Cold War

For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation).

The US and USSR were the two superpowers during the Cold War, each leading its own sphere of influence. Here, the respective leaders Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev (from left to right) meet in 1985.

The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s. Throughout this period, the rivalry between the two superpowers unfolded in multiple arenas, such as military coalitions, ideology, propaganda, espionage, weaponry, industrial advances, and technological developments, which included the space race. In sports, rising tensions between the US and the USSR led to boycotts of major events. The Cold War generated for both superpowers costly defence spending, a massive conventional and nuclear arms race, and many proxy wars.

While there was never a direct military engagement between the US and the Soviet Union, there was half a century of military buildup and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and satellite nations in local "third party" wars. Although the US and the Soviet Union had been allied against the Axis powers, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the US sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe and the Middle East, while the Soviet Union supported Communist movements around the world, particlarly Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. There were repeated crises that threatened to escalate into world wars but never did, most notably the Berlin Blockade (1948–49), the Korean War (1950–53), the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–89). There were also periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought détente. Direct military attacks on adversaries were deterred by the potential for mutual assured destruction using deliverable nuclear weapons.

The Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The Soviet Union had built up its military, which was a heavy burden for the Soviet economy. Other burdens included collectivized agriculture and an inefficient planned manufacturing system. At the same time, the price of oil, the Soviet Union's main export, rapidly decreased. This brought the economy to a stagnant state. When he came to power, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika in an attempt to bring the Soviet Union up to par economically with the West. He then implemented glasnost as he believed that the opening up of the political system—essentially, democratizing it—was the only way to overcome inertia in the inefficient political and bureaucratic apparatus and because he believed that the path to economic and social recovery required the inclusion of people in the political process. Gorbachev’s policies deprived the Soviet Union of ideological enemies, which in turn weakened the hold of Soviet ideology over the people. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States the sole superpower in a unipolar world.

Origins of the term

In the specific sense of the post-World War II geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the US, the Cold War term has been attributed to American financier and US presidential advisor Bernard Baruch. The Cassell Companion to Quotations cites a speech Baruch gave in South Carolina on April 16 1947, in which he said, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war". The Cassell Companion notes that the phrase was actually suggested to Baruch by his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940. Columnist Walter Lippmann also gave the term wide currency after his 1947 book titled Cold War.

History

Background

Main article: Origins of the Cold War

Further information: Red Scare

American troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

There is disagreement over exactly when the Cold War began. While most historians say that it began in the period just after World War II, some say that it began towards the end of World War I, though tensions between the Russian Empire and the British Empire and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th century. The ideological clash between communism and capitalism began in 1917 following the Russian Revolution, when Russia emerged as the world's first communist nation. This was the first event which made Russian–American relations a matter of major long-term concern to the leaders in each country.

Several events led to suspicion and distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union: the Bolsheviks' challenge to capitalism (through violent overthrow of "capitalist" regimes to be replaced by communism), Russia's withdrawal from World War I in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, US intervention in Russia supporting the White Army in the Russian Civil War, and the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933. Other events in the interwar period increased this suspicion and distrust. The Treaty of Rapallo and the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact are two notable examples.

World War II and Post-War (1939–47)

Further information: Restatement of Policy on Germany

During the war, the Soviets strongly suspected that the Anglo-Americans had opted to let the Russians bear the brunt of the war effort, to insert themselves only at the last minute so as to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe. Nevertheless, Soviet perceptions of the West and vice versa left a strong undercurrent of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.

The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin

There was severe disagreement between the Allies about how Europe should look following the war. Both sides, moreover, held very dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security. The Americans tended to understand security in situational terms, assuming that, if US-style governments and markets were established as widely as possible, countries could resolve their differences peacefully, through international organizations. Soviet leaders, however, tended to understand security in geo-political terms. This reasoning was conditioned by Russia's historical experiences, given the frequency with which the country had been invaded from the West over the previous 150 years. The immense damage inflicted upon the USSR by the German invasion was unprecedented both in terms of death toll (est. 35 million) and the extent of destruction. Moscow was committed to ensuring that the new order in Europe would guarantee its long-term security through eliminating the chance of a hostile government would reappear along the USSR western border. Poland was a particularly thorny issue: in April 1945, both Churchill and the new American President, Harry S. Truman protested to the Soviets' propping up the Lublin government, the Soviet-controlled rival to the Polish government-in-exile whose relations with the Soviets were severed.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies attempted to define the framework for a post-war settlement in Europe but could not reach a firm consensus. Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe, while strong US and Western allied forces remained in Western Europe. In occupied Germany, the US and the Soviet Union established zones of occupation and a loose framework for four-power control with the fading French and British. For the maintenance of world peace, the Allies set up the United Nations, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed by the superpowers' use of the veto; inaction was the rule, and it was essentially converted into a forum for exchanging polemical rhetoric, with the Soviets regarding the UN almost exclusively as a propaganda tribune.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned that given the enormous size of Soviet forces deployed in Europe at the end of the war, and the perception that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was unreliable, there existed a Soviet threat to Western Europe. In April-May 1945, British Armed Forces developed Operation Unthinkable, the Third World War plan, the primary goal of which was "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire." However, the plan was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.

Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin meeting at the Potsdam Conference on July 18 1945

At the Potsdam Conference, starting in late July, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe; the participants' mounting antipathy and bellicose language served to confirm their suspicions about each other's hostile intentions and entrench their positions. At this conference Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed a powerful new weapon. According to Gaddis: "Stalin’s only reply was to say that he was glad to hear of the bomb and he hoped [the United States] would not use it." One week after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to further tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan.

In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped to articulate the growing hard line that was being taken against the Soviets, and became the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War. That September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capital building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war". On September 6 1946, James F. Byrnes made a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle between us and Russia over minds [...]" A few weeks after the release of this "Long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri. The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic".

"Containment" through the Korean War (1947–53)

Main article: Cold War (1947–1953)

By 1947, Truman's advisors were worried that time was running out to counter the influence of the Soviet Union, as Stalin was seeking to weaken the position of the US in a period of post-war confusion and collapse, by encouraging the rivalries among capitalists in order to bring about a new war. Moreover, the USSR was setting up puppet communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, as well as East Germany, and maintained a military presence in most of these countries. However, the regimes Stalin installed in Eastern Europe lacked the legitimacy their capitalist counterparts sustained by the West would quickly gain.

The event which spurred Truman on to announce formally the American adoption of "containment" policy was the British government's announcement in February 1947 that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents. Rather than view this war as a civil conflict revolving around domestic issues, US policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiracy against the Greek royalists in an effort to "expand" their influence into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa; however, the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, not Moscow. In March 1947 the US administration unveiled the "Truman Doctrine". Truman rallied Americans in his famous "Truman Doctrine" speech to spend $400,000,000 on intervention in the civil war in Greece, painting the conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes:

It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures. ... [W]e must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

President Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of 1949 with guests in the Oval Office.

Map of Cold-War era Europe and the Near East showing countries that received Marshall Plan aid. The red columns show the relative amount of total aid per nation.

For US policymakers, threats to Europe's balance of power were not necessarily military ones, but a political and economic challenge. George Kennan helped to summarise the problem at the State Department Planning Staff in May 1947: "Communist activities" were not "the root of the difficulties of Western Europe" but rather "the disruptive effects of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe". According to this view, the Communist parties financed by the Soviet Union were "exploiting the European crisis" to gain power. In June, following the recommendations of the State Department Planning Staff, the Truman Doctrine was complemented by the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance aimed at rebuilding the Western political-economic system and countering perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, such as communist parties attempting to seize power through free elections or popular revolutions, in countries like France or Italy. In January 1949, the USSR responded by tying together the economies of the Eastern bloc in a Soviet-led version of the Marshall Plan, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON).

In July, Truman rescinded the punitive Morgenthau plan, which had specifically directed the US forces of occupation in Germany not to assist in Germany's economic rehabilitation efforts. It was replaced by JCS 1779, which stressed instead that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery. The National Security Act of 1947, signed by Truman on July 26, created a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War. The Soviets, in order to tighten political control over their satellites, created Cominform in September and faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito-Stalin split obliged them to expel Yugoslavia, which remained Communist but adopted a neutral stance in the Cold War.

European economic alliances

European military alliances

The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid to Western Europe, and Greece and Turkey. With US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war, and the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist-Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948. Two months earlier, an alarmed Stalin had actively contributed to a plan by Czechoslovak communists to seize power in the only Eastern European state that had retained a democratic government, which in turn guaranteed quick Congressional approval of Marshall aid.

In the US, the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats, focused on containment and deterrence; this weakened during and after the Vietnam War but ultimately held steady. Social democrats in Europe, not to mention moderate and conservative parties, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, but Communists there and in the US, paid by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of consensus politics came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the CND and the nuclear freeze movement.

In retaliation for Western efforts to reunite West Germany, Stalin built blockades in order to block Western access to West Berlin, but Truman maintained supply lines to the enclave by flying supplies in over the blockade from 1948 to '49. Meanwhile, the NKVD, led by Lavrentiy Beria, supervised the establishment of Soviet-style systems of secret police in the Eastern European states, which were supposed to crush any anti-communist resistance. When the slightest stirrings of independence emerged among East European satellites, Stalin's strategy was to deal with those responsible in the same manner he had handled his prewar rivals within the Soviet Union: they were removed from power, put on trial, imprisoned, and in several instances executed.

The US formally allied itself to the Western European states in the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, Stalin ordered the detonation of the first Soviet atomic device. Additionally, the US spearheaded the establishment of West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in May 1949. To counter this Western reorganisation of Germany, the Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the "German Democratic Republic" that October. In the early 1950s, the US worked for the rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, its full membership to NATO. Meanwhile, in May 1953, Lavrentiy Beria, appointed First Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of a neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO.

In 1949, Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang regime in China. As Stalin was quite slow to support the Chinese communist revolution, he was surprised at its success, and shortly afterwards, the Soviet Union created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China. Confronted with the Chinese Revolution and the end of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand the containment policy. In a secret 1950 document, NSC-68, Truman administration officials proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defence.

File:Ac.maostalin.jpg

A meeting between Mao and Joseph Stalin after the CPC's 1949 victory over the KMT in the Chinese Civil War

US officials moved thereafter to expand "containment" into Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by Communist parties financed by the USSR, fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in South-East Asia. In the early 1950s, The US formalized a series of alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS and SEATO), thereby guaranteeing the United States a number of long-term military bases.

One of the most significant impacts of containment was the Korean War. As noted, the US and the Soviet Union had been fighting proxy wars, on a small scale, and without US troops; but to Stalin's surprise, Truman committed US forces to drive back the North Koreans, who had invaded South Korea; this action was backed by the UN Security Council only because the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest that Taiwan and not Communist China held a permanent seat there. Among other effects, the war galvanised NATO to develop a military structure, as all communist countries were suspected of acting together. Public opinion in countries such as Great Britain, usual allies of the US, was divided for and against the war. British Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross repudiated the sentiment of those opposed when he said:

"I know there are some who think that the horror and devastation of a world war now would be so frightful, whoever won, and the damage to civilization so lasting, that it would be better to submit to Communist domination. I understand that view – but I reject it".

Even if the Chinese and North Koreans were exhausted by the war and were ready to end it by late 1952, Stalin insisted that they should continue fighting, and a cease-fire was approved only in July 1953, after Stalin's death.

Crisis and escalation (1953–62)

Main article: Cold War (1953–1962)

Further information: 1953 Iranian coup d'état, 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and Sino-Soviet Split

In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War. Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president in January 1953. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defence budget had quadrupled, and Eisenhower resolved to reduce military spending by brandishing the United States' nuclear superiority while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively. In March, as Joseph Stalin died, Nikita Khrushchev soon became the dominant leader of the USSR, having deposed and executed Lavrentiy Beria, and pushed aside his other two rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. On February 25 1956, Khruschev shocked delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by cataloging and denouncing Stalin's crimes. He declared that the only way to reform and move away from Stalin's policies would be by acknowledging errors made in the past.

On November 18 1956, while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Khrushchev used his famous "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you" expression, shocking everyone present. However, he had not been talking about nuclear war, he later claimed, but rather about the historically determined victory of communism over capitalism. He then declared in 1961 that even if the USSR might indeed be behind the West, within a decade its housing shortage would disappear, consumer goods would be abundant, its population would be "materially provided for", and within two decades, the Soviet Union "would rise to such a great height that, by comparison, the main capitalist countries will remain far below and well behind".

Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles initiated a "New Look" for the "containment" strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime. Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation", threatening a severe US response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, Eisenhower curtailed Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Map of the Warsaw Pact countries

There was a slight relaxation of tensions after Stalin's death in 1953, but the situation in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce. US troops seemed stationed indefinitely in West Germany and Soviet forces seemed indefinitely stationed throughout Eastern Europe. To counter West German rearmament and admission into NATO, the Soviets established a formal alliance with the Eastern European Communist states called the Warsaw Treaty Organization or Warsaw Pact in 1955; this was more a political than a defense measure, as the USSR already had a network of mutual assistance treaties with all its allies in Eastern Europe by the time NATO was set up in 1949. In 1956, the status quo was briefly threatened in Hungary, when the Soviets invaded rather than allow the Hungarians to move out of their orbit, which started after Khrushchev arranged the removal from power of Hungary's Stalinist leader, Mátyás Rákosi. Berlin remained divided and contested. In 1961, the East Germans erected the Berlin Wall to prevent the movement of East Berliners into West Berlin.

From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city. However, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's belief in the inevitability of war, and declared his new goal was to be "peaceful coexistence". During November 1958, he made an unsuccessful attempt to turn all of Berlin into an independent, demilitarized "free city", giving the United States, Great Britain, and France a six-month ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the sectors they still occupied in West Berlin, or he would transfer control of Western access rights to the East Germans. Khrushchev earlier explained to Mao, using a startling anatomical metaphor, that "Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin". NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid-December and Khrushchev withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question. More broadly, one hallmark of the 1950s was the beginning of European integration–a fundamental byproduct of the Cold War that Truman and Eisenhower promoted politically, economically, and militarily, but which later administrations viewed ambivalently, fearful that an independent Europe would launch a separate détente with the Soviet Union, which would use this to exacerbate Western disunity.

During the 1950s, the Third World was an increasingly important arena of Cold War competition. After World War II, the US emerged as the predominant power in the Third World, filling the vacuum of the old imperial hegemony of its principal Cold War allies—the traditional Western European colonial powers (particularly the UK, France, and the Netherlands). However, nationalists in many postcolonial states were often unsympathetic to the Western Bloc. Adjusting to decolonization, meanwhile, was a difficult process economically and psychologically for European powers; and NATO suffered, as it included all the world's major colonial empires.

File:NonAlignedMovement.jpg

Leaders of the major Non-Aligned states meet at the United Nations in New York, October 1960. From left to right: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia and President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Iran, the Philippines, and Indochina were often allied with communist groups—or at least were perceived in the West to be allied with communists. In this context, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s. The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support others. The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran's first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam's pro-Western regime. Both sides used propaganda to advance their cause: the United States Information Agency was set up to create support for US foreign policy, aided by its radio division, Voice of America; the BBC did its part too. The CIA spread covert propaganda against US-hostile governments (including Eastern Bloc ones), also providing funds to establish Radio Free Europe, which was frequently jammed. The Chinese and the Soviets waged an intra-Communist propaganda war after their split. Soviet propaganda used Marxist philosophy to attack capitalism, claiming labor exploitation and war-mongering imperialism were inherent in the system.

Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East-West competition. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the postwar order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.

File:Mao Krushchev.jpg

One of the last meetings between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev before the Sino-Soviet Split

On the nuclear weapons front, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other. In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and, in October, launched the first earth satellite, Sputnik. However, the period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Mao had defended Stalin when Khrushchev attacked him in 1956, and treated the new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost his revolutionary edge. After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal. Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement, and the two clashed militarily in 1969.

In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues announce their intention to oust him. He declared that "I'm glad that the party has gotten to the point that it can rein in even its first secretary". The charges made against Khrushchev more than merited his characterization of them. He was accused of rudeness, incompetence, as well as ruining Soviet agriculture while bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. He had become an embarrassment to the country by authorizing the construction of the Berlin Wall, a public humiliation for Marxism-Leninism. However, Khrushchev was allowed a peaceful retirement, as he optimistically considered a significant accomplishment the fact that he was the first one not able to keep his position.

The nuclear arms race brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev formed an alliance with Fidel Castro after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before in the history of the Cold War. It also showed that neither superpower was ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other's retaliation, and thus of mutually assured destruction. The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts at nuclear disarmament and improving relations, though the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961.

Confrontation through détente (1962–79)

Main article: Cold War (1962–1979)

Further information: Vietnam War, Yom Kippur War, Chilean coup of 1973, and Angolan Civil War

United States Navy F-4 Phantom II intercepts a Soviet Tu-95 Bear D aircraft in the early 1970s

In the course of the 1960s and '70s, both the US and the Soviet Union struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs. From the beginning of the postwar period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and '60s, increasing their strength compared to the United States. As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower. Moscow, meanwhile, was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems. During this period, Soviet leaders such as Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev embraced the notion of détente. On November 13 1968, during a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party, Brezhnev outlined the Brezhnev Doctrine, in which he claimed the right to violate the sovereignty of any country attempting to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism. During the speech, Brezhnev stated:

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

The reasons for adopting such a doctrine had to do with the failures of Marxism-Leninism in states like Poland, Hungary and East Germany, which were facing a declining standard of living, in contrast with the prosperity of West Germany and the rest of Western Europe.

Brezhnev and Nixon during Brezhnev's June 1973 visit to Washington; this marked a high-water mark in détente between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, both superpowers resolved to reinforce their global leadership. Both the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to stave off challenges to their leadership in their own regions. President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in Operation Power Pack, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. Western Europe remained dependent on the US for its defense, a status most vociferously contested by France's Charles de Gaulle, who in 1966 withdrew from NATO's military structures and expelled NATO troops from French soil. In 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and then crushed the Prague Spring reform movement, which had threatened to take the country out of the Warsaw Pact. The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania and China, and from Western European communist parties.

The US continued to spend heavily on supporting friendly Third World regimes in Asia. Conflicts in peripheral regions and client states—most prominently in Vietnam—continued. Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and their North Vietnamese allies in the Vietnam War, but his costly policy weakened the US economy and, by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's more powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations. Additionally, Operation Condor, employed by South American dictators to suppress leftist dissent, was backed by the US, which (sometimes accurately) perceived Soviet or Cuban support behind these opposition movements. Brezhnev, meanwhile, faced far more daunting challenges in reviving the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.

File:Vietnamescape.jpg

On April 29, 1975, the last US helicopters remove Americans and friends from Saigon as South Vietnam falls.

Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions began to ease as the period of détente began. The Chinese had sought improved relations with the US in order to gain advantage over the Soviets. In February 1972, Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing and met with Mao Zedong and Chou En-Lai. Nixon and Henry Kissinger then announced a stunning rapprochement with Mao's China.

Later, in June, Nixon and Kissinger met with Soviet leaders in Moscow, and announced the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, aimed at limiting the development of costly antiballistic missiles and offensive nuclear missiles. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties. Meanwhile, these developments coincided with the "Ostpolitik" of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.

Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter sign SALT II treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna.

However, the détente of the 1970s was short lived. The KGB, led by Yuri Andropov, continued to persecute distinguished Soviet personalities such as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, who were criticising the Soviet leadership in harsh terms. Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia and Angola. While President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, his efforts were undercut by the other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US regimes, and his retaliation against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.

"Second Cold War" (1979–85)

Main article: Cold War (1979–1985)

Further information: Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, Invasion of Grenada, United States bombing of Libya, and Iran-Contra

The term second Cold War has been used by some historians to refer to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the early 1980s. Tensions greatly increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic.

During December 1979, about 75,000 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in order to support the Marxist government formed by ex-Prime-minister Nur Muhammad Taraki, assassinated that September by one of his party rivals. As a result, US President Jimmy Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from the Senate, imposed embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, demanded a significant increase in military spending and further announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. He described the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".

File:New Cold War Map 1980.png

This map shows the two essential global spheres during the Cold War in 1980 – the US in blue and the USSR in red. Consult the legend on the map for more details.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the US presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere. Both Reagan and Britain's new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms that rivaled those of the worst days of the Cold War in the late 1940s, with the former famously vowing to leave the "evil empire" on the "ash heap of history". Pope John Paul II helped provide a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist upsurge that galvanized opposition and may have led to his attempted assassination two years later.

With the background of a buildup in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the deployment of Soviet SS-20 ballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany. This deployment would have placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow. Yet support for the deployment was wavering and many doubted whether the push for deployment could be sustained. But on September 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard when it violated Soviet airspace just past the west coast of Sakhalin Island—an act which Reagan characterized as a "massacre". This act galvanized support for the deployment, which Reagan oversaw and stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

File:Journey to the Soviet Union.png

In November 1982 American ten year old Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, and pleading with him to work toward peace. Andropov gave her a personal invitation to visit the USSR. Smith's visit was one of few prominent attempts to improve relations between the superpowers during Andropov's brief leadership from 1982–84 at a low point in US-Soviet relations.

Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which saw at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years. Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. The Soviet armed forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military–industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically lagged behind the West.

By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Previously, the US had relied on the qualitative superiority of its weapons, but the gap had been narrowed. Ronald Reagan began massively building up the United States military not long after taking office. This led to the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history. Tensions continued intensifying in the early 1980s when Reagan revived the B-1 bomber program that was canceled by the Carter administration, produced MX "Peacekeeper" missiles, installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced his experimental Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. Reagan also imposed economic sanctions on Poland to protest the suppression of the opposition Solidarity movement. In response, Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's top ideologist, advised the Soviet leaders not to intervene if Poland fell under the control of Solidarity, as it may have led to heavy economic sanctions representing a catastrophe for the USSR's economy.

After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy. At the same time, Reagan persuaded Saudi Arabia to increase oil production, even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production. These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union, as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues. The decrease in oil prices and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to a stagnant state at this time.

US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945–2006

US domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts. In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the US, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy.

Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by many countries (especially the US), waged a fierce resistance against the invasion. The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam". However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system. A high US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay". The Soviets were not helped by their aged and sclerotic leadership either: Brezhnev, virtually incapacitated in his last years, was succeeded by Andropov and Chernenko, neither of whom lasted long, prompting Reagan to quip after the latter's death when asked why he had not negotiated with the Soviet leaders that "they keep dying on me".

End of the Cold War (1985–91)

Main article: Cold War (1985–1991)

Further information: Economy of the Soviet Union, Dissolution of the USSR, Glasnost, and Perestroika

File:Glasnost poster 1.jpg

Glasnost poster from 1987. The slogan is "Be Bold, Comrade! Openness is Our Strength!"

By the time the comparatively youthful and vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to power in 1985, the Soviets suffered from an economic growth rate close to zero percent, combined with a sharp fall in hard currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in world oil prices in the 1980s. To restructure the Soviet economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform. Reform required Gorbachev to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. As a result, Gorbachev offered major concessions to the United States on the levels of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and policy in Eastern Europe. Many US Soviet experts and administration officials doubted that Gorbachev was serious about winding down the arms race but the new Soviet leader eventually proved more concerned about reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition than fighting the arms race with the West.

The Kremlin made major military and political concessions; in response Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The first was held in November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland. There, Reagan invited Gorbachev to take a walk to a nearby boathouse and leave their aides. The two men, with only a translator, agreed on a proposal calling for 50 percent reductions of each country's respective nuclear arsenal.

File:Evstafiev-afghan-apc-passes-russian.jpg

Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988

The second summit was held the following year in Reykjavík, Iceland. Talks went well, except for when the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed SDI, which Gorbachev wanted eliminated and Reagan refused. The negotiations ended in failure, but achievements were made at the third summit in 1987 with the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400 miles) and their infrastructure. It was the first treaty to reduce nuclear arms. The East–West tensions that had reached intense new heights earlier in the decade rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s, culminating with the final summit in Moscow in 1988. The following year, the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe: oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels, represented an economic drain and the security advantage of a buffer zone was so reduced that by 1990 Gorbachev consented to German reunification. In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.

In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War over at a summit meeting in Malta; a year later, the two former rivals were partners in the Gulf War against longtime Soviet ally Iraq.

Comparison between USSR and US economies (1989) according to 1990 CIA The World Factbook
	USSR	US
GDP (1989 – millions $)	2,659,500	5,233,300
Population (July 1990)	290,938,469	250,410,000
GDP Per Capita ($)	9,211	21,082
Labor force (1989)	152,300,000	125,557,000

By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power; Gorbachev's "Common European Home" began to take shape when the Berlin Wall itself came down in November, the only alternative (as he later admitted) being a Tiananmen scenario. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev had tried to reform the party to quash internal resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the Soviet Union together. By February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power. At the same time, the festering "nationalities question" increasingly led the Union's component republics to declare their autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic states withdrawing from the Union entirely. (At first, Gorbachev's permissive attitude toward Eastern Europe did not extend to Soviet territory; even Bush condemned the January 1991 killings in Latvia and Lithuania, privately warning that economic ties would be frozen if the violence continued.) On 25 December 1991, with a growing number of SSRs, particularly Russia, threatening to secede, the USSR (fatally weakened by an August coup attempt) was declared officially dissolved.

Legacy

The Cold War was fought at a tremendous cost globally over the course of more than four decades. It cost the US up to $8 trillion in military expenditures, and the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans in Korea and Vietnam. It cost the Soviets an even higher share of their gross national product. In Southeast Asia, local civil wars were intensified by superpower rivalry, leaving millions dead.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world is widely considered as a unipolar world, with the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower. In the words of Samuel P. Huntington,

The United States, of course, is the sole state with preeminence in every domain of power–economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural–with the reach and capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world.

Formation of the CIS, the official end of the USSR

Created on December 21, 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States could be viewed as a successor entity to the Soviet Union and, according to leaders of Russia, its purpose was to "allow a civilized divorce" between the Soviet Republics. However, the CIS is emphatically not a state unto itself, and is more comparable to a loose confederation, similar to the European Community.

Following the Cold War, Russia had the chance to cut military spending dramatically, but the adjustment was wrenching. The military-industrial sector employed at least one of every five Soviet adults. Its dismantling left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. Russian living standards have worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth since the Putin presidency. In the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic downturn, including a financial crisis, more severe than the US or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression after it had embarked on capitalist economic reforms.

The legacy of the Cold War continues to structure world affairs. The Cold War institutionalized the role of the United States in the postwar global economic and political system. By 1989, the US was responsible for military alliances with 50 countries and 1.5 million US troops were posted in 117 countries. The Cold War also institutionalized the commitment to a huge, permanent peacetime military-industrial complex. Some of the economic and social tensions that underpinned Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In some countries, the breakdown of state control was accompanied by state failure, such as in Afghanistan. In other areas, particularly much of Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by a large growth in the number of liberal democracies. In areas where the two superpowers had been waging proxy wars, and subsidizing local conflicts, many conflicts ended with the Cold War; and the occurrence of interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, or refugee and displaced persons crises declined sharply.

Historiography

Main article: Historiography of the Cold War

As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet–US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.

While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism", and "post-revisionism". Nevertheless, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.

See also

• Timeline of events in the Cold War
• American Empire
• Soviet Empire
• Culture during the Cold War

References

• Åslund, Anders (1990). "How small is the Soviet National Income?". In Rowen, Henry S.; Wolf, Charles Jr. (ed.). The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden. California Institute for Contemporary Studies. ISBN 1558150668.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• Brinkley, Alan (1995). American History: A Survey. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0079121195.
• Byrd, Peter (2003). "Cold War". In Iain McLean & Alistair McMillan (ed.). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192802763.
• Calhoun, Craig (2002). Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195123719.
• Gaddis, John Lewis (1997). We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198780702.
• Gaddis, John Lewis (2005). The Cold War: A New History. Penguin Press. ISBN 1594200629.
• Gaidar, Yegor (October 17, 2007). Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (in Russian). Brookings Institution Press. ISBN 5824307598. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Garthoff, Raymond (1994). Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan. Brookings Institution Press. ISBN 0815730411.
• Halliday, Fred (2001). "Cold War". In Krieger, Joel & Crahan, Margaret E. (ed.). The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195117395.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• Hobsbawn, Eric (1996). The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. Vintage Books. ISBN 0679730052. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Karabell, Zachary (1999). "Cold War (1945–91): External Course". In John Whiteclay Chambers (ed.). The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195071980.
• Kennan, George F. (1968). Memoirs, 1925-1950. Hutchinson. ISBN 009085800X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Kolb, Richard K. (2004). Cold War Clashes: Confronting Communism, 1945-1991. Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States. ISBN 0974364312. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• LaFeber, Walter. "Cold War". In Foner, Eric & Garraty, John Arthur (ed.). The Reader's companion to American history. Houghton Mifflin Books. ISBN 0395513723.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• Link, William A. (1993). American Epoch: A History of the United States. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070379513.
• Lundestad, Geir (2005). East, West, North, South: Major Developments in International Politics since 1945. Oxford University Press. ISBN 1412907489.
• McMahon, Robert (2003). The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192801783.
• Nashel, Jonathan (1999). "Cold War (1945–91): Changing Interpretations". In John Whiteclay Chambers (ed.). The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195071980.
• Nolan, Peter (1995). China's Rise, Russia's Fall. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312127146.
• Nye, Joseph S. (2003). The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195161106.
• Palmowski, Jan (2004). A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198608756.
• Reagan, Ronald. "Cold War". In Foner, Eric & Garraty, John Arthur (ed.). The Reader's companion to American history. Houghton Mifflin Books. ISBN 0395513723.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• Schmitz, David F. (1999). "Cold War (1945–91): Causes". In John Whiteclay Chambers (ed.). The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195071980.
• Shearman, Peter (1995). Russian Foreign Policy Since 1990. Westview Pess. ISBN 0813326338.
• Taubman, William (2004). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393324842.
• Walker, Martin (1995). The Cold War: A History. H. Holt. ISBN 0805031901.

Further reading

Main article: List of primary and secondary sources on the Cold War

External links

Archives

• An archive of UK civil defence material
• CONELRAD Cold War Pop Culture Site
• CBC Digital Archives - Cold War Culture: The Nuclear Fear of the 1950s and 1960s
• 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
• The CAESAR, POLO, and ESAU Papers – This collection of declassified analytic monographs and reference aids, designated within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directorate of Intelligence (DI) as the CAESAR, ESAU, and POLO series, highlights the CIA's efforts from the 1950s through the mid-1970s to pursue in-depth research on Soviet and Chinese internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations. The documents reflect the views of seasoned analysts who had followed closely their special areas of research and whose views were shaped in often heated debate.

Bibliographies

• Annotated bibliography for the arms race from the Alsos Digital Library
• Annotated bibliography from Citizendium

News

• Video and audio news reports from during the cold war

Educational Resources

• Minuteman Missile National Historic Site: Protecting a Legacy of the Cold War , a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan