Cold War

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COLD WAR

Never reaching a direct military conflict, the Cold War was a 45-year rivalry between the Western powers, led by the United States, and the Soviet Union. Beginning after World War II (1939–1945) and lasting until 1990, this worldwide conflict grew from the ideological differences between communism and capitalist democracy.

The United States and the Soviet Union shared a mutual distrust that existed years before the onset of the Cold War. After a century-long friendship, the United States and Russia competed over the economic development of Manchuria in the 1890s. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the competition turned into an ideological rivalry that pitted U.S. capitalist democracy against Russian Communism. Although the United States and Russia became allies against the Axis nations (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in 1941 during World War II, friction arose within their alliance. Throughout the war the Soviets disagreed with the United States and Great Britain over military strategies and postwar plans for Germany.

After two German invasions into Russia and nearly 25 million Soviet casualties, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) was determined to use his Red Army to control Poland and to keep Germany from ever regaining its strength. In the United States, President Harry S. Truman (1945–1953) was determined to ensure an open, capitalist, international economy— starting with the rebuilding of Europe's economic infrastructure, which included West Germany. After the war, the United States and other Western powers saw the expansion of the Soviet Union as a threat, while the Soviets feared that the powerful Western capitalist nations would overthrow their Communist regime. The Cold War began.

Following World War II, Europe was devastated and in a severe economic crisis. Between 1945 and 1947, the Soviets seized power over much of Eastern Europe with the might of its Red Army and supported communist and Soviet-friendly regimes throughout the region. Alarmed by the rise of communism in Europe and wanting to contain its spread, the United States initiated a European recovery program known as the Marshall Plan, which helped restore war-ravaged Western Europe's economic growth. Wary of capitalist intrusion, the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations strongly opposed the American plan.

Fearing the threat of a revived Germany, the Soviet Union restricted access into West Berlin (which it was overseeing in the post-war period) in 1948 by setting up road, train, and canal blockades into the city, but the United States flew supplies into Berlin until the blockades were removed in the following year. When the United States denied the Soviet Union war reparations in the form of West German factories, the Soviets secured East Germany as a communist state. Great Britain's Winston Churchill criticized Moscow for barricading the new Soviet Empire with an "iron curtain."

The Western bloc developed a policy of containment, which was aimed at containing the Soviet-backed states within their current borders and preventing any further spread of communism. U.S. officials sought to strengthen their alliance with other nations and increase military defense spending. When the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in August 1949, President Truman ordered U.S. engineers to develop a hydrogen bomb. Also in 1949, the United States joined 11 other nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). To counterbalance NATO, the Communist bloc formed the Warsaw Treaty Organization military pact, or the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.

The Cold War spread into Asia in 1950, the year the Soviet Union negotiated an alliance with China, and Communist North Korean forces attacked South Korea, starting the Korean War (1950–1953). Communist China supported guerrillas in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. In response, the United States helped establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and provided neutral Asian nations tremendous military support, though guerrilla warfare persisted.

After Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, a relaxation in Soviet policy led to optimism for cooperation between the Soviet Union and the West. A permanent ban on nuclear weapons seemed likely. The launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, however, demonstrated the Soviet Union's technological capabilities, spurring a new race in space exploration and missile production. Both Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev (1958–1964) and U.S. officials threatened "massive retaliation" for any aggression on the other's part. Meanwhile, the Cold War struggle continued in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Vying for the allegiance of these neutral Third World regions, the two superpowers each provided military and financial aid to support often brutal regimes.

In 1961 the East German government built the Berlin Wall to prevent the emigration of East Germans to the West. In 1962 American intelligence discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba, where a Communist allegiance had formed in 1959, following Fidel Castro's revolution. When President John F. Kennedy (1961–1963) sent U.S. ships to intercept Soviet vessels carrying rockets to Cuba, Khrushchev ordered a retreat. After this incident, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis—one of the few direct confrontations to take place during the Cold War—the United States and the Soviet Union both made careful efforts to avoid nuclear war and subsequently agreed to ban nuclear testing.

Meanwhile, the two superpowers had begun to weaken. In Europe, France considered withdrawing its presence from NATO, while Romania departed from its allegiance with the Soviet Union. In 1968 a Czechoslovakian reform movement was terminated by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (1977–1982). The once friendly Soviet and Chinese troops began to battle one another along their common border, and heavy military expenditures damaged the Soviet economy. American involvement in the Vietnam War (1964–1975) was a controversial example of Western determination to achieve the goals of the containment policy, as the United States went to long efforts to assist the South Vietnamese government in resistance against the aggressive communist North.

In the early 1970s U.S. President Richard Nixon (1969–1974) signed the SALT I treaty with Soviet President Brezhnev to reduce the need for spending on strategic weapons, and an agreement was made to strengthen American and Soviet economic bonds. Shortly afterward, however, tensions resurfaced when political clashes erupted in the Middle East, Angola, and Chile, and the two superpowers rivaled for influence.

American President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) heightened Cold War antagonism in the early 1980s by calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire," increasing military spending, intensifying the nuclear arms race, and imposing economic sanctions to protest Brezhnev's recent crackdown on Poland. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated until tensions were the worst they had been since the height of the Cold War in the late 1940s.

Tensions began to ease in 1985 after Mikhail Gorbachev (1988–1981) took control in Moscow. Aware that the Soviet economy was failing, he made major reforms that called for economic restructuring, openness, and democracy within Communist bloc countries. Gorbachev meant his reforms to be a slow and mild effort. In fact, his policies resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the disintegration of Soviet military forces, and nuclear disarmament. The United States accepted military arms and economic agreements. In 1989 Gorbachev declared that the postwar period had ended, and Washington officials concurred that the world had outgrown Cold War policies.

By 1990 Gorbachev's reform policies and a Soviet economic collapse led to the overthrow of communist governments in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The downfall of the Soviet Union officially ended the Cold War.

See also: Korean War, Marshall Plan, Space Race, World War II