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Chapter 11 · pp. 338–373
The Cold War was a long struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought with alliances, arms, propaganda, and proxy wars instead of direct battle. This chapter follows its roots in the end of World War II, the policies the US built to contain communism, and the crises in Europe and Asia. It also covers the nuclear arms race, the space race, the Red Scare at home, the CIA's covert actions, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the way the conflict ended between 1987 and 1991. This part covers the definition of the Cold War, its origins, and the early containment policies in Europe.
The Cold War was a global political and ideological contest between capitalist and communist countries. Its two main players were the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR). It is called "cold" because the two superpowers never fought each other in a direct shooting war. They competed through alliances, arms buildups, propaganda, and conflicts in other countries, such as Korea and Vietnam (p. 339).
Historians usually split the conflict into phases:
The Cold War grew out of the failure of the "Big Three" Allies (the US, Britain, and the USSR) to agree on a lasting postwar settlement. They met at Yalta and Potsdam to plan the new order. Stalin saw the Eastern European lands that the Red Army had conquered as a Soviet sphere of influence. Disagreements about reparations and about how to occupy Germany added to the suspicion (p. 339).
The mistrust was much older than 1945. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the US had sent troops against the Red Army in the Russian Civil War. It then refused to recognize the Soviet Union when it was founded in 1922. The two countries fought on the same side in World War II only because they shared an enemy. Once Germany was beaten, little held them together (p. 340).
Leadership changes also mattered. President Franklin Roosevelt distrusted Stalin but still hoped to bring the Soviets into a cooperative postwar world. He died in April 1945. His successor, Harry Truman, shared Churchill's lack of illusions about the Soviets and chose a hard-line, anti-Soviet course (p. 339).
Plans for the postwar world had already begun with the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement of goals issued by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941. It led to the United Nations. The USSR was one of its founding members and held one of five permanent seats on the Security Council, along with the US, Britain, France, and China. The Charter also started planning for a new global economy, which produced the Bretton Woods system (1944) and then the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947). The Soviets rejected these economic arrangements (p. 340).
Two statements in early 1946 set the tone of the era. On February 22, George Kennan was a US diplomat in Moscow. He sent the State Department a very long telegram, now called the "Long Telegram." It described Soviet communism as a dangerous, expansionist force. He concluded that cooperation was impossible and that the USSR had to be "contained" (p. 338). In 1947 he repeated the argument in an article signed "Mr. X," urging a policy of "firm containment" (p. 340).
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill spoke while visiting Truman in Missouri. He said an "iron curtain" had come down across Europe and split it in half (pp. 338–339). The phrase became a lasting image of the line between the Soviet-dominated East and the democratic West.
Containment meant stopping the spread of Soviet and communist influence, rather than rolling it back by direct war. Two major programs put it into action in Europe.
The Truman Doctrine (March 1947). Britain could no longer afford to support Greece, where communist-led fighters threatened the government. Truman asked for $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey. He said the US should support free peoples resisting outside pressure. This idea became a cornerstone of containment and implied that the US would resist Soviet expansion anywhere (pp. 340–341).
The Marshall Plan (1948–1952). The winter of 1946–1947 was brutal. Blizzards halted coal output, factories closed, unemployment rose, and famine threatened. Communist parties in France and Italy won nearly a third of the seats in their parliaments. US officials feared that desperate people would turn toward the Soviets. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed large-scale aid, and the European Recovery Program followed. It sent about $13 billion to Western Europe over four years and lowered trade barriers. Its goals were to rebuild economies, open markets, and win support for capitalist democracy. Stalin saw it as a "Trojan Horse" meant to pull countries into the capitalist system (p. 341).
The Soviets answered the Marshall Plan with the Molotov Plan, a mostly symbolic aid pledge to Eastern Europe. The two plans divided Europe into rival economic and political blocs. Poland boycotted Marshall aid and was rewarded with a five-year, 200 million in American help. Stalin then called its foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, to Moscow. Masaryk said he went as the representative of an independent state and came back as a servant of the Soviet government. Stalin then tightened control over his "satellite" countries (p. 341).
Germany was occupied in zones, and Berlin was divided too, although the city lay deep inside the Soviet zone. In June 1948 the US, Britain, and France introduced a new currency in their zones. In response, the USSR blocked rail and road access to West Berlin, hoping to take control of the whole city. The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major Cold War crises. The US organized an airlift that flew in supplies for eleven months, until the Soviets ended the blockade on May 12, 1949 (pp. 341–342).
Germany was then formally split. The west became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in May 1949, and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that fall. Berlin stayed divided, and walls separated its two halves from August 1961 until November 1989 (p. 342).
Military alliances followed. In 1949 the US and Canada joined with Western European nations, including Britain, France, Italy, and Norway, to form NATO, a mutual defense pact. The USSR formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 with its satellite states, among them Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. This made the division of Europe military as well as economic (pp. 342–343).
The journalist Walter Lippmann helped popularize the term "Cold War" in his 1947 book. He imagined a long stalemate of words and ideas, not battles. He agreed that the USSR had to meet American power. But he called Kennan's plan "fundamentally unsound." In his view it would force the US to keep money and force ready to counter communism at constantly shifting points around the world. He preferred a limited commitment centered on the "heart" of Europe. He expected the Soviet system to collapse eventually from its own flaws if it were held back there (p. 343).
By 1949 the Cold War was no longer mainly about Europe. On October 1, 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong declared victory in China's civil war. Its opponent was the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek and backed by Western countries. The Kuomintang fled to the island of Taiwan. The CCP took the mainland and founded the People's Republic of China. (p. 343)
The timing mattered. The Soviets had tested an atomic bomb on August 29, only about a month before. Americans now saw the "loss of China," the most populous country on Earth, as a second major blow. Panic grew among US foreign policy makers, and their attention began to shift from Europe toward Asia. (p. 343)
Secretary of State Dean Acheson also changed his team. George Kennan, the author of containment, was replaced by Paul Nitze, a former investment banker. Nitze's first job was to help write a paper that would persuade top officials to approve a large increase in military spending. (p. 343)
That paper was NSC-68, issued in April 1950. It was a classified memo of nearly sixty pages. Its main claims were:
NSC-68 turned containment into a mainly military policy. Kennan and Lippmann belonged to a small group who warned that this "militarization of containment" was a serious mistake. Their warnings were ignored. (p. 344)
Why Korea was divided. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union jointly occupied Korea. That occupation led to a split. In November 1947 the UN called for one Korean government, but the USSR would not cooperate, so only the south held elections. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) was created, and a month later northern communists set up the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Each government claimed to speak for all of Korea. The UN recognized only the south, and fighting along the border never stopped. (pp. 344–345)
How the war unfolded. Kim Il Sung, the northern leader, wanted to take the South by force. His plan was influenced by Mao's victory. In spring 1950 Stalin reluctantly agreed. He did not want a direct fight with the US, but he expected China to help if the North got into trouble. The war then moved through clear phases:
Truman and MacArthur. During the stalemate MacArthur asked for permission to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and China. Truman refused, because he did not want to risk World War III. MacArthur then criticized the president in public. Truman fired him in April 1951. This showed that civilian leaders intended to keep the war limited. (p. 345)
Results. Korea stayed divided into a US-backed south and a communist north. More than 30,000 Americans died, and millions of Korean soldiers and civilians were killed. Because it came right after World War II and ended without a clear victory, many Americans called it a "forgotten war." (pp. 345–346)
The next major Asian conflict also grew out of the Cold War. France had colonized Vietnam, and Japan took it during World War II. Ho Chi Minh led Vietnamese nationalists, and the US had supported him against the Japanese. After Japan surrendered in 1945, his Viet Minh declared an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam. They even drew on the American Declaration of Independence. (p. 346)
France tried to take back its colony, and the United States sided with France instead of Vietnamese self-determination. Ho Chi Minh asked the Soviet Union for help, and a long war followed. (pp. 346–347)
France lost the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. A temporary settlement then split Vietnam in two: a north backed by the Soviets and Chinese, and a south backed by the US. To stop communism from spreading south, the US sent weapons and advisors, supported corrupt leaders, and blocked elections. In the end it sent over 500,000 troops, and nearly 60,000 of them died before the communists reunified the country. (p. 347)
A new kind of war. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed perhaps 180,000 civilians and changed warfare permanently. The Soviets sped up their own program, helped by "atom spies" like Klaus Fuchs, who stole secrets from the Manhattan Project. They tested a bomb on August 29, 1949, years before US officials expected. (p. 347)
Action and reaction. The US exploded the first hydrogen bomb on November 1, 1952. A hydrogen bomb uses fusion and has no clear upper limit on its power. The blast was over ten megatons. Its radioactive fallout circled the globe and raised alarm about health and the environment. The USSR tested its own hydrogen bomb in 1953. Each side's progress pushed the other to build better warheads and delivery systems. That cycle is an arms race. (p. 347)
Mutually assured destruction. Eisenhower announced "massive retaliation." The US would answer aggression with possibly its whole nuclear force. In theory neither side would start a war, because each could destroy the other. This logic is called mutually assured destruction (MAD). J. Robert Oppenheimer compared the two powers to "two scorpions in a bottle." Each could kill the other, but only by risking its own death. (pp. 347–348)
Atomic culture. Fear of nuclear war shaped daily life. Films such as Godzilla, Fail-Safe, and Dr. Strangelove explored these anxieties. Protesters warned of environmental disaster. Schoolchildren learned to "duck and cover" from a Federal Civil Defense Administration film starring Bert the Turtle. (pp. 348, 350)
Atoms for Peace. Nuclear power also carried hope. In a 1953 UN speech, Eisenhower offered to share atomic knowledge so other countries could use it for energy. The speech led to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Supporters promised power that was clean, safe, and "too cheap to meter." (pp. 348–349)
Shared German roots. At the end of World War II, both superpowers grabbed German V-2 rocket scientists, designs, and equipment. The V-2 could travel nearly 600 miles. Wernher von Braun led the American effort, and Sergei Korolev secretly ran the Soviet one. Both teams adapted the V-2 into the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and the same rockets could carry satellites into space. (p. 349)
Soviet firsts. The USSR led early on:
The US created NASA in 1958, but its early Vanguard rocket launches failed badly. Alan Shepard's short suborbital flight came on May 5, 1961, after Gagarin's orbit. Kennedy used these American losses to win support for a moon landing. (p. 349)
Science funding. After the embarrassment of Sputnik, Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1958, inside the Defense Department. ARPA worked with university engineers on the first packet-switching systems, which began to link computers into networks. (pp. 349–350)
The Red Scare was a wave of fear in the late 1940s and 1950s that communists were hiding inside American life. McCarthyism was its best-known form. The word means making reckless accusations of disloyalty without solid evidence. (p. 350)
Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, became famous on February 9, 1950. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he said he held a list of 205 communists working in the State Department. He had no such list. When reporters pressed him, the number dropped to 57 and later became 81. People laughed at the changing numbers, but the publicity still made him a national figure. (p. 350)
McCarthy did not create the fear. He used it. The fear came before him and lasted after him, so McCarthyism was a symptom of a wider panic. A journalist at the time made the same point: McCarthy exploited a fear that already existed. (pp. 350, 359)
Why was the fear so strong? In about ten months starting in 1949, the USSR tested an atomic bomb, China became communist, and over 300,000 American soldiers went to fight in Korea. Newspapers also ran many stories about Soviet spying. (p. 352)
The government set up many ways to look for "subversives."
Two spy cases made the panic worse.
Alger Hiss was a senior State Department official. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers told HUAC that the two had belonged to a secret communist group in Washington in the 1930s. Congressman Richard Nixon publicly pushed the accusation. Hiss said he was innocent. His first trial ended in a hung jury. In 1950 he was convicted of perjury, not espionage, because the time limit for charging espionage had passed. (p. 352)
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been CPUSA members in the 1930s. They were accused of passing atomic bomb information to the Soviets. They were indicted in August 1950, found guilty in March 1951, and executed on June 19, 1953. (p. 352)
Strong evidence of guilt appeared only later. Even so, the convictions pushed some people to see communists everywhere. McCarthy and others used the cases to claim a giant Soviet plot. They also used them to smear liberals who were themselves firmly anticommunist. (p. 352)
The CPUSA began after the 1917 Russian Revolution and worked in secret for its first two years. It went public in 1921. Communism stayed on the edge of American life until the 1930s. During the Great Depression, some leftists and liberals looked to the Soviet Union with hope. (p. 354)
In that decade, communists joined the Popular Front, an effort to make communism fit American history and culture. They allied with progressives in the Democratic Party. They gained influence in unions of the CIO. They fought Jim Crow and were active in the NAACP and ACLU. They also ran "front" groups, such as the League of American Writers, where some members did not know about the Comintern ties. (p. 354)
Even so, the party never won many Americans. At its peak it had only about 80,000 members. Most of its power was indirect, through coalitions with liberals. After the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, many members left feeling betrayed. Left-liberal anticommunists purged the remaining communists from their groups, and the Popular Front fell apart. By the time Congress passed the Communist Control Act in 1954, the party had little real influence. (pp. 354–355)
It is wrong to say that only right-wing conservatives drove the Red Scare. The domestic Cold War was bipartisan. It rested on an alliance of left-liberal and conservative anticommunists. (p. 355)
Several examples show this.
Many liberals disliked McCarthy's methods. They still shared his basic opposition to communism. (pp. 352, 355)
In fall 1947, HUAC held highly publicized hearings on Hollywood. Friendly witnesses, including Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, helped investigators look for communist influence. A group of writers, directors, and producers refused to answer questions. This group, the "Hollywood Ten," was held in contempt of Congress. Their case set the pattern for a blacklist that kept hundreds of film artists from working. (p. 355)
HUAC returned many times in the 1950s. Its famous question was whether a witness was, or ever had been, a Communist Party member. Many witnesses "named names," giving the names of anyone they knew who had links to communist-related groups. Those who refused risked their careers. Paul Robeson told HUAC in 1956 that he was being punished for fighting for his people's rights. His passport was revoked, and his music and films were hard to buy in the US. (pp. 355–356)
The Red Scare rewarded conformity. People who seemed to break the norms were in danger. (p. 356)
Movements for social justice, such as civil rights, gay rights, and feminism, were suppressed in this climate. (p. 360)
Religion became part of the fight too. McCarthy called the struggle a battle between "communistic atheism and Christianity." Leaders contrasted "godless communism" with God-fearing Americanism. Church attendance reached record levels. "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God We Trust" became the national motto in 1956. (pp. 356, 358)
This religion was broad. Leaders spoke of a shared Judeo-Christian heritage instead of attacking Catholics and Jews. Eisenhower said government needed religious faith, and he did not care which one. (p. 358)
McCarthy became chair of the Senate investigations subcommittee in 1953. He investigated the Voice of America and then the Army. On March 9, 1954, journalist Edward R. Murrow criticized him on CBS. About twenty million people watched the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Army counsel Joseph Welch asked McCarthy whether he had "no sense of decency." On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67–22 to condemn him. He died in 1957. (p. 359)
Red-baiting, smearing opponents by linking them to communism, outlasted him. Nixon used the Hiss case to rise to the vice presidency and presidency. Reagan used his testimony and his anticommunist work for General Electric to enter politics. The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, even called Martin Luther King Jr. a communist. (p. 360)
The Domino Theory said that if one country became communist, its neighbors would fall one after another. After China turned communist, US leaders used it to justify actions in Korea and Vietnam. It could be applied anywhere. Cuba, for example, was seen as a communist foothold that endangered Latin America. (pp. 360–361)
It is a mistake to think every nation the US opposed was committed to communism. Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro were revolutionary nationalists. Castro's turn toward communism came in earnest after the US rebuffed him. Many interventions were also driven by other motives, such as economic interests, not only by anticommunism. (p. 361)
After every earlier major war, the US had shrunk its army. After World War II it did not. The Cold War created a permanent, large defense establishment, and the spending touched the whole country (p. 361).
Different regions specialized in different parts of this system (p. 361):
Sociologist C. Wright Mills called this setup a "permanent war economy" in 1956. He argued that it corrupted a ruling "power elite" who might push the nation toward war to protect corporate profits (p. 361).
The most famous warning came from President Eisenhower. In his January 1961 farewell address, he said the military-industrial complex was the close alliance of the military, arms makers, and government. He feared its "unwarranted influence" could endanger liberties and democratic processes. Its reach, he said, was economic, political, and even spiritual, felt in every city and statehouse (pp. 361–362). Eisenhower meant mainly the domestic links among arms manufacturers, Congress, and the Defense Department. Critics argued these ties also shaped foreign policy, because the US needed overseas markets and good trade terms (p. 362).
After 1945, more than eighty countries gained independence, mostly from European rule. The US played a mixed role. Roosevelt had told Churchill in 1941 that it was hard to fight fascism while backing old colonial policy. But once the US focused on stopping Soviet power, officials opposed any independence movement that might be tied to communism (pp. 362–363).
The USSR also sought influence. It built client states in Eastern and Central Europe and supported left-wing liberation movements, especially anti-American ones. The result was many proxy wars in the Third World, where the superpowers backed opposing local sides (p. 363).
US planners hoped to build hegemony, power resting mostly on consent, rather than an empire, which rests on coercion. They believed successful decolonization would show that democracy and capitalism beat the Soviet model. But European powers still defended colonies, and the US often sided with them, which alienated nationalist leaders in Asia and Africa (p. 363).
To win public opinion, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948. It set up cultural exchanges, even with the USSR, to improve foreign views of America. The Soviets ran a similar "peace offensive" that was often judged more successful, so US officials feared they were losing the "war for hearts and minds" (p. 363).
The National Security Act of 1947 gave the US machinery for Cold War action. It placed the military under a new secretary of defense, created the National Security Council, and turned the wartime Office of Strategic Services into the permanent Central Intelligence Agency (p. 363). With broad agreement in both parties, anticommunism and "national security" became the logic behind interventions abroad (p. 363).
Two early CIA operations show the pattern (pp. 364–365):
Note that economic interests, such as oil and fruit plantations, mattered alongside fear of communism. The text also stresses that many targets, like Castro and Ho Chi Minh, were revolutionary nationalists who turned to communism partly after US rebuffs (p. 361).
Fidel Castro overthrew US-backed Batista in January 1959. The US first recognized his government. But Castro's land redistribution and nationalizations alarmed the Eisenhower administration, and many upper- and middle-class Cubans fled to Florida (p. 365).
Relations collapsed quickly (p. 365):
Cuba then moved closer to the USSR. In 1962, answering US nuclear weapons in Turkey and invited by Cuba, the Soviets placed missiles there. US spy planes found launch sites on October 14, and Kennedy told the nation on October 22. After days on the edge of nuclear war, the crisis ended October 28: the USSR withdrew its missiles, the US removed its missiles from Turkey, and the US pledged not to invade Cuba (pp. 365, 367).
Cuban emigration resumed in the mid-1960s. A 1965 deal reunited separated families, and the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act let Cuban refugees become permanent residents. Hundreds of thousands arrived, bringing strong anticommunism into American politics (p. 367).
Kennedy increased support for South Vietnam. Fewer than a thousand advisors were there when he took office; by late 1963 he had sent about fifteen thousand more personnel, preparing for direct intervention (p. 367).
At home, Black radicals such as Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. Du Bois linked American racism to European imperialism and backed global anticolonial movements. Soviet propaganda used Southern injustice to call the US hypocritical for claiming to defend freedom abroad. The Cold War thus tied the Black freedom struggle to the Third World (p. 367).
The Cold War ended quickly (p. 369):
Historians still debate whether conservative pressure or internal Soviet weakness and reform mattered more. Either way, the conflict killed tens of millions, reshaped American politics and culture, and changed the US role in the world (p. 369).
