Cold War

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{{Infobox Military Conflict |conflict=Cold War |image=Image:ColdWar.jpg |caption=Clockwise from top: United States President John F. Kennedy and Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev meet in a 1961 summit held in Vienna; East German border guards at the Berlin Wall; the first Soviet nuclear weapon Joe 1 is tested; American soldiers land in Vietnam during the Vietnam War; Sputnik 1 is launched into orbit (triggering the Space Race). |date = 1945–1990 |place = Proxy wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Korea. Communist uprisings in China, Cuba, Mozambique, Angola, Laos etc. Anti-communist uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. Global arms race between the United States and their NATO allies, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. |result= Dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of most Communist states in the late 1980s and early 1990s. }}

The Cold War was the protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States, supported by their alliance partners. It lasted from about 1947 to about 1991.

It was called the Cold War because no direct fighting 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 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 used in the Cold War.

The Cold War cycled through a series of high and low tension years (the latter called détente). It ended when the Soviet Union gave up its empire in 1989, and then collapsed in 1991. Analysts continue to debate the causes in the 1940s, and the reasons for the Soviet collapse in the 1980s, but the highly politicized debates that characterized the Cold War have practically ended.

1 Historical overview
2 Arms race
3 Intelligence
4 Origin of the Term "Cold War"
5 Historiography
6 Further reading
7 External links

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Historical overview

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Origins

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

Tensions between the Soviet Union and the West resumed after Second World War which ended in May 1945. They escalated in 1945–1947. Historians differ but the usual starting year is 1947 for the Cold War that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Historians looking at the Soviet side take two approaches, one that emphasizes Communist ideology, the other that emphasizes the interests of the Russian state in terms of controlling territory, gaining access to the sea, ensuring quiet borders, and supporting the Slavic and Orthodox peoples of Eastern Europe. The roots of the ideological tensions can be seen in Lenin's seizure of power in Russia (the Bolshevik Revolution of late 1917). Walter LaFeber stresses Russia's historic interests, going back to the Czarist years when the U.S. 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 USSR and Germany became belligerents in 1941, Roosevelt made a personal commitment to help the Soviets (Congress never voted any sort of alliance). The wartime cooperation was never friendly, and it became increasingly strained by February 1945 at the Yalta Conference, as it became increasingly clear that Stalin intended to spread communism to Russia's neighboring countries (of which he succeeded and of which lead to the birth of Cominform) and then, to spread communism throughout Western Europe.

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Global Realignments

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The period from the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 to the change in leadership for both superpowers in 1953 - from Presidents Truman to Eisenhower for the United States, from Stalin to Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

Events include the Greek Civil War, 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 U.S. Marshall Plan intended to rebuild the European economy and point the way toward European unity while thwarting 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 U.S., the plan rejected the isolationism of the 1920s and integrated the North American and Western European economies.

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Escalation and Crisis

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The period between the change in leadership for both superpowers in 1953 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Events included the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the Prague Spring in 1968. Especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis the world was closest to the third (nuclear) world war.

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Second Cold War

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The period between the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985 was characterized by a marked "freeze" in relations between the superpowers after the "thaw" of the Détente period of the 1970s. As a result of this re-intensification, the period is sometimes referred to as the "Second Cold War".

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 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 at Soviet actions. The Soviet invasion led to a protracted conflict, which involved Pakistan, an erstwhile US ally, in locked horns with the Soviet military might for over 12 years.

Worried by Soviet deployment of nuclear SS-20 missiles (commenced in 1977), NATO allies agreed in 1979 to continued Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to constrain the number of nuclear missiles for battlefield targets, while threatening to deploy some 500 cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in West Germany and the Netherlands if negotiations were unsuccessful. The negotiations, taken up in Geneva, November 30 1981, 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, however, soon withdrawn beginning in October 1988.

In spite of detentes real successes, the "new conservatives" or "neoconservatives" rebelled against both the Nixon-era policies and the similar position of Democratic Party 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 confront charges of Soviet expansionism.

The election, firstly of Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister in 1979, followed by that of Ronald Reagan to the American Presidency in 1981, saw the elevation of two hardline Cold Warriors to the leadership of the Western World.

Others events included the Strategic Defense Initiative and Solidarity.

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End of the Cold War

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The period between the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Events included the Chernobyl accident in 1986, glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, the Autumn of Nations (which includes the famous 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 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, who had begun their careers in the heyday of "de-Stalinization" under reformist leader Nikita Khrushchev (1953–1964), 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, Switzerland in 1985 and Reykjavík, Iceland 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 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, possibly left Gorbachev's efforts to boost production of consumer goods and reform the stagnating economy all but impossible. The result in was a dual approach of cooperation with the west and economic restructuring (perestroika) and democratization (glasnost) domestically, which eventually made it impossible for Gorbachev to reassert central control and influence over Warsaw Pact member states.

Conservatives often argue that the primary 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. 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 laboured to keep up with its western counterparts. The pace of military technology was advancing such that the Soviets were simply incapable of keeping up and still maintaining a healthy economy. The arms race, both nuclear and conventional, was too much for the underdeveloped Soviet economy of the time. 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. However the proximate cause of the end of the Cold War was ultimately Mikhail Gorbachev's decision, publicized in 1988, to repudiate the Brezhnev doctrine.

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

Research shows that the fall of Communism 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. One thing is sure, the "Cold War" consisted of four things: science, espionage (various agencies for specific countries and groups), propaganda, and opinion (whether the opinion itself was on government, or any of the sciences, espionage, etc).[2]

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Arms race

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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.

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.

All of these fields required massive technological and manufacturing investment. Except in aeronautics and rocket and missile design, the West mainly created weapons with superior effectiveness, mainly due to their lead in digital computers after 1965. However, the Eastern bloc fielded a larger number of designs in each field and built a larger number of many types of weapons.

One prominent feature of the nuclear arms race, especially following the massed deployment of nuclear ICBMs due to the flawed assumption that the manned bomber was fatally vulnerable to SAMs, was the concept of deterrence via assured destruction, later, mutually 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 reduce each other to nothing, 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.

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Intelligence

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Military forces from the countries involved rarely had much direct participation in the Cold War; the war was primarily fought 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 U.S.-UK intelligence sharing organization that was created during World War II, were used against the USSR, 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. 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.

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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 USA 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 book) on US-Soviet tensions entitled The Cold War.

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Historiography

Three distinct periods have existed in the Western scholarship of the Cold War: the traditionalist, the revisionist, and the post-revisionist. For more than a decade after the end of World War II, few American historians saw any reason to challenge the conventional "traditionalist" interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War: that the breakdown of relations was a direct result of Stalin's violation of the accords of the Yalta conference, the imposition of Soviet-dominated governments on an unwilling Eastern Europe, Soviet intransigence, and aggressive Soviet expansionism. They would point 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 were regarded as actively working for the overthrow of all Western governments.

Later New Left revisionist historians were influenced by Marxist theory. William Appleman Williams of the in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and Walter LaFeber in his 1967 America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1968 argued that the Cold War was an inevitable outgrowth of conflicting American and Russian economic interests. Some new left revisionist historians have argued that U.S. policy of containment as expressed in the Truman Doctrine were at least equally responsible, if not more so, than Soviet seizure of Poland and other states. Some date the onset of the Cold War to the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, regarding the U.S. use of nuclear weapons as a warning to the Soviet Union, which was about to join the war against the nearly defeated Japan. In short, historians have disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable. This revisionist approach reached its height during the Vietnam War when many began to view the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as morally comparable empires.

In the later years of the Cold War, there were attempts to forge a "post-revisionist" synthesis by historians. Prominent post-revisionist historians include 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 traces the origins of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less as the lone fault of one side or the other and more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. 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 potentially 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 Second World War on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe which threatened to drastically alter the balance of power in a manner favorable to the U.S.S.R.

The end of the Cold War opened many of the archives of the Communist states, 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]

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