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba and the United States demanded their unconditional withdrawal from the island.

De-escalation, Vietnam, and the Brezhnev Doctrine, 1962-1969

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union took some tentative steps towards a lessening of hostilities, such as the installation of the "Hotline" communications link between Washington and Moscow in 1963, and the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty the same year. However, the escalation of hostilities in Vietnam following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, including a massive influx of American ground forces in 1965 and large-scale air combat operations over North Vietnam, signalled that this lessening of superpower tensions was short-lived.

The political liberalization in Czechoslovakia in 1968, popularly known as the Prague Spring, was followed in August of that year by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which signalled the introduction of what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. The Soviet Union reserved the right to maintain the stability of the regimes allied with or dominated by it, by use of force if necessary.

Thaw and Détente, 1969-1979

The Détente period of the Cold War was marked by mediation and comparative peace. At its most reconciliatory, German Chancellor Willy Brandt forwarded the foreign policy of Ostpolitik during his tenure in the Federal Republic of Germany. Egon Bahr, its architect and advisor to Brandt, framed this policy (translated literally as "eastern politics") as "change through rapprochement".

These initiatives led to the Treaty of Warsaw between Poland and West Germany (signed on 7 December 1970), the Quadripartite or Four-Power Agreement on Berlin between the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union (signed on 3 September 1971), and a few east-west German agreements including the Basic Treaty of 21 December 1972.

Limitations to reconciliation did exist, as evidenced by the deposition of Walter Ulbricht by Erich Honecker as the leader of East Germany on 3 May 1971.

Second Cold War

The period between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union in March 1985 was characterized by a marked "freeze" in relations between the superpowers after the "thaw" of the Détente period of the 1970s. Due to increased tensions between the Western and Eastern blocs during this time, the period is sometimes referred to as the "Second Cold War".

The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of an embryonic communist regime in that country led to international outcries and the widespread boycotting of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games by many Western countries in protest of Soviet actions. The Soviet invasion led to a protracted conflict between Muslim guerrillas, supported by the United States and others, and the Soviet military that lasted through the end of the 1980s.

Worried by Soviet deployment of their SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles (beginning in 1977), NATO allies agreed in 1979 to continued Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to limit the number of deployed nuclear missiles, while threatening to deploy some 500 cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in West Germany and the Netherlands if negotiations were unsuccessful. The negotiations were bound to fail. The planned deployment of Pershing II met intense and widespread opposition from public opinion across Europe, which became the site of the largest demonstrations ever seen in several countries.[1] Pershing II missiles were deployed in Europe from January 1984. They were withdrawn beginning in October 1988.

The "new conservatives" or "neoconservatives" rebelled against both the Nixon-era policies and the similar position of Jimmy Carter toward the Soviet Union. Many clustered around hawkish Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, and pressured President Carter into a more confrontational stance. Eventually, they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the conservative wing of the Republicans, who promised to end Soviet expansionism.

The election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in 1979, followed by that of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States in 1980, saw the elevation of two hardline Cold Warriors to the leadership of the Western world.

Other significant events affecting the Cold War that began during this period included the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and Solidarity.

End of the Cold War

This period began at the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet Union leader in 1985 and continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Events included the Chernobyl accident in 1986, the Autumn of Nations (which includes the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989), the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Others include the implementation of the policies of glasnost and perestroika, public discontent over the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan, and the socio-political effects of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. East-West tensions eased rapidly after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three elderly Soviet Union leaders in a row since 1982, the Politburo elected Gorbachev Soviet Communist Party chief in 1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young reform-oriented technocrats rapidly consolidated power, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West.

Meanwhile, in his second term, Reagan surprised the neoconservatives by meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavík in 1986, the latter to continue discussions about scaling back their intermediate missile arsenals in Europe. The talks broke down in failure. Afterwards, Soviet policymakers increasingly accepted Reagan's administration warnings that the U.S. would make the arms race a huge burden for them. The twin burdens of the Cold War arms race on one hand and the provision of large sums of foreign and military aid, which their socialist allies had grown to expect, left Gorbachev's efforts to boost production of consumer goods and reform the stagnating economy in an extremely precarious state. The result was a dual approach of cooperation with the west and economic restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost) domestically, which eventually made it impossible for Gorbachev to reassert central control over Warsaw Pact member states.

Thus, in 1989 Eastern Europe's Communist governments toppled one after another. In Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria, reforms in the government (in the case of Poland under pressure from Solidarity), prompted a peaceful end to Communist rule and democratization. Elsewhere, mass demonstrations succeeded in ousting the Communists from Czechoslovakia and East Germany, where the Berlin Wall was opened on 9 November. In Romania, a popular uprising deposed the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu in mid-December and led to his execution on 25 December 1989.

Western historians often argue that one major cause of death of the Soviet Union was the massive fiscal spending on military technology that the Soviets saw as necessary in response to NATO's increased armament of the 1980s. They insist that Soviet efforts to keep up with NATO military expenditures resulted in massive economic disruption and the effective bankruptcy of the Soviet economy, which had always labored to keep up with its western counterparts. It was estimated that the Soviets were a decade behind the West in computers and falling further behind every year. The critics of the USSR state that computerized military technology was advancing at such a pace that the Soviets were simply incapable of keeping up, even by sacrificing more of the already weak civilian economy. According to the critics, the arms race, both nuclear and conventional, was too much for the underdeveloped Soviet economy of the time. In fact, Gorbachev himself states that defense spending was a major reason in forcing Soviet reforms, quote "I think we all lost the Cold War, particularly the Soviet Union. We each lost $10 trillion". For this reason, President Ronald Reagan is seen by many conservatives as the man who 'won' the Cold War indirectly through his escalation of the arms race and then diplomacy with Gorbachev.

The Soviet Union provided little infrastructure help for its Eastern European satellites, but they did receive substantial military assistance in the form of funds, material and control. Their integration into the inefficient military-oriented economy of the Soviet Union caused severe readjustment problems after the fall of Communism.

The fall of the USSR was accompanied by a sudden and dramatic decline in total warfare, interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, the number of refugees and displaced persons and an increase in the number of democratic states. The opposite pattern was seen before the end.^[1]

Arms race

File:Buran AN-225.jpg

Soviet Shuttle Buran, carried by Antonov An-225 carrier, the world's largest powered aircraft.

Science and technology

A major feature of the Cold War was the arms race between the member states of the Warsaw Pact and those of NATO. This resulted in substantial scientific discoveries in many technological and military fields. As a result of the decisive role which technological developments played in World War II (with radar and the atomic bomb being two of the most noticeable and memorable technologies), both Western and Eastern governments felt from very early on that heavy investment in science and technology was necessary to maintain their political and strategic positions.

Some particularly revolutionary advances were made in the field of nuclear weapons and rocketry, which led to the space race (many of the rockets used to launch humans and satellites into orbit were originally based on military designs formulated during this period).

Other fields in which arms races occurred include: jet fighters, bombers, chemical weapons, biological weapons, anti-aircraft warfare, surface-to-surface missiles (including SRBMs and cruise missiles), inter-continental ballistic missiles (as well as IRBMs), anti-ballistic missiles, anti-tank weapons, submarines and anti-submarine warfare, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, electronic intelligence, signals intelligence, reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites.

Many of these military technologies also led to important non-military work as well. Developments in computing technology, for example, was sponsored heavily by military research (some of the earliest digital computers were involved in detecting nuclear bombs, such as the SAGE system) but ended up having a major role in the civilian economy as well (the SABRE airline reservation system was a direct result of the SAGE research).

Nuclear weapons and political strategy

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States sought to maintain a monopoly over the technology behind nuclear weapons, but this was broken by the Soviet Union in 1949, and followed soon by other countries which entered into "the nuclear club". Though nuclear weapons were never actually used in warfare during the Cold War, they played a large role in the popular and political mindsets.

Nuclear strategies shifted many times during the Cold War. The United States, for example, held to a strategy of "massive retaliation" under the Eisenhower administration, which emphasized the use of nuclear weapons as a strategic deterrent, but shifted into a "flexible response" policy under the Kennedy administration, which encouraged the idea of a "limited" nuclear war. Popularly these strategies are often considered under the common rubric of deterrence — the idea that the threat of total destruction would deter future conflicts — known as mutual assured destruction or "MAD". The idea was that the Western bloc would not attack the Eastern bloc or vice versa, because both sides had more than enough nuclear weapons to bomb each other out of existence and to make the entire planet uninhabitable. Therefore, launching an attack on either party would be suicidal and so neither would attempt it. With increasing numbers and accuracy of delivery systems, particularly in the closing stages of the Cold War, the possibility of a first strike doctrine weakened the deterrence theory. A first strike would aim to degrade the enemy's nuclear forces to such an extent that the retalitatory response would involve "acceptable" losses.

Different nuclear strategies often dictated a different composition of worldwide nuclear arms. For example, an emphasis on "limited" nuclear warfare encouraged many nations to create large stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons which were relatively small (in both physical size and yield) and could be used in battlefield situations. Emphasis on strategic deterrence encouraged stockpiles of weapons which would inflict incredible damage against cities, such as multi-megaton hydrogen bombs. The development of missiles which could carry many separately targetable nuclear warheads — multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs — was done in order to defeat anti-missile defense systems.

Nuclear weapons are often credited for having prevented the Cold War from becoming "hot" — that is, preventing a total-war confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union — though the exact nature of their role in Cold War policy and decisionmaking is hotly debated, as is the question of their ethics and morality.

Intelligence

Much of the Cold War involved secretive work by intelligence agencies like the CIA (United States), MI6 (United Kingdom), BND (West Germany), Stasi (East Germany) and the KGB (Soviet Union).

The abilities of ECHELON, a United States-United Kingdom intelligence satellite sharing organization that was created during World War II, were used against the Soviet Union, China and their allies.

According to the CIA, much of the technology in the Communist states consisted simply of copies of Western products that had been legally purchased or gained through a massive espionage program.[2] Stricter Western control of the export of technology through COCOM and providing defective technology to Communist agents after the discovery of the Farewell Dossier contributed to the fall of Communism.

Origin of the Term "Cold War"

The origins of the term "Cold War" are debated. The term was used hypothetically by George Orwell in 1945, though not in reference to the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had not yet been initiated. American politician Bernard Baruch began using the term in April 1947, but it first came into general use in September 1947 when journalist Walter Lippmann published a series of newspaper columns (and books) on United States-Soviet Union tensions entitled The Cold War.

Historiography

There are four schools of interpretations of the Cold War and its origins. These are the Orthodox, the Revisionist, the Post-revisionist and Post-Cold War.

1. For more than a decade after the end of World War II, most American historians supported the "orthodox" interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War: that the breakdown of relations was primarily a result of Stalin's commitment to Communist expansion, as seen in his violation of the accords of the Yalta Conference and Potsdam Conference, the imposition of Soviet Union-dominated governments on an unwilling Eastern Europe, Soviet intransigence and aggressive Soviet expansionism. The Orthodox pointed out that Marxist theory rejected liberal democracy, while prescribing a worldwide proletarian revolution and argue that this stance made conflict inevitable. Organizations such as the Comintern and later the Cominform were regarded as actively working for the overthrow of all Western governments. In summary: Orthodox historians blame the USSR for starting and escalating the Cold War. These views were notably expressed from 1947-1960.

2. New Left or Revisionist historians emerged from the anti-Vietnam War student movement of the 1960s. It was influenced by Marxist theory, and was hostile to capitalism. William Appleman Williams in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and Walter LaFeber in his 1967 America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1966 argued that the Cold War was an inevitable outgrowth of conflicting American and Soviet economic interests. Some New Left revisionist historians have argued that the American policy of Containment as expressed in the Truman Doctrine was at least equally responsible, if not more so, than Soviet seizure of Poland and other states. Some dated the onset of the Cold War to the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, regarding the American use of nuclear weapons as a warning to the Soviet Union. This New Left approach reached its height during the Vietnam War when some began to view the United States and the Soviet Union as morally comparable evil empires, and shifted their admiration to revolutionary nations like China and Cuba.

In summary: Revisionist historians argued that capitalism had to expand and thus helped start and/or escalate the Cold War.

3. In the later years of the Cold War, a "post-revisionist" synthesis school emerged, led by John Lewis Gaddis. Rather than attribute the beginning of the Cold War to the actions of either superpower, post-revisionist historians have focused on mutual misperception, mutual reactivity and shared responsibility between the leaders of the superpowers. Gaddis perceives the origins of the conflict between the US and USSR. The causes were not real, but psychological and came more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. Melvyn Leffler contends that Truman and Eisenhower acted, on the whole, thoughtfully in meeting what was understandably perceived to be a potentially serious threat from a totalitarian communist regime that was ruthless at home and that might be threatening abroad. Borrowing from the realist school of international relations, the post-revisionists essentially accepted U.S. European policy in Europe, such as aid to Greece in 1947 and the Marshall Plan. According to this synthesis, "Communist activity" was not the root of the difficulties of Europe, but rather a consequence of the disruptive effects of the World War II on the economic, political and social structure of Europe, which threatened to drastically alter the balance of power in a manner favorable to the Soviet Union.

In summary: Post-Revisionists believed that the blame for the Cold War lay with both the USA and the USSR for misunderstanding each other, and for taking inappropriate defensive action against what they saw as a threat.

All three schools assumed that the Cold War was undesirable and that the originators should be blamed. None stressed that the Cold War succeeded in preventing nuclear war for 40 years.

4. The Post-Cold War historians, notably John Lewis Gaddis (who changed his view with the opening of Soviet archives), focus much more on the characters of leaders and their effects on the Cold War. Gaddis charges that the removal of Stalin would have meant that there would have been no Cold War, whereas the removal of Truman or successive American Presidents would not have changed the course of the Cold War as significantly. The end of the Cold War opened many of the archives of the Communist states, providing documentation which has increased the support for the traditionalist position. Gaddis has written that Stalin's "authoritarian, paranoid and narcissistic predisposition" locked the Cold War into place. "Stalin alone pursued personal security by depriving everyone else of it: no Western leader relied on terror to the extent that he did. He alone had transformed his country into an extension of himself: no Western leader could have succeeded at such a feat and none attempted it. He alone saw war and revolution as acceptable means with which to pursue ultimate ends: no Western leader associated violence with progress to the extent that he did."[3]

Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley in their book "Rise to Globalism" charge that the economic moves made by the Truman administration were a deliberate attempt to create two economic superblocs, achieved with the establishment of Comecon in 1949. This is supposed to have been done in order to prevent economic recession and high unemployment in America through the introduction of a permanent war economy.