Cold War
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- For the generic term for high-tension and / or indirect struggle between states, falling short of actual open hostilities, see cold war (war).
The Cold War was the geostrategic, economic and ideological struggle between the global superpowers the Soviet Union and the United States of America, supported by their respective and emerging alliance partners. It lasted over four decades, from circa 1947 (the post-World War II period) until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The struggle was widely called the Cold War because it did not involve direct armed conflict between the contestants (by contrast, a so-called "hot" war). The Cold War was instead waged by means of diplomatic maneuvering, economic pressure, selective aid, intimidation, propaganda, assassination, low-intensity military operations and full-scale proxy war from circa 1947 until the terminal decline of the Warsaw Pact in the late 1980s. The Cold War also simultaneously witnessed the largest arms race (both conventional and nuclear) in history, leading to widespread global fears of a potential nuclear war.
The origins of the term "Cold War" are debated. The term is 600 years old[citation needed]. It was used by George Orwell in 1945, but not in reference to what we call the Cold War. The term came into general use in 1947 when journalist Walter Lippmann published a book on US-Soviet tensions entitled The Cold War.[1]
Historical overview
- Main articles: Cold War (1947-1953), Cold War (1953-1962), and Cold War (1962-1991).
The Cold War is usually considered to have occurred approximately from the end of the strained alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during World War II until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Some also see the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 as the end of the Cold War. The Korean War; the Hungarian Revolution; the Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis; the Vietnam War; the Afghan War; and U.S.-backed military coups against governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and civil wars in countries such as Angola, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were some of the occasions when the tension related to the Cold War took the form of an armed conflict. In those conflicts, the major powers operated in good part by arming or funding surrogates, a development that lessened direct impact on the populations of the major powers, but brought the conflict to millions of civilians around the world.
In the 1970s, the Cold War gave way to détente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer split into two clearly opposed blocs. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize their common interest in trying to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons (see SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). U.S.-Soviet relations would deteriorate once again in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but improved as the Soviet bloc started to unravel in the late 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia lost the superpower status that it had won in World War II. The period after the Cold War where Soviet leaders announced a policy of peaceful coexistence was called the Thaw.
In the strategic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union a major arena was the strategy of technology (see also deterrence theory). It also involved covert conflict through acts of espionage. Beyond the actual killing of intelligence personnel, the Cold War was heavily manifest in the concerns about nuclear weapons. It was questioned as to if they were being mass produced and whether wars could really be deterred by the mere existence of nuclear weapons. Another manifestation was in the propaganda wars between the United States and the USSR. Indeed, it was far from certain that a global nuclear war would not result from smaller regional wars, which heightened the level of concern for each conflict. This tension shaped the lives of people around the world almost as much as the actual fighting did.
One major hotspot of conflict was Germany, particularly the city of Berlin. Arguably, the most vivid symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall. The Wall isolated West Berlin (the portion of the city controlled by West Germany and the Allies) from East Berlin and the territory of East Germany, which completely surrounded it. In practical terms, the Fulda Gap as the main land attack route into Western Europe for the Warsaw Pact, was an area of constant tension.
Arms race
A major feature of the Cold War was the long drawn out arms race between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. This race took place in many technological and military fields, resulting in many scientific discoveries. Particularly revolutionary advances were made in the field of nuclear weapons and rocketry, which led to the space race (Most or all of the rockets used to launch humans and satellites into orbit were originally military designs).
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, supported in particular by the deployment of nuclear ICBMs, was the concept of deterrence via 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.
Intelligence
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. Echelon's heavy U.S.-UK bias led to Canadian (CSIS), New Zealand (NZSIS) and Australian (ASIS) security intelligence agencies participating in the Cold War either as signals intelligence gathering units or as initial processors of raw intelligence.
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.
Historiography
There have been three distinct periods in the western study of the Cold War: traditionalist, revisionist, and 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 reject liberal democracy, prescribe a worldwide proletarian revolution, and argue that this made the conflict inevitable. Organizations such as the Comintern actively worked for the overthrow of all Western governments.
However, later "revisionist" historians, especially William Appleman Williams in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and Walter LaFeber in his 1967 America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1968, articulated an overriding concern: U.S. commitment to maintaining an "open door" for American trade in world markets. Some revisionist historians have argued that U.S. policy of containment as expressed in the Truman Doctrine were at least equally to blame, if not more so. 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, and since the end of the Cold War, the post-revisionist school has come to dominate. Prominent post-revisionist historians include John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn Leffler. Rather than attributing the beginning of the Cold War to either superpower, post-revisionist historians focused on mutual misperception, mutual reactivity, and shared responsibility between the superpowers. 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 it was a consequence of the disruptive effects of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe. In addition, the Marshall Plan rebuilt a functioning Western economic system, thwarting the political appeal of the radical left.
For Western Europe, economic aid ended the dollar shortage and stimulated private investment for postwar reconstruction. For the United States, the plan spared it from a crisis of over-production and maintained demand for American exports. The NATO alliance would serve to integrate Western Europe into the system of mutual defense pacts, thus providing safeguards against subversion or neutrality in the bloc. Rejecting the assumption that communism was an international monolith with aggressive designs on the "free world", the post-revisionist school nevertheless accepts U.S. policy in Europe as a necessary reaction to cope with instability in Europe, which threatened to drastically alter the balance of power in a manner favorable to the U.S.S.R. and devastate the Western economic and political system.
See also
Further reading
Overviews
- Ball, S. J. The Cold War: An International History, 1947-1991 (1998) British perspective
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1989);
- Flory, Harriette and Jenike, Samual. The Modern World 16th century to present. New York: Pitman Publishing, 1992.
- Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History (2005), most important recent overview
- Gaddis, John Lewis. Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States. An Interpretative History 2nd ed. ( 1990)
- Gaddis, John Lewis. Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987)
- Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982)
- LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1992 7th ed. (1993)
- Mitchell, George. The Iron Curtain: The Cold War in Europe (2004)
- Ninkovich, Frank. Germany and the United States: The Transformation of the German Question since 1945 (1988)
- Paterson, Thomas G. Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (1988)
- Powaski, Ronald E. The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (1998)
- Sivachev, Nikolai and Nikolai Yakolev, Russia and the United States (1979), by Soviet historians
- Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1973, 2nd ed. (1974)
Historiography
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila. "Russia's Twentieth Century in History and Historiography," The Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 46, 2000'
- Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1998)
- Matlock, Jack E. "The End of the Cold War" Harvard International Review, Vol. 23, 2001
- Walker, J. Samuel. "Historians and Cold War Origins: The New Consensus", in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (1981), 207-236.
- White, Timothy J. "Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies" International Social Science Review, 2000
- William Appleman Williams The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1958) (1988 edition ISBN 0-393-30493-0 )
- Berger, Henry W. ed. A William Appleman Williams Reader (1992)
- Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams. Lloyd C. Gardner (ed.) Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University, 1986.
Origins: to 1950
- Cumings, Bruce The Origins of the Korean War (2 vols., 1981-90), friendly to North Korea and hostile to US
- Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972)
- Holloway, David . Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1959-1956 (1994)
- Goncharov, Sergei, John Lewis and Xue Litai , Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (1993)
- Leffler, Melvyn. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992).
- Mastny, Vojtech. Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (1979)
- Levering, Ralph, Vladamir Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, and C. Earl Edmondson. Debating the Origins of the Cold War (2001)
Intelligence
- Aldrich, Richard J. The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (2002).
- Ambrose, Stephen E. Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Intelligence Establishment (1981).
- Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999)
- Mitrokhin. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin Archive (1999). vol 1, on KGB
- Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (1990).
- Bogle, Lori, ed. Cold War Espionage and Spying (2001), essays by scholars
- Dorril, Stephen. MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service (2000).
- Gates, Robert M. From The Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story Of Five Presidents And How They Won The Cold War (1997)
- Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999).
- Helms, Richard. A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (2003)
- Koehler, John O. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (1999)
- Murphy, David E., Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey. Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (1997).
- Prados, John. Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II (1996)
- Rositzke, Harry. The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Action (1988)
- Trahair, Richard C. S. Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies and Secret Operations (2004), by an Australian scholar; contains excellent historiographical introduction
- Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (1999).
1950s and 1960s
- Beschloss, Michael. Kennedy v. Khrushchev: The Crisis Years, 1960-63 (1991)
- Brands, H. W. Cold Warriors. Eisenhower's Generation and American Foreign Policy (1988).
- Brands, H. W. The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power (1997)
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, New York: Praeger (1961), ISBN 0674825454
- Divine, Robert A. Eisenhower and the Cold War (1981)
- Divine, Robert A. ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis 2nd ed. (1988)
- Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000)
- Fursenko, Aleksandr and Timothy Naftali. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1997)
- [2] Kunz, Diane B. The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American foreign Relations during the 1960s (1994)
- Navratil, Jaromir. The Prague Spring 68´ (1998)
- Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (1998)
- Melanson, Richard A. and David Mayers, eds., Reevaluating Eisenhower. American Foreign Policy in the 1950s (1986)
- Paterson, Thomas G. ed., Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (1989).
- Reynolds, David, ed. The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives (1994)
- Stueck, Jr. William W. The Korean War: An International History (1995)
- Vandiver, Frank E. Shadows of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson's Wars (1997)
- Williams, Kirrian. The Prague Spring and its Aftermath : Czechoslovak Politics, 1968-1970 (1997)
Detente: 1969-1979
- Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983)
- Garthoff, Raymond. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan 2nd ed (1994). important, detailed narrative
- Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger (1992);
- Kissinger, Henry. White House Years (1979) and Years of Upheaval (1982)
- Nixon, Richard. Memoirs (1981)
- Ulam, Adam B. Dangerous Relations. The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 (1983).
Second Cold War: 1979-86
- Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (1983);
- Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983)
- Mower, A. Glenn Jr. Human Rights and American Foreign Policy: The Carter and Reagan Experiences ( 1987),
- Smith, Gaddis. Morality, Reason and Power:American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (1986).
End of Cold War: 1986-91
- Beschloss, Michael, and Strobe Talbott. At the Highest Levels:The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993)
- Bialer, Seweryn and Michael Mandelbaum, eds. Gorbachev's Russia and American Foreign Policy (1988).
- Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (1992)
- Garthoff, Raymond. The Great Transition:American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (1994) detailed narrative
- Hogan, Michael ed. The End of the Cold War. Its Meaning and Implications (1992) articles from Diplomatic History online at JSTOR
- Kyvig, David ed. Reagan and the World (1990)
- Matlock, Jack F. Autopsy of an Empire (1995) by US ambassador to Moscow
- Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1993).
Economics and Internal Forces
- Heiss, Mary Ann. "The Economic Cold War: America, Britain, and East-West Trade, 1948-63" The Historian, Vol. 65, 2003
- Keohane, Robert O. and Joseph S. Nye. Power and Interdependence (3rd Edition) (2000)
- Kunz, Diane B. Butter and Guns: America's Cold War Economic Diplomacy (1997
- Morgan, Patrick M. and Keith L. Nelson (edsRe-Viewing the Cold War: Domestic Factors and Foreign Policy in the East-West Confrontation (1997)
Popular culture
- Boyer, Paul S. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1994)
- Mulvihill, Jason. "James Bond's Cold War Part I" Journal of Instructional Media, Vol. 28, 2001
- Schwartz, Richard Alan. Cold War Culture: Media and the Arts, 1945-1990 (2000)
- Zeman, Scott C. "I Was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism and the Cold War Imagination"
- Shapiro Jerome F. Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film (2001)
- Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War (1996)
Primary sources: Documents and memoirs
- Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1992).
- Etzold, Thomas and John Lewis Gaddis , eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (1978)
- Chang, Laurence and Peter Kornbluh , eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1952 (1985)
- Khrushchev, Nikita. Memoirs:
- Khrushchev Remembers ed. Strobe Talbott (1991)
- Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament ed. Strobe Talbott (1987)
- Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes ed. Jerrold Schechter (1989)
- Kisser, Henry
- vol 1 White House Years (1979)
- vol 2 Years of Upheaval (1982)
- vol 3 Years of Renewal (1999), 1974-76
- Nixon, Richard. Memoirs (1981)
- Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1993)
External links
- The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP)
- The Cold War Files
- CNN Cold War Knowledge Bank comparison of articles on Cold War topics in the Western and the Soviet press between 1945 and 1991
- People, states and agencies figuring in the Cold War
- The Reagan/Gorbachev Summits
- Cold War Veterans Association
- History of the Western allies in Berlin during the Cold War
- Russian Threat Perceptions and Plans for Sabotage Against the United States: Hearing before the Military Research and Development Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services held at the House of Representatives of the US Congress on October 26, 1999
- The Cold War Museum
- People's history: The cultural cold war Information on the cultural element of the conflict
- Video and audio news reports from during the cold war