Cold War

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 16th of April 1947, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents named Bernard Baruch stood before an audience and declared, "we are today in the midst of a cold war." The line had been written by a journalist, Herbert Bayard Swope. It was the first time anyone applied the phrase to the specific standoff taking shape between the Soviet Union and the United States. The two nations had just fought side by side to win the Second World War. Now they were drifting into a rivalry that would last until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The strange thing about this war was that the two superpowers never fought each other directly. So why call it a war at all? What kept two heavily armed giants circling each other for more than four decades without ever firing on one another? And how did a contest of ideas come to be measured in satellites, spies, blockades, and the systematic targeting of cities for nuclear destruction?

• 2. A War By Proxy

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  Each superpower supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The struggle was ideological and economic, fought through an arms race in both conventional and nuclear weapons. It surfaced in espionage, propaganda campaigns, embargoes, and sports diplomacy. The two powers never traded blows directly, yet the fighting was real elsewhere.

  The Korean War of 1950 to 1953 showed the pattern starkly. In June 1950, Kim Il Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea. A United Nations force of sixteen countries answered, though about 40 percent of troops were South Korean and roughly 50 percent came from the United States. After early advances, the Chinese sent in a large army and pushed United Nations forces back below the 38th parallel. The Korean Armistice Agreement was approved in July 1953, leaving the combatants near the original border.

  Vietnam became the longer wound. Under President John F. Kennedy, US troop levels there grew from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authorization to deepen the commitment, raising troop levels to 184,000. The Tet Offensive of 1968 proved the turning point. The war of 1955 to 1975 ended in defeat for the United States, and that defeat pushed America toward détente with both China and the Soviet Union.

• 3. Lines Across Europe

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  On the 5th of March 1946, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, calling for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets. A week later, on the 13th of March, Stalin responded by comparing Churchill to Adolf Hitler and calling the speech "a call for war on the USSR." The political division of Europe was hardening into something visible.

  George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" of February 1946 helped articulate Washington's increasingly hard line and shaped the Truman administration's Soviet policy. By 1947, the United States adopted a policy of containment, aiming to stop the spread of communism. Truman framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes and called for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the Greek civil war.

  In June 1947 the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate. Truman signed it on the 3rd of April 1948, and the government gave Western Europe over $13 billion. Stalin prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving the aid, fearing economic integration with the West would let them escape Soviet control.

  In early 1948, Czech Communists executed a coup in Czechoslovakia, the only Eastern Bloc state the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality shocked Western powers more than any earlier event. It swept away the last opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress and helped lead to the formation in 1949 of two German states, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.

• 4. The Berlin Flashpoint

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  In June 1948, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade, preventing Western supplies from reaching West Berlin. The United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others answered with a massive airlift that supplied the city despite Soviet threats. US Air Force pilot Gail Halvorsen created "Operation Vittles," dropping candy to German children. In May 1949, Stalin lifted the blockade.

  The Berlin municipal elections held on the 5th of December 1948 produced a turnout of 86 percent and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. The vote effectively split the city into East and West, with the West comprising the US, British, and French sectors. Three hundred thousand Berliners demonstrated and urged the airlift to continue.

  By 1961, the loophole between East Berlin and West Berlin had drained East Germany of its young and educated. Nearly 20 percent of the population had migrated to West Germany. Khrushchev had earlier explained the city's value to Mao Zedong in blunt terms: "Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin." On the 13th of August 1961, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that grew into the Berlin Wall, closing the loophole for good.

• 5. Alliances And Arsenals

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  In April 1949, Britain, France, the United States, Canada, and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty, establishing NATO. That August, the first Soviet atomic device was detonated in Semipalatinsk, in the Kazakh SSR, four years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. The Soviet Union countered NATO with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a pact whose only direct military actions would be the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away.

  NSC 68, a secret 1950 document, proposed reinforcing pro-Western alliances and quadrupling defense spending. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration the American defense budget had quadrupled. Eisenhower then moved to reduce military spending by a third while still fighting the Cold War, leaning on the cheaper deterrent of nuclear weapons through John Foster Dulles's doctrine of "massive retaliation." Declassified US plans for retaliatory strikes in the late 1950s included the systematic destruction of 1,200 major urban centers in the Soviet Bloc and China, among them Moscow, East Berlin, and Beijing.

  Kennedy implemented a strategy known as flexible response, relying on conventional arms for limited goals. From 1961 to 1964, the number of nuclear weapons increased by 50 percent, as did the number of B-52 bombers. The ICBM force grew from 63 intercontinental ballistic missiles to 424. Kennedy also authorized 23 new Polaris submarines, each carrying 16 nuclear missiles, and called on cities to construct fallout shelters.

• 6. Battlegrounds Of The Third World

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  In 1953, President Eisenhower implemented Operation Ajax, a covert coup that overthrew Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. The pro-Western shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then assumed control as an autocratic monarch, banning the communist Tudeh Party and suppressing dissent through his security agency, SAVAK. As colonial states underwent decolonization, many became Third World battlegrounds, and both powers used economic aid to win the loyalty of non-aligned countries.

  In Guatemala, the 1954 coup ousted left-wing President Jacobo Árbenz with material CIA support. The military junta that followed, headed by Carlos Castillo Armas, repealed a land reform law and returned nationalized property to the United Fruit Company. In the Congo, newly independent from Belgium since June 1960, the CIA-backed Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko seized power and handed the elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba to Katangan authorities, who executed him by firing squad.

  Many emerging nations refused to choose sides. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. That consensus produced the Belgrade-headquartered Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. The Cuban Revolution of the 1st of January 1959, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, ran the other way. It installed the first communist regime in the Western Hemisphere and set the stage for the most dangerous confrontation of all.

• 7. To The Brink

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  Khrushchev learned of Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy administration's campaign of destabilization against Cuba, in February 1962. Preparations to install Soviet nuclear missiles on the island followed in response. The discovery of those missiles brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before.

  Kennedy answered the installation with a naval blockade and an ultimatum. Khrushchev backed down. The Soviet Union removed the missiles in return for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba again, along with a covert deal to remove US missiles from Turkey. Because that second part stayed secret, the Soviets appeared to be retreating from a crisis they had started, and the outcome embarrassed Khrushchev.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis of October to November 1962 reshaped the relationship. According to Dobrynin, the top Soviet leadership took the outcome as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation." In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues ousted him, though they allowed him a peaceful retirement. John Lewis Gaddis notes he was blamed for ruining Soviet agriculture, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and becoming an "international embarrassment" when he authorized the Berlin Wall.

• 8. The Thaw Called Détente

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  In 1972, Richard Nixon traveled to China, turning a Sino-Soviet split that had reached its peak in 1969 into an opening for the West. That year tensions along the Chinese-Soviet border had run so high that the Soviets planned a large-scale nuclear strike against China. Nixon used the rift to shift the balance of power, and the opening culminated in 1979 when President Carter and Deng Xiaoping signed the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations.

  Nixon met Soviet leaders in Moscow, where the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks produced landmark arms control treaties limiting anti-ballistic and nuclear missiles. Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence." Brezhnev needed it, since the Soviet military budget in the 1970s ran between 40 and 60 percent of the federal budget and 15 percent of GDP. The Helsinki Accords of 1975, in which the Soviets promised to grant free elections in Europe, have been called a major concession to ensure peace.

  The Soviet Union signed legally binding human rights documents, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973 and the Helsinki Accords. In practice they were neither widely known nor taken seriously by the authorities, and activists faced harassment, repression, and arrest. The KGB, led by Yuri Andropov, persecuted dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

  The thaw did not hold. President Jimmy Carter tried to limit the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, but his efforts were undermined that year by the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US governments, and by the Soviet coup in Afghanistan in December. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the USSR and expanded political freedoms, a shift that fed the revolutions of 1989 and led to the collapse that Bernard Baruch could never have foreseen.