Cold War (1945 – 91): External Course

This entry is a subentry of Cold War (1945 – 91).

The most famous image to emerge from the Yalta Conference in 1945 is a picture of Winston S. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin seated outdoors, wearing their overcoats, Churchill with his trademark cigar and Stalin with his marshal's cap. The three look pleased, almost jovial. The war in Europe had turned decisively against Nazi Germany and the Allied leaders knew that victory was near.

When the Allied leaders next met, in July 1945, Roosevelt had died, replaced by his vice president, Harry S. Truman. A man of scant foreign policy experience, Truman arrived at the Potsdam Conference, near Berlin, with the knowledge that an atomic bomb had been successfully detonated in New Mexico. He was hopeful about a future U.S.‐Soviet detente, but the relationship was marked by suspicion and distrust on both sides. At some point before 1947, it deteriorated to the point where the two superpowers became locked in a global struggle that stopped short of direct armed conflict.

The Role of Nuclear Weapons

By 1949, both countries possessed nuclear weapons. There has been much debate over the exact role of these weapons in the Cold War. Many historians argue that the only reason the Cold War never became “hot” was that the fear of nuclear annihilation effectively deterred each side from directly attacking the other. Others disagree, pointing to the fact that the Cold War had already reached a fever pitch before the Soviets had nuclear weapons, and that until the widespread development of hydrogen bombs in the 1950s, atomic weapons were only slightly more deadly than the most concentrated conventional attacks.

Without question, nuclear weapons were an integral aspect of the Cold War, and it is impossible to understand the history of the conflict without an appreciation for how large the threat of these weapons loomed, not just over Washington and Moscow but throughout the world. The rapid growth of nuclear arsenals altered the nature of international relations and made both nuclear superpowers far more wary of military confrontation with one another than they might otherwise have been.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, both sides made strenuous efforts to establish a modus vivendi. A period of detente continued until 1979, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan contributed to renewed American military spending and to the election of President Ronald Reagan, who pursued what is sometimes known as the “second Cold War.” This lasted from 1979 to 1986, when Reagan and the reform‐minded Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to an agreement in Iceland. The final years, between 1986 and 1991, saw the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union. Its collapse in December 1991 marked the end of a Cold War that had all but sputtered out in the previous five years.

Phase One: 1945–46

After Potsdam, the United States and the Soviet Union approached each other warily. Throughout the fall of 1945, the two countries shifted attention from the European and Asian wars that had consumed them for the past five years. As they did so, they found that their visions for a post–Cold War world differed, most noticeably in Poland and occupied Germany. The United States envisioned a world dominated by democracy and free market economics, while the USSR saw that vision as a thinly veiled strategy to dominate the Soviet Union. By the end of 1946, the level of antagonism between the two nations had risen precipitously. Each viewed the other as the primary foreign policy threat, and both governments mobilized resources and planned strategy with one goal in mind: maximizing their own influence and minimizing that of the other.

Phase Two: 1947–62

The second phase was the most intensive of the Cold War, and the most dangerous. During this period, the United States and the Soviet Union constructed formidable nuclear arsenals and enormous conventional forces, and at several points the two countries nearly came to blows.

In 1947, the U.S. government reorganized. The National Security Act created a unified Department of Defense, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a National Security Council. These would be the primary bureaucracies for American policy in the Cold War. Responding to a Communist insurgency in Greece and to Stalin's pressure on Turkey to allow Soviet military access to the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, Truman requested Congress to authorize a $400 million aid program. In order to mobilize isolationists in the Republican Congress, the Democratic president heightened the rhetorical stakes, painting the Cold War as a contest between “free institutions and representative government” and those who were forcibly ruled by “the will of the minority.” The struggle between the two sides in the Cold War was more than military, strategic, or economic; it was also profoundly ideological, with each side presenting the other as the embodiment of evil.

The Truman Doctrine was followed by an announcement of European aid by Secretary of State George C. Marshall, in June 1947. The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid to Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. With American assistance, the Greek military defeated the insurgents, and the Christian Democrats in Italy defeated the powerful Communist‐Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.

At the same time, tension over Germany grew. Unable to agree on a partition of Germany, both Soviet and U.S. troops remained in Berlin, and in an attempt to force the Americans out, the Soviets blockaded Berlin in the summer of 1948. Rather than backing down, the United States orchestrated the Berlin airlift of supplies to Berlin, which lasted nearly a year until Stalin realized that his blockade had failed in its aims.

The year 1949 saw three developments that deepened the conflict. In April, a Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was created, and it bound the United States to the defense of Western Europe. In September, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear weapon; and in October, the Communist forces of Mao Zedong defeated the last remnant of the Nationalist Army and took power in China. In response to these events, the National Security Council in Washington drew up a plan in early 1950 known as NSC 68, which called for a massive buildup of American conventional and nuclear forces and an aggressive military response to Communist expansionism throughout the world.

When war erupted between North and South Korea in June 1950, Truman and his advisers barely hesitated before acting on NSC 68 and sending U.S. troops to bolster South Korea. By late fall, more than 1 million Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River in North Korea and entered the Korean War against American, South Korean, and other United Nations troops. The war turned into a stalemate that lasted until an armistice in 1953 that returned Korea essentially to its pre‐1950 dividing line.

The inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in January 1953 and the death of Josef Stalin that March shifted the dynamic of the Cold War somewhat. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated the “New Look” strategy, which called for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons to deter China and the Soviet Union. Dulles enunciated a doctrine of massive retaliation that called for a severe American response to any Soviet aggression and violence, and the “New Look” also drew the United States more closely into Third World politics. The Soviets, now led by Nikita Khrushchev, moved away from the depredations of Stalinism, but in foreign policy they remained dedicated to global competition with the United States.

The Cold War in Europe settled into an uneasy armed truce, with NATO troops stationed in West Germany and Warsaw Pact and Soviet forces stationed throughout Eastern Europe. In 1956, the Soviets invaded Hungary rather than allow the Hungarians to move out of the Soviet orbit. Berlin remained divided and contested, and in 1961, the East Germans erected a wall to prevent their citizens from fleeing to West Berlin.

The other arena for the Cold War during the 1950s was the Third World, where nationalist movements in countries such as Guatemala, Iran, and the Philippines were often allied with or led by Communist groups. The United States and the Soviet Union began to compete by proxy in the Third World, and the U.S. government utilized the CIA as well as various forms of covert operations in order to remove certain Third World governments and support others. Third World countries reacted by rejecting the impetus to choose sides in the Cold War. At Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, dozens of Third World governments gathered and resolved on staying out of the Cold War. This resolve culminated with the creation of the Non‐Aligned movement in 1961.

During the 1950s, the Soviets and the Americans created a new generation of nuclear weapons—hydrogen bombs—which magnified exponentially the potential damage of nuclear war. In the late 1950s, the Soviets launched the first of the reconnaissance satellites, Sputnik, while the United States developed U‐2 spy planes. Both innovations soon led to aerial reconnaissance, allowing Cold War adversaries to gain a clearer picture of the military strength of the other.

But in 1960, U.S. reconnaissance did not prevent the CIA and the American military from overestimating the strength of the Soviet military. During the presidential election of 1960, John F. Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing an alleged “missile gap” to develop with the Soviet Union, even though in reality the United States was ahead of the Soviets in missiles, in particular, intercontinental missile development. On his inauguration as president, Kennedy promised that the United States would not fall behind the Soviet Union in military strength.

Kennedy and Khrushchev held a summit in Vienna in June 1961, but it did not go well. Kennedy felt bullied, and Khrushchev felt that Kennedy was a weak man surrounded by hawkish advisers. At the same time, Khrushchev knew that the only missile gap was on the Soviet side, and he intended to redress that imbalance. In the summer of 1962, Khrushchev decided to station nuclear missiles in Cuba, where the anti‐American Fidel Castro had recently come to power and thwarted a CIA‐sponsored invasion by Cuban exiles. An American U‐2 overflight of Cuba detected these missiles, and that discovery set off what has since become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For thirteen days in October 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev played a deadly game of “chicken,” each threatening to escalate the crisis to the brink of nuclear war. After a tense standoff, Khrushchev decided to withdraw the weapons from Cuba in return for a pledge from Kennedy that the United States would not invade the island. Though the crisis was a victory for Kennedy, it signaled to both the United States and the Soviet Union that the cost of direct confrontation in an era of nuclear weapons was greater than any potential gain. In 1963, the two countries agreed on a Limited Test Ban Treaty, which marked the first step toward normalization of relations.

Phase Three: 1963–79

After 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union entered the period that came to be known as detente. Ideological passions gradually dissipated in favor of a more pragmatic approach to international politics. The United States turned its attention to the Vietnam War, and until 1973, it remained mired there. The civil war in Vietnam was part of the Cold War insofar as it was the logical outgrowth of American policies of containment and rollback, but with its military attention locked on Vietnam and beset by severe domestic unrest, the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson focused less on Moscow. President Richard M. Nixon, while disengaging from Vietnam, worked assiduously to establish a diplomatic rapport with the Soviets, aided in that task by his chief foreign policy official, Henry Kissinger.

The Soviets until the very end of this period focused on their bitter rivalry with Mao's China; after Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, the Soviet leadership turned inward to attend to the many domestic problems that plagued the Soviet Union. Soviet rulers such as Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev warily embraced the notion of detente, although like the Americans they continued to expend considerable energies trying to win various Third World states to their side.

The year 1972 was the apogee of detente. Nixon and Kissinger orchestrated a stunning and secretive rapprochement with Communist China. For their part, the Chinese had sought improved relations with the Americans in order to gain advantage over the Soviets. In February, Nixon traveled to the Forbidden City in Beijing and met with Mao and Chou En‐Lai. Then, in June, Nixon and Kissinger met with Brezhnev and Soviet military officials in Moscow. The result was the first of the SALT Treaties (an acronym for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which pledged the United States and the USSR to limit the deployment of antiballistic missiles and set restrictions on offensive nuclear missiles as well. SALT I was followed in 1974 by SALT II, which went even further in specifying numbers of warheads each side could possess.

President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977 with SALT II unratified, and he announced that his administration would make human rights a central concern. Carter had great success brokering a Middle East peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Camp David Accords (1979). However, though relations with the Soviets and the Chinese were civil, the spirit of detente began to dissipate. In December 1979, Brezhnev ordered Soviet troops to invade Afghanistan to support a tottering pro‐Moscow regime. The U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran, had been seized a month earlier by Islamic militant students allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the American hostages were held until the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in January 1980. The dual effects of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a significant increase in U.S. military spending in Carter's last year, to the election of Reagan, and to the end of detente.

Phase Four: 1980–86

Reagan arrived in office determined to restore American pride and power. He and his advisers believed that both the realpolitik of Kissinger and the weakness of Carter had sacrificed America's ideological and strategic advantage in the Cold War. Calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Reagan embarked on a huge military buildup that ranged from new aircraft carrier groups to research for a space missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”). The most visible manifestation of Reagan's renewed Cold War fervor was the support given to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, who were fighting a guerrilla war against the Communist Sandinista government.

The Soviets attempted to match Reagan's military spending. But the war in Afghanistan deteriorated, and Moscow discovered that the ailing industry and economy of the Soviet Union simply could not keep pace with the Americans. In 1985, a young, dynamic Mikhail Gorbachev became premier, and he instituted a series of domestic reforms known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring the economy).

At first, the Reagan administration saw these initiatives as a ruse. They were not. Meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, Reagan made what was for him a leap of faith, agreeing to both the INF Treaty (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) and the START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction, the stepchild of SALT II). At Reykjavik, the Cold War began to thaw.

Phase Five: 1987–91

Few could have predicted how quickly the ice would melt. Although glasnost was designed to save and strengthen the Soviet Union, it helped cause the Soviet system to collapse. The economy was in shambles, and the pressures of war in Afghanistan and deep structural reform were simply more than the system could bear. In 1989, taking their cue from Moscow, people throughout the Eastern bloc demanded change. In Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, Communist regimes fell and were replaced by interim governments dedicated to democracy and the free market. At the same time, in the Soviet Union itself, the Baltic states declared their independence, and Gorbachev significantly refused to authorize the use of the military to force either Eastern European or the Baltics back into the Soviet fold.

The end came in 1991. In August, Gorbachev survived a coup attempt by hard‐liners opposed to any further reforms, but he survived largely because the newly elected Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, rallied army units and crowds to oppose the coup in Moscow. Gorbachev returned, but only for a brief time, before the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation declared their independence. In December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the defunct Soviet Union.

Assessment

The end of the Cold War came as a surprise to Moscow, Washington, and to the world. Almost no one had thought that the conflict would end so suddenly with one side collapsing internally. Both the Americans and the Western Europeans were unprepared for the rapid demise of Soviet military and economic power, and in the years after 1991, the major players in the Cold War tried to find a new strategic template that would organize their foreign policy. With the possible exception of China, that template proved elusive in the 1990s.

Like the Westphalian system in 1648 after the Thirty Year's War, and that of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War was as much an international system following a major war as it was a struggle between two nuclear superpowers. It was a system that dominated all aspects of world politics between 1945 and 1991, and one that both exacerbated conflict in the Third World and prevented armed nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[See also Arms Control and Disarmament; China, U.S. Military Involvement in; Deterrence; Iran, U.S. Military Involvement in; Nicaragua, U.S. Military Involvement in; Russia, U.S. Military Involvement in, 1921–95.]

Bibliography

• Walter Lafeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, first publ. 1972; 7th ed. 1993.
• John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, 1982.
• McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, 1988.
• Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1990, 1988.
• Walter Laqueur, Europe in Our Time: A History, 1945–1992, 1992.
• Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History, 1993.
• Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlim's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev, 1996.
• Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964, 1997