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 to the early
1990s. Throughout the period, the rivalry between the two
superpowers was played out in multiple arenas and had a number of distinguishing characteristics:
★ The Cold War dominated international relations between major global powers such as the US,
Britain,
France, the USSR and
China.
★ It was characterised by a number of flash-points around the globe which threatened to turn the Cold War hot. A few examples of these potentially explosive situations are the crises in Germany in general and Berlin in particular, the
Cuban Missile Crisis (
1962), and the wars in
Korea (
1950-
1953),
Vietnam War (
1964-
1975), and
Afghanistan (
1979-
1989).
★ There were also, however, periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought
détente.
★ Although many "hot" wars were fought over the period in question, the superpowers never fought one another directly. They did, however, support opposite sides in various conflicts, thus opposing each other indirectly.
★ The main
deterrent to a direct military confrontation (and, consequently, a Third World War) was the severe threat posed by the respective
nuclear arsenals of the two sides. They were very large and offered the very real possibility of
mutual assured destruction.
★ It was an
ideological struggle between Western, democratic, capitalist states and the Eastern bloc of communist, autocratic nations. Both sides attempted to win other countries (particularly in
Asia and
Africa) over in support of their respective ideologies.
★ Being a multi-faceted conflict, the Cold War also comprised
propaganda, psychology, rival military coalitions,
espionage; military, industrial and technological developments (including the
space race); costly defense spending; a massive conventional and
nuclear arms race; financial, military and food aid to Third-World nations; confrontations within the UNO; and numerous
proxy wars.
There never was a direct military engagement between the US and the Soviet Union, but there was a half-century of military build-up, and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and
satellite nations. Although the US and the Soviet Union had been allied against
Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of the
World War II. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside
Europe to every region of the world as the US sought "
containment" of the spreading of
communism and forged numerous alliances to this end -- particularly in Western Europe, the
Middle East and
Southeast Asia.
The Cold War drew to a close in the late
1980s following the launching of Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programs, ''
perestroika'' and ''
glasnost''. The Soviet Union consequently ceded its power over Eastern Europe and was
dissolved in 1991.
Origins of the term
The term "Cold War" first used in a sense that referred to the tensions of the
Soviet Union and its neighbors was coined by
George Orwell in an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb." The essay was first published
October 19,
1945 in the
London Tribune. In an excerpt from this essay Orwell wrote:
The term "cold war" had been used before in political sense. On
March 26,
1938,
The Nation had a headline, "Hitler's Cold War". According to Luis Garcia Arias, in his work ''El Concepto de Guerra y la Denominada "Guerra Fria" ''(1956), the term was first used by a thirteenth-century Spanish writer named Don Juan Manuel, who used the term "guerra fria" ("cold war") to refer to the coexistence of
Islam and Christiandom in medieval
Spain.
[1]
The term "Cold War" was originally thought to have been coined by
Bernard Baruch. The ''Cassell Companion to Quotations'' cites a speech Baruch gave in
South Carolina,
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: "The phrase was suggested to Baruch by his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940. The columnist
Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency and is sometimes mistakenly credited with coining it. Swope clearly coined it: Baruch gave it currency. "
''
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations'' lists a slight variation on Baruch's quote listing it as "We are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer", which Baruch used in a speech before the Senate Committee in 1948 (Bartlett's says he first used the term in 1947).
Even if Herbert Swope first used the term "cold war" in 1940, it could not have referred to what later became its more specific meaning. The geopolitical tensions between a dominant
Soviet Union and its allies versus the
United States and its allies did not emerge until after
World War II.
History
The challenge of Nazi Germany forced the Western
Allies and the Soviets into wartime cooperation. From the start, however, the alliance between the USSR, the world's first Communist state and the USA, the world's leading economic power, was marked by mutual distrust and ideological tension.
The ideological clash between
communism and
capitalism began in 1917 following the
Russian Revolution, when the USSR emerged as the first major communist power. This was the first event which made Russian-American relations a matter of major, long-term concern to the leaders in each country.
[John Lewis Gaddis, ''Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States'' An Interpretive History''. 1990, p. 57] In
World War I, the USA, Britain and Russia had been allies for a few months from April 1917 until the
Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November. In 1918, the Bolsheviks negotiated a separate peace with the
Central Powers at
Brest-Litovsk, and the Western Allies intervened in the
Russian Civil War against revolutionary forces.
Relations were never particularly good between the two nations in the inter-war period, with limited trade and diplomatic links being established in an atmosphere of extreme suspicion. Memories of US efforts to crush Bolshevism between 1918 and 1920, and Russia's efforts to spread communism beyond its own borders, further aggravated the tensions. The US refused to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933.
[Walter LaFeber, "Cold War." ''A Reader's Companion to American History'', Eric Foner and John A. Garrraty, eds. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.] After winning the civil war (''see''
Russian Civil War), the Bolsheviks proclaimed a worldwide challenge to
capitalism.
The period of pre-war diplomacy also left both sides wary of the other's intentions and motives in World War II. The threat posed by Germany and Japan made Russia an ally of the West, and military cooperation simply ''had'' to increase if the Allies were to win. The USA, the USSR and Britain met on several occasions during the war to discuss strategy and make plans for a post-war Europe. Even during these summits, suspicions ran deep. Russian and the US both feared that the other might pull out of the war effort and make a separate settlement with Germany.
Moscow recalled the Western appeasement of
Adolf Hitler after signing the
Munich Pact in 1938 and US failure to pass on Nuclear Bomb secrets. Russia's motives in Eastern Europe were called into question as Stalin demanded the right to annex certain nations. US President
Franklin D. Roosevelt feared that his Russian counterpart,
Joseph Stalin, would once more agree to a settlement with Germany, as he had done in August 1939 under the
German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact.
From 1941 to 1945, the alliance was only a temporary aberration in the post-
nineteenth century relationship between Russia and America.
During the war, the Soviets were deeply suspicious of US military tactics and strategies. The Soviets believed at the time, and charged throughout the Cold War, that the British and Americans intentionally delayed the opening of a second front against Germany.
[2] As early as July 1941, Stalin had asked Britain to invade northern France, but that country was in no position to carry out such a request.
[3] The second front was ultimately constituted on June 6, 1944, or
D-Day. The Soviets strongly suspected that the Anglo-Americans had opted to let the Russians bear the brunt of the war effort, to intervene themselves only at the last minute so as to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe.
[2] Historians such as
John Lewis Gaddis dispute this claim, citing other military and strategic calculations for the timing of the Normandy invasion.
[5] Nevertheless, Soviet perceptions (or misconceptions) of the West and ''vice versa'' left an strong undercurrent of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.
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.
[6] The key to the US vision of security was a post-war world shaped according to the principles laid out in the 1941
Atlantic Charter -- in other words, a liberal international system based on free trade and open markets. This vision would require a rebuilt capitalist Europe, with a healthy Germany at its center, to serve once more serve as a hub in global affairs.
This would also require US economic and political leadership of the postwar world. Europe needed the USA's assistance if it was to rebuild its domestic production and finance its international trade. The USA was the only world power not economically devastated by the fighting. By the end of the war, she was producing around fifty percent of the world's industrial goods.
Soviet leaders, however, tended to understand security in terms of space.
[7] This reasoning was conditioned by Russia's historical experiences, given the frequency with which the country had been invaded over the last 150 years.
[8] The Second World War experience was particularly dramatic for the Russians: the Soviet Union suffered unprecedented devastation as a result of the Nazi onslaught, and over 20,000,000 Soviet citizens died during the war; tens of thousands of Soviet cities, towns, and villages were leveled; and 30,100 Soviet factories were destroyed.
[David F. Schmitz, "Cold War (1945–91): Causes" ''The Oxford Companion to American Military History''. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999.] In order to prevent a similar assault in the future, Stalin was determined to use the
Red Army to gain control of
Poland, to dominate the Balkans and to destroy utterly Germany's capacity to engage in another war. The problem was that Stalin's strategy risked confrontation with the equally powerful United States, who viewed Stalin's actions as a flagrant violation of the Yalta agreement.
As the war came to an end, it seemed highly likely, inevitable even, that cooperation between the Western powers and the USSR would give way to intense rivalry, conflict even. This was due primarily to the starkly contrasting economic ideologies of the two superpowers, now quite easily the strongest in the world. Whereas the USA was a liberal, multi-party democracy with an advanced capitalist economy, based on free enterprise and profit-making, the USSR was a one-party Communist dictatorship with a state-controlled economy where private wealth and initiative was all but outlawed. It seemed obvious that, while America would be wholly in favour of a return to democracy for post-war Europe, providing it with allies and important trading partners, Russia (especially under Stalin's rule) would attempt to take advantage of the chaos and spread communism.
At the
Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies attempted to define the framework for a post-war settlement in Europe. The Allies could not reach firm agreements on the crucial questions (being the occupation of Germany, post-war reparations from Germany, and loans). No final consensus was reached on Germany, other than to agree to a Soviet request for reparations totalling $10-billion, "as a basis for negotiations."
[9] Debates over the composition of Poland's post-war government were similarly acrimonious.
[10]
Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe, while the US had much of 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 ailing French and British.
At the
Potsdam Conference, starting in late July, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe.
[Peter Byrd, "Cold War" ''The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics''. Ed. Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan. Oxford University Press, 2003.] At Potsdam, the US was represented by a new president,
Harry S. Truman, who on
April 12 acceded to the office upon Roosevelt's death. Truman was unaware of Roosevelt's plans for post-war engagement with the Soviet Union, and more generally uninformed about foreign policy and military matters.
The new president, therefore, was initially reliant on a set of advisers (including Ambassador to the Soviet Union
Averell Harriman, Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson and Truman's own choice for secretary of state,
James F. Byrnes. This group tended to take a harder line towards Moscow than Roosevelt had done.
Administration officials favouring cooperation with the Soviet Union and the incorporation of socialist economies into a world trade system were marginalised.
One week after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to Soviet distrust of the United States. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in
occupied Japan.
[11]
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.
The telegram argued that the Soviet Union was motivated by both traditional Russian imperialism and
Marxist ideology, and that Soviet behaviour was inherently expansionist and paranoid, posing a threat to the United States and its allies. Writing later as "Mr. X" in an article entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in the July 1947 edition of ''
Foreign Affairs'', Kennan drafted the famous argument for a policy of "containment" towards the Soviet Union.
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."
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. (''see''
Restatement of Policy on Germany) As Byrnes admitted one month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle between us and Russia over minds [....]"
[12]
From "Containment" through the Korean War (1947-1953)
By 1947, Truman's advisors were worried that time was running out to counter the influence of the Soviet Union.
In Europe, post-war economic recovery was faltering, and shortages of food and other essential consumer goods were common. Truman's advisors feared that the Soviet Union was seeking to weaken the position of the US in a period of post-war confusion and collapse.
The event which spurred Truman on to announce formally the US's adopting the policy of "
containment" 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. (''See''
Greek Civil War.) Rather than view this war as a civil conflict revolving around domestic issues, US policymakers interpreted it as a Soviet effort; however, the insurgents were helped by
Josip Broz Tito's
Yugoslavia, not Moscow.
Secretary of State
Dean Acheson accused the Soviet Union of conspiracy against the Greek royalists in an effort to "expand" into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and in March 1947 the administration unveiled the "
Truman Doctrine". It "must be the policy of the United States," Truman declared, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures."
Truman rallied Americans in his famous "Truman Doctrine" speech to spend $400,000,000 on intervention in the civil war in Greece. In order to mobilize an unfriendly
Republican Congress, the
Democratic president painted the conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes, thus dramatically heightening the rhetorical stakes of the conflict.
By aiding Greece, Truman set a precedent for US aid to regimes, no matter how repressive and corrupt, that requested help to fight communists.
Without the assistance of huge capital resources to rebuild industry transferred from the United States, Western European economies failed to recover from the enormous wartime destruction of the region's infrastructure. Communist parties, meanwhile, were winning large votes in free elections in countries such as France and Italy. American policymakers were worried that economic conditions in Western Europe might deteriorate to the point where communist parties could seize power there, too, through free elections or popular revolutions.
[13] Some US policymakers also feared that their own economy might suffer unless effective demand for their exports in Western Europe was restored.
[14]
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 summarize 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."
[George F. Kennan, ''Memorirs: 1925-1950'' An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1967. pp. 335-336.] According to this view, the Communists 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, which the US had gone to war to restore, from the radical left.
[13]
After lobbying by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Generals
Clay and
Marshall, the Truman administration finally realized that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously had been dependent.
[16]
In July, Truman rescinded, on "national security grounds",
[17] the punitive Morgenthau plan
JCS 1067, which had directed the US forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which stressed instead that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."
[18]
President Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of
1949 with guests in the Oval Office.
Also in July, Truman reorganised his government to fight the Cold War. The
National Security Act of 1947, signed by Truman on July 26, created a unified
Department of Defence, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the
National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War.
[Zachary Karabell, "Cold War (1945–91): External Course" ''The Oxford Companion to American Military History''. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999.]
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.
European economic alliances
European military alliances
The US consolidated its new role as leader of the West. In retaliation to Western moves to reunite West Germany, Stalin built blockades 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. (''see''
Berlin Blockade)
The US formally allied itself to the Western European states in the
North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, establishing the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Stalin countered 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), and exploding the first Soviet atomic device in August 1949.
The US took the lead in re-establishing West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in 1949.
To counter this Western reorganisation of Germany, the Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the "
German Democratic Republic" in 1949.
In the early 1950s, the US worked for the rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, its full membership to NATO.
In 1949
Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed
Kuomintang regime in China. Shortly afterwards, the Soviet Union created an alliance with the new
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.
US officials moved thereafter to expand "containment" into Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
At the same time, revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by Communist parties, were fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in South-East Asia. The US formalised an alliance with Japan in the early 1950s, thereby guaranteeing Washington a number of long-term military bases. Truman also brought other states, including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines, into a series of alliances.
To Stalin's surprise, Truman committed US forces to drive back the North Koreans.
Public opinion in countries such as Great Britain, usual allies of the U.S., 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.
[19] In 1953, the
Korean War ended in stalemate, but the US gradually got itself entangled in another civil war. The US supported the
South Vietnamese government against
North Vietnam, which was backed by the Soviet Union and China.
Crisis and escalation (1953-1962)
In 1953 changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.
[Zachary Karabell, "Cold War (1945–91): External Course" ''The Oxford Companion to American Military History''. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999.] Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president in January 1953. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defense 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 Joseph Stalin died, and the Soviets, now led by
Nikita Khrushchev, moved away from Stalinist terror.
Eisenhower's secretary of state,
John Foster Dulles initiated a "New Look" for the "containment" strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons to US enemies.
Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation," threatening a severe U.S 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 Cold War in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce.
[Jan Palmowski, "Cold War" ''A Dictionary of Contemporary World History''. Oxford University Press, 2003.] US troops seemed stationed indefinitely in West Germany and Soviet forces seemed indefinitely stationed throughout Eastern Europe. To counter West German rearmament, the Soviets established a formal alliance with the Eastern European Communist states termed the Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization or
Warsaw Pact in 1955.
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 (''see''
Hungarian Revolution of 1956). Berlin remained divided and contested. In 1961, the East Germans erected the "
Berlin Wall" to prevent the movement of East Berliners into West Berlin.
In the US, Wisconsin senator
Joseph McCarthy emerged as an influential proponent of a hard-line stance on the Cold War. Although the president quietly deplored his demagoguery, the senator exploited anti-Soviet sentiment when alleging a communist conspiracy to take over the US government, leading to a massive political witch-hunt.
During the 1950s, the
Third World was an increasingly important arena of Cold War competition. After the Second World War, 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).
[Eric Hobsbawm, ''The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991''. Vintage Books, 1991] However, nationalists in many
postcolonial states were often unsympathetic to the Western bloc.
[20] 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.
[William A. Link and Arthur S. Link, ''American Epoch: A History of the United States since 1990'' Volume II Affluence and Anxiety, 1940-1992. Seventh Edition. McGraw Hill, 1993.]
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.
[Zachary Karabell, "Cold War (1945–91): External Course" ''The Oxford Companion to American Military History''. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999.] 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 (''see''
Operation Ajax) and Guatemala's democratically-elected president
Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (''see''
Operation PBSUCCESS) Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam's pro-Western regime.
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 reach 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.
During the 1950s, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other.
The Soviets developed their own
hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, launched the first earth satellite. However, the period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance. (''see''
Sino-Soviet Split) Before Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement.
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—a show of force that brought the world close to nuclear war.
["Cold War," ''Dictionary of the Social Sciences''. Craig Calhoun, ed. Oxford University Press. 2002.] The
Cuban Missile Crisis 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.
From confrontation through détente (1962-1979)
On April 29, 1975, the last U.S. helicopters remove Americans and friends from Saigon as South Vietnam falls.
In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, both the U.S. 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 by the two superpowers.
[21] Since 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 1960s, 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. (EB) 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.
Nevertheless, both superpowers resolved to reinforce their global leadership. Both the Soviet Union and the United States struggled to stave off challenges to their leadership in their own regions. President
Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the
Dominican Republic, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. (''see''
Operation Power Pack)
In Eastern Europe, the Soviets in 1968 crushed the
Prague Spring reform movement in
Czechoslovakia that might have threatened to take the country out of the Warsaw Pact.
The U.S. 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, but his costly policy weakened the U.S. economy and, by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations. Brezhnev, meanwhile, faced far more daunting challenges in reviving the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.
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 U.S. 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.
Brezhnev and Nixon talk during Brezhnev's June 1973 visit to Washington—a high-water mark in détente between the United States and the Soviet Union.
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 by the
Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.
However, the détente of the 1970s was short-lived. The U.S. Congress limited the economic pact between Nixon and Brezhnev so much that the Soviets repudiated it in 1975.
Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East (''see''
Yom Kippur War), Chile (''see''
Chilean coup of 1973), and Angola (''see''
Angolan Civil War). 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-U.S. regimes, and his retaliation against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.
The "Second Cold War" (1979-1985)
In November 1982 American ten-year-old
Samantha Smith wrote a letter to the Soviet leader
Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, and pleading with him to work toward peace. Surprisingly, Andropov himself replied, and gave her a personal invitation to visit the country, which she accepted. Samantha Smith's visit was one of few prominent attempts to improve relations between the superpowers during Andropov's brief leadership from 1982-1984 at a dangerously low point in U.S.-Soviet relations. Above appears a cover of her book about the experience.
The term "second Cold War" has been used by some historians to refer to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s.
In 1980
Ronald Reagan defeated
Jimmy Carter, 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 that of the worst days of the Cold War in the late 1940s.
Reagan spent $2.2 trillion for the military over eight years. Military spending, combined with the legacy of the economic structural problems of the 1970s, transformed the U.S. from the world's leading creditor in 1981 to the world's leading debtor.
Tensions intensified in the early 1980s when Reagan installed U.S. cruise missiles in Europe and announced his experimental "
Strategic Defense Initiative," nicknamed "Star Wars," to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. Reagan also imposed economic sanctions to protest the suppression of the opposition
Solidarity movement in Poland.
U.S. domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.
[22] But Reagan did not encounter major public opposition to his foreign policies. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low cost
counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts.
[23] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided
Lebanese Civil War (''see''
1983 Beirut barracks bombing), invaded Grenada (''see''
Invasion of Grenada), bombed Libya (''see''
United States bombing of Libya), and backed the Central American
Contras—right-wing paramilitaries seeking overthrow the Soviet-aligned
Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
["Ronald Reagan," ''A Reader's Companion to American History'' Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.] While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the U.S., his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy. In 1985, the president authorized the sale of arms to Iran; later, administration subordinates illegally diverted the proceeds to the Contras. (''see''
Iran-Contra)
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 waged a surprisingly fierce resistance against the invasion.
[24] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to call the war the Soviets' Vietnam.
[24] 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
U.S. 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," he construed, "be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay."
[Anatoly Dobrynin, ''In Confidence'', 1995, pp. 438-439; Charles W. Maynes, "The World in 1980," U.S. Department of State, ''Current Policy'', April 1980, pp. 1-2. Quoted in LaFeber 2002, p. 314.]
End of the Cold War
By the early 1980s, the
Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world by many measures—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.
[William E. Odom, ''The Collapse of the Soviet Military'', Yale University Press, 1998, p. 1.] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. This led many U.S. observers to vastly overestimate Soviet power. (LaFeber 2002, 340)
By the late years of the Cold War, Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as twenty-five percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of
consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. (LaFeber 2002, 332) But the size of the Soviet armed forces was not necessarily the result of a simple action-reaction arms race with the United States. (Odom) Instead, Soviet spending on the
arms race and other Cold War commitments can be understood as both a cause and effect of the deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which accumulated at least a decade of economic stagnation during the Brezhnev years. (''see''
Economy of the Soviet Union) Soviet investment in the defense sector was not necessarily 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, 335)
By the time
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. (LaFaber 2002, 331-333) (Petroleum exports made up around 60 percent of the Soviet Union's total export earnings.) (LaFeber 2002, 332) To restructure the Soviet economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform (''see
perestroika and
glasnost''). 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.
However, many U.S. Soviet experts and administration officials doubted that Gorbachev was serious about winding down the arms race. (LaFeber, 2002) 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. (Palmowski) 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 East-West tensions that had reached intense new heights earlier in the decade rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s. In 1988, the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe. In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
In December 1989, Gorbachev and
George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at a summit meeting in
Malta.
[26]
But by then, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By February 1990, the
Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year old monopoly on state power. By December of the next year, the union-state also dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states. (''see''
Dissolution of the USSR)
Legacy
Despite its rapid and relatively bloodless end, the Cold War was fought at a tremendous cost globally over the course of more than four decades. It cost the U.S. up to $8 trillion in military expenditures, and the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans in Korea and Vietnam.
[27] 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.
The end of the Cold War gave Russia 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.
[Anders Åslund, "How small is the Soviet National Income?" in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., eds., ''The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden'' (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990), 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 in recent years. In the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the U.S. or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the
Great Depression after it had embarked on capitalist economic reforms.
[Peter Nolan, ''China's Rise, Russia's Fall''. Macmillan Press, 1995. 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 U.S. was responsible for military alliances with 50 countries and 1.5 million U.S. troops were posted in 117 countries.
The Cold War also institutionalized the commitment to a huge, permanent wartime 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. But 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'' (Center for Systemic Peace: 2006, online at [3]]
Historiography
As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the U.S. 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.
[Jonathan Nashel, "Cold War (1945–91): Changing Interpretations" ''The Oxford Companion to American Military History''. John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., Oxford University Press 1999.] In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet-U.S. relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided.
[Brinkley, Alan (1986). ''American History: A Survey''. New York: McGraw-Hill, 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." Nevertheless, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.
Orthodox accounts
The first school of interpretation to emerge in the U.S. was the "orthodox" one. For more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, few U.S. historians challenged the official U.S. interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] This "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.
, for example, argued in his 1950 ''America Faces Russia'' that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar years. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] From this view, U.S. officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the Marshall Plan.
This interpretation has been described as the "official" U.S. version of Cold War history.
Although it lost its dominance as a mode of historical thought in academic discussions in 1960s, it continues to be influential.
Revisionism
U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned many historians with the premises of "containment", and thus with the assumptions of the "orthodox" approach to understanding the Cold War.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, in the context of a larger rethinking of the U.S. role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of
American empire or
hegemony.
The Wisconsin school of interpretation argues that the US and the USSR were economic rivals, making them natural adversaries, irrespective of their ideologies.
[28] Walter LaFeber, meanwhile, argues the US and
Imperial Russia were already rivals by 1900 over the development of
Manchuria. Russia, unable to compete industrially with the States, sought to close off parts of East Asia to trade with other colonial powers. Meanwhile, the US demanded open competition for markets.
[Walter Lafeber, “America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1992,” 9th ed. (2002).]
While the new school of thought spanned many differences among individual scholars, the works comprising it were generally responses in one way or another to
William Appleman Williams' landmark 1959 volume, ''The Tragedy of American Diplomacy''. Williams challenged the long-held assumptions of "orthodox" accounts, arguing that Americans had always been an empire-building people, even while American leaders denied it.
Following Williams, "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.
According to Williams and later "revisionist" writers, U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining
capitalism domestically. In order to achieve that objective, they pursued an "
open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture.
From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally.
"Revisionist" scholars challenged the widely accepted notion that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar "expansionism". They cited evidence that the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale, and that Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies.
In this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States; moreover, the U.S. maintained a nuclear monopoly until the
USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799]
Revisionist historians have also challenged the assumption that the origins of the Cold War date no further back than the immediate postwar period.
Notably,
Walter LaFeber, in his landmark study, ''America, Russia, and the Cold War'', first published in 1972, argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to U.S. trade, markets, and influence.
LaFeber argued that the U.S. commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U.S. influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799]
Starting with
Gar Alperovitz, in his influential ''Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam'' (1965), "revisionist" scholars have focused on the U.S. decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of World War II.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] In their view, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in effect, started the Cold War. According to Alperovitz, the bombs were not used on an already defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets, signaling that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to structure a postwar world around U.S. interests as U.S. policymakers saw fit.
According to some revisionists, Japan had tried to surrender for several months, but the U.S. wanted to test nuclear weapons in war and, most importantly, show its power to the Soviet Union.
[29][30]
Joyce and
Gabriel Kolko's ''The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954'' (1972) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War. The Kolkos argued U.S. policy was both reflexively
anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The U.S. was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the U.S. economic and political prerogatives through either covert or military means.
In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, and more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients, and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy.
Post-revisionism
The "revisionist" interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own. In a variety of ways, "post-revisionist" scholarship, before the fall of Communism, challenged earlier works on the origins and course of the Cold War.
During the period, "post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by accepting some of their findings but rejecting most of their key claims. Particulary, post-revisionist historians argued that revisionists put too much emphasis on U.S. economic considerations while ignoring domestic politics and perceptions held at the time.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] Another current attempted to strike a balance between the "orthodox" and "revisionist" camps, identifying areas of responsibility for the origins of the conflict on both sides.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] Thomas G. Paterson, in ''Soviet-American Confrontation'' (1973), for example, viewed Soviet hostility and U.S. efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War.
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799]
The seminal work of this approach was
John Lewis Gaddis's ''The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947'' (1972). The account was immediately hailed as the beginning of a new school of thought on the Cold War claiming to synthesize a variety of interpretations.
Gaddis then maintained that "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War."
[Brinkley 1986, pp. 798-799] He did, however, emphasize the constraints imposed on U.S. policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics.
Gaddis has, in addition, criticized some "revisionist" scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.
Out of the "post-revisionist" literature emerged a new area of inquiry that was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who started the conflict than in offering insight into U.S. and Soviet actions and perspectives.
From this perspective, the Cold War was not so much the responsibility of either side, but rather the result of predictable tensions between two world powers that had been suspicious of one another for nearly a century. For example, Ernest May wrote in a 1984 essay:
After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists.... There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict... Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience ... all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back.[31]
From this view of "post-revisionism" emerged a line of inquiry that examines how Cold War actors perceived various events, and the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes.
While Gaddis does not hold either side entirely responsible for the onset of the conflict, he has now argued that the Soviets should be held clearly more accountable for the ensuing problems. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home. Asking if it were possible to predict that the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months, leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in a 1997 essay, ''We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History:''
[32]
Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it. It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of causation; and it took [Stalin] in particular, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into place.
For Stalin, Gaddis continues, "World politics was an extension of Soviet politics, which was in turn an extension of Stalin's preferred personal environment: a zero-sum game, in which achieving security for one meant depriving everyone else of it."
See also
★
Timeline of events in the Cold War
★
American empire - the revisionist cause of the Cold War
★
Culture during the Cold War
References
1. "Yale Book of Quotations" (2006) Yale University Press, edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
2. Gaddis 1990, p. 151
3. Gaddis 1990, p. 149
4. Gaddis 1990, p. 151
5. Gaddis 1990, pp. 151-153
6. Gaddis 1990, p. 156
7. Gaddis 1990, p. 176
8. Id.
9. Gaddis 1990, p. 164
10. LaFeber 2002, p. 15
11. LaFeber 2002, p. 28
12. Curtis F. Morgan, Southern Partnership: James F. Byrnes, Lucius D. Clay and Germany, 1945 1947
13. Gaddis 1990, p. 186
14. LaFeber 2002, p. 68
15. Gaddis 1990, p. 186
16. Ray Salvatore Jennings "The Road Ahead: Lessons in Nation Building from Japan, Germany, and Afghanistan for Postwar Iraq May 2003, Peaceworks No. 49 pg.15
17. Ray Salvatore Jennings “The Road Ahead: Lessons in Nation Building from Japan, Germany, and Afghanistan for Postwar Iraq May 2003, Peaceworks No. 49 pg.15
18. Pas de Pagaille! Time Magazine July 28, 1947.
19. Column by Ernest Borneman, ''Harper's Magazine'', May 1951
20. Hobsbawm 1991, p. 227
21. "Cold War." ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. 2006. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
22. LaFeber 2002, p. 323
23. LaFeber 2002, pg. 323
24. LaFeber 2002, p. 314
25. LaFeber 2002, p. 314
26. "Cold War," ''A Dictionary of World History''. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.
27. LaFeber 2002, p. 1
28. The term "Wisconsin school" refers to those interpretations of the Cold War which were influenced by William Appleman Williams, a historian at the University of Wisconsin. The term is used because his research interests were continued by some of his students, most notably Walter La Feber.
29. Tim Weiner, "U.S. Spied on its World War II Allies," New York Times, Aug. 11, 1993, p.9
30. William Blum (1995) ''NEEDLESS SLAUGHTER, USEFUL TERROR''
31. Brinkley 1986, p. 799
32. John Lewis Gaddis, ''We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) For free access to the first chapter Gaddis' book online, see [4]
Further reading
★ Ball, S. J. ''The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991'' (1998), British perspective
★ Brzezinski, Zbigniew. ''The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century'' (1989)
★ Cowley, Robert. ''The Cold War: A Military History'' (2005)
★ Friedman, Norman. ''The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War''. (2000)
★ Gaddis, John Lewis. ''The Cold War: A New History'' (2005), recent overview
★ Gaddis, John Lewis. ''Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States. An Interpretative History'' 2nd ed. (1990)
★ Gaddis, John Lewis. ''Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War'' (1987)
★ Kort, Michael. "The Columbia Guide to the Cold War" (1998)
★ LaFeber, Walter. ''America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992'' 7th ed. (1993)
★ Lundestad, Geir. ''East, West, North, South: Major Developments in International Politics since 1945'' (1999). USA: Oxford University Press
★ Mcmahon, Robert. ''The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction.'' 2003.
★ Powaski, Ronald E. ''The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917–1991'' (1998)
★ Walker, Martin. ''The Cold War: A History'' (1995)
★ Westad, Odd Arne ''The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times'' (2006)
★
External links
'Archives'
★
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
★
WWW-VL: History: The Cold War 1945-1991
'Bibliographies'
★
Annotated bibliography for the arms race from the Alsos Digital Library
★
Annotated bibliography from ''Citizendium''
'Museums'
★
The Cold War Museum
★
Royal Engineers Museum Royal Engineers and the Cold War
'News'
★
Video and audio news reports from during the cold war
★
Professor Paul Kennedy on the risks of the Cold War era relative to international tensions in the C21
'Special interest'
★
CONELRAD's definitive history of the Daisy ad
★
The Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact
★
The Reagan/Gorbachev Summits
★
History of the Western allies in Berlin during the Cold War
★
People's history: The cultural cold war Information on the cultural element of the conflict
.jpg)
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
![Don\](images/articles/thumbs/beachrainthumb.jpg "Don\")
