Cold War

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

Europe

In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents. The American government's response to this announcement was the adoption of "containment",Gaddis 2005, pp. 28–29 whose goal was to stop the spread of communism. Truman gave a speech to unveil the "Truman Doctrine", which framed the conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes. Even though the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, US policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to "expand" Soviet influence.Gaddis 2005, p. 38

For US policymakers, threats to Europe's balance of power were not necessarily military ones, but political and economic challenges. In June, 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 threats included attempts by communist parties to seize power through free elections or popular revolutions, in countries like France or Italy.Gaddis 1990, p. 186

Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a significant threat to Soviet control of Eastern Europe. He believed that economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet guidance, and that the US was trying to "buy" a pro-US re-alignment of Europe.Gaddis 2005, p. 32 Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's "alternative" to the Marshall plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with western Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan, and later, the COMECON. Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany, as his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm, or be any kind of a threat to the Soviet Union.Gaddis 2005, pp. 105–106

In 1948, in retaliation for Western efforts to re-industrialize and rebuild the German economy, Stalin built blockades which prevented Western materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin.Gaddis 2005, p. 33 This move, known as the Berlin Blockade, precipitated one of the first major crises of the Cold War. Both sides directed propaganda against the other, with the Soviets mounting a public relations campaign against the US policy change, and the US accidentally creating "Operation Little Vittles", which supplied candy to German children. The Berlin Blockade ended peacefully, with Stalin backing down, and allowing the resumption of normal shipments to West Berlin.Gaddis 2005, p. 34

In July, Truman rescinded the punitive Morgenthau plan (part of an agreement with the Soviet Union regarding post-war Germany), which had specifically directed US occupation forces in Germany not to assist in Germany's economic rehabilitation efforts. It was replaced by a new directive which stressed instead that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery.

In September, the Soviets created Cominform, whose purpose was to enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc. Cominform 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.Carabott, p. 66

As part of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, 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 anti-communist resistance.Gaddis 2005, p. 34 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.Gaddis, p. 100

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).Gaddis 2005, p. 34 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. 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 105

A major propaganda effort begun in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which was dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the Communist system and the governments of what were known as the satellite nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria). Radio Free Europe attempted to fulfill these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press.Puddington, p. 9 RFE was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan.Puddington, p. 7 American policymakers such as Kennan and John Foster Dulles acknowledged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the Communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world.Puddington, p. 10

Asia

In 1949, Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang (KMT)'s Nationalist Government in China, and the Soviet Union promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China.Gaddis 2005, p. 39 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,Gaddis 2005, p. 164 Truman administration officials proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defence.

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 212 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 more significant impacts of containment was the outbreak of 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.Malkasian, p. 16

Among other effects, the Korean War galvanised NATO to develop a military structure,Isby, pp. 13–14 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".Column by Ernest Borneman, Harper's Magazine, May 1951

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

Crisis and escalation (1953–62)

In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.Karabell, p. 916 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 107 He declared that the only way to reform and move away from Stalin's policies would be to acknowledge 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."We Will Bury You!", Time magazine, November 26, 1956. Retrieved on June 26, 2008. However, he had not been talking about nuclear war, he later claimed, but rather about the historically determined victory of communism over capitalism.Gaddis 2005, p. 84 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".Taubman, pp. 427, 511

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.

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.Feldbrugge, p. 818 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.Gaddis 2005, pp. 108–109 In 1961, the East Germans erected the Berlin Wall to prevent the movement of East Berliners into West Berlin.Gaddis 2005, p. 74

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".Gaddis 2005, p. 70 This formulation modified the Stalin-era Soviet stance, where international class struggle meant the two opposing camps were on an inevitable collision course where Communism would triumph through global war; now, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own,Perlmutter, p. 145 as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities.Njolstad, p. 136 Only with Gorbachev's "new thinking" was this vision relaxed and peaceful coexistence seen as an end in itself rather than a form of class struggle.Breslauer, p. 72 US pronouncements concentrated on American strength abroad and the success of liberal capitalism.Joshel, p. 128 However, by the late 1960s, the "battle for men's minds" between two systems of social organization that Kennedy spoke of in 1961 was largely over, with tensions henceforth based primarily on clashing geopolitical objectives rather than ideology.Rycroft, p. 7

During November 1958, Khrushchev 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".Gaddis 2005, p. 71 NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid-December and Khrushchev withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question.Glees, pp. 126–27

More broadly, one hallmark of the 1950s was the beginning of European integration–a fundamental by-product 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.Hanhimaki, p. 312–13

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;Gaddis 2005, pp. 121–124 additionally, the Soviets saw continuing losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.Edelheit, p. 382 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 (see 1953 Iranian coup d'état) and Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (see 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état).Gaddis 2005, p. 164 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.Jacobs, p. 120 Soviet propaganda used Marxist philosophy to attack capitalism, claiming labor exploitation and war-mongering imperialism were inherent in the system.Wood, p. 105

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 126 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.

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 missileLackey, p. 49 (ICBM) and, in October, launched the first earth satellite, Sputnik. The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 142 Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement,Gaddis 2005, pp. 140–142 and the two clashed militarily in 1969.

The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (June 4 1961 – Nov 9 1961) was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post-World War II Germany. It was provoked by a new ultimatum issued by the Soviet Union demanding the withdrawal of allied forces from West Berlin. It culminated in the erection of the Berlin Wall, and de facto partition of Berlin.

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 76 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 82 It also showed that neither superpower was prepared to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other's retaliation, and thus of mutually assured destruction.Gaddis 2005, p. 80 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.National Research Council Committee on Antarctic Policy and Science, p. 33

In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement.Gaddis 2005, p. 119–120 Accused of rudeness and incompetence, he was also credited with ruining Soviet agriculture and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Krushchev had become an international embarrassment when he authorised construction of the Berlin Wall, a public humiliation for Marxism-Leninism.

Confrontation through détente (1962–79)

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,Gaddis 2005, p. 212 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:
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.Gaddis 2005, p. 153

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.Muravchik, p. 62
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.Gaddis 2005, p. 150 The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania and China, and from Western European communist parties.Gaddis 2005, p. 154

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 133 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.McSherry, p. 13 Brezhnev, meanwhile, faced far more daunting challenges in reviving the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures. Moreover, the Middle East continued to be a source of contention. Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, was a troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist in both the Six-Day War (with advisers and technicians) and the War of Attrition (with pilots and aircraft) against US ally Israel;Stone, p. 230 Syria and Iraq later received increased assistance as well as (indirectly) the PLO.Friedman, p. 330 During the Yom Kippur War, rumors of imminent Soviet intervention on the Egyptians' behalf brought about a massive US mobilization that threatened to wreck détente;Kumaraswamy, p. 127 this escalation, the USSR's first in a regional conflict central to US interests, inaugurated a new and more turbulent stage of Third World military activism and made use of the new Soviet strategic parity.Porter, p. 113

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.Gaddis 2005, pp. 149–152 A desire by the USSR to contain China fear of conflict on both its European and Asian fronts, and a renewed sense of encirclement by adversaries was one factor leading to the Soviet-US détente. Its other two principal causes were the USSR's having achieved rough nuclear parity with the US and the serious weakening the Vietnam War was causing the United States (a reduction of influence in the Third World and a cooling of relations with Western Europe).Buchanan, pp. 168–169

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 154 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 188

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.Gaddis 2005 p. 186 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 178 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)

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 210 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".Gaddis 2005, p. 211

In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the US presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere.Gaddis 2005, p. 189 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,Gaddis 2005, p. 197 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.Smith, p. 182

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.Gaddis 2005, p. 202 This deployment would have placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.Garthoff, p. 88 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.

The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated Western European nuclear release, frightened Soviet leadership.

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.LaFeber 2002, p. 332 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.LaFeber 2002, p. 335 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.Odom, p. 1 However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically lagged behind the West.LaFeber 2002, p. 340

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 Soviet economy.Gaddis 2005, pp. 219–222

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."Official Energy Statistics of the US Government", EIA - International Energy Data and Analysis. Retrieved on July 4 2008. These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union, as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues.LaFeber 2002, p. 332 The decrease in oil prices and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to a stagnant state at this time.Gaidar 2007 pp. 190–205

US domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.LaFeber 2002, p. 323 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 212 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.LaFeber 2002, p. 314 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 senior 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".Dobrynin, pp. 438–439Maynes, pp. 1–2 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. After Chernenko's death, Reagan was asked why he had not negotiated with Soviet leaders. Reagan quipped, "They keep dying on me".Karaagac, p. 67

End of the Cold War (1985–91)

By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to power in 1985,Gaddis 2005, p. 197 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.LaFaber 2002, pp. 331–333 To restructure the Soviet economy, Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform, called perestroika, or restructuring. Within two years, however, Gorbachev came to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary.Gaddis 2005, pp. 231–233 Gorbachev redirected the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. Many US Soviet experts and administration officials doubted that Gorbachev was serious about winding down the arms race,LaFeber 2002, pp. 300–340 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.

Also introduced was glasnost, or "openness", which allowed for criticism of the Soviet government, and Soviet institutions to be more transparent.

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.Gaddis 2005, pp. 229–230 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.1985: "Superpowers aim for 'safer world'", BBC News, November 21 1985. Retrieved on July 4 2008.
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:Gaddis 2005, p. 248 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.Shearman, p. 76 In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.Gaddis 2005, pp. 235–236

In December 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, declared the Cold War over at a summit meeting in Malta;Malta summit ends Cold War, BBC News, December 3, 1989. Retrieved on 11 June 2008. a year later, the two former rivals were partners in the Gulf War against longtime Soviet ally Iraq.Goodby, p. 26

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;Gaddis 2005, pp. 235–236 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.Shearman, p.74 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.Gorbachev, pp. 287, 290, 292 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.Gaddis 2005, p. 253 (At first, Gorbachev's permissive attitude toward Eastern Europe did not extend to Soviet territory; even Bush, who strove to maintain friendly relations, condemned the January 1991 killings in Latvia and Lithuania, privately warning that economic ties would be frozen if the violence continued.)Goldgeier, p. 27 On December 25, 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.Gaddis 2005, pp. 256–257

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.LaFeber 2002, p. 1 It cost the Soviets an even higher share of their gross national product.Gaddis 2005, p. 213 In Southeast Asia, local civil wars were intensified by superpower rivalry, leaving millions dead.Gaddis 2005, p. 266

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.Country profile: United States of America. BBC News. Retrieved on March 11, 2007Nye, p. 157Blum, p. 87Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, Foreign Policy Magazine (1991). Retrieved on 8 June 2008.Peter Brookes, Kurt Campbell and Thomas Donnelly, The United States as the World's only superpower (PDF), Gaiko Forum, Washington D.C. Retrieved on 9 June 2008. In the words of Samuel P. Huntington,Samuel P. Huntington, The Lonely Superpower, Council on Foreign Relations, March/April 1999. Retrieved on 9 June 2008.

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.Soviet Leaders Recall ‘Inevitable’ Breakup Of Soviet Union, Radio Free Europe, December 8, 2006. Retrieved on May 20, 2008.

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.Åslund, p. 49 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 1999. 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.Nolan, pp. 17–18

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 and large-scale military funding of science.
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.Monty G. Marshall and Ted Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2005 (PDF), Center for Systemic Peace (2006). Retrieved on June 14, 2008.

Historiography

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.Brinkley, pp. 798–799 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".

This "orthodox" accounts place the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe. "Revisionist" writers placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. "Post-revisionists" saw the events in the Cold War as more nuanced, and attempted to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold War.

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

External links

Archives
Open Society Archives, Budapest (Hungary), one of the biggest history of communism and cold war archives in the world
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