Cold War

HISTORY PROJECT
Introduction
After the Second World War, the U.S.A. and Russia emerged as the two superpowers. During the war, there was a mutual understanding between the two nations, which however began to evaporate soon after the war. Difference in ideologies and mutual distrust between the two nations led to the beginning of cold war. Both tried to spread their influence and divided the world into two hostile groups.
The western European countries came under the influence of America while the eastern European countries came under the sway of communist Russia. This was a state of extreme unfriendliness, although no actual war was fought. During this period, both the superpowers formed various military alliances such as NATO, SEATO, CENTO, Warsaw Pact and the Baghdad Pact. This also led to a mad race of armaments by both the blocs.
It led to the existence of two universal ideologies in conflict, and two different self-images, the United Stated championing a world made safe for democracy. Its opponent, the Soviet Union advocated world Communism

Origins of the term
At the end of World War II, English author and journalist George Orwell used cold war, as a general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare, Orwell wrote:
"For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the imposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbours."
In The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that "after the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire."
The first use of the term to describe the post–World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its satellites and the United States and its western European allies is attributed to Bernard Baruch, an American financier and presidential advisor. In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech saying, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency, with the book The Cold War; when asked in 1947 about the source of the term, he referred it to a French term from the 1930s, la guerre froide.

Causes
The cause of the Cold War is debatable. Because the Cold War doubles as a conflict between two countries (the USA and the USSR) and between two ideologies (Capitalism and Communism) several different causes can be suggested.
Russian Revolution
Because Capitalism and Communism are usually seen as antithetical, it can be argued that the Cold War began when Communism began, in 1917 with the Russian Revolution. Or, if not quite in 1917, then in early 1920s, when Lenin and his Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Russia and tried to spread Communism to the West, to Europe on the blade of their swords—although they were rather quickly unsuccessful, being defeated by the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921).
In World War I, the US, 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. This separate peace contributed to American mistrust of the Soviets, since it left the Western Allies to fight the Central Powers alone.
As a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia followed by its withdrawal from World War I, Soviet Russia found itself isolated in international diplomacy. Leader Vladimir Lenin stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement" and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with the establishment of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals abroad. Tensions between Russia (including its allies) and the West turned intensely ideological. The landing of U.S. troops in Russia in 1918, which became involved in assisting the anti-Bolshevik Whites in the Russian Civil War helped solidify lasting suspicions among Soviet leadership of the capitalist world. This was the first event which made Russian–American relations a matter of major, long-term concern to the leaders in each country.

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Another commonly argued cause of the Cold War is, fittingly enough, the beginning of World War II in Europe: 1939. The Soviet Union, now under Stalin, had signed a secret pact with Germany's Hitler, and both countries attacked Poland in September of that year.
In 1939, after conducting negotiations with both a British-French group and Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a Commercial Agreement providing for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, commonly named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (Molotov–Ribbentrop)
One week after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's signing, the partition of Poland commenced with the German invasion of western Poland. Relations between the Soviet Union and the West further deteriorated when, two weeks after the German invasion, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland while coordinating with German forces. The Soviet Union then invaded Finland, which was also ceded to it under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocol, resulting in stiff losses and the entry of an interim peace treaty granting it parts of eastern Finland.
On June 22, 1941, Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union through the territories that the two countries had previously divided. Stalin switched his cooperation from Hitler to Churchill. Britain and the Soviets signed a formal alliance. The British and Poles strongly suspected that Stalin was cooperating with Hitler. Still, the Soviets and the Western Allies were forced to cooperate, despite their tensions.

World War II
However, the most popular cause of the Cold War was not the beginning, but the end of World War II: 1945. Stalin, after being betrayed by Hitler in 1941, finished the war on the Allied side, but the tensions between the victorious Western Powers and the USSR were already in evidence. The USSR was gobbling up the countries East of Germany, and part of Germany itself, which made the Americans and British somewhat hesitant. The British feared too strong a Soviet presence in Europe and the Americans wanted a free and open Germany which would become a large market for its products. The Soviets stood in the way to both. In fact, American General George Patton once famously remarked that when the Americans had gotten to Berlin, they should have kept going on to Moscow!
The Allies disagreed about how the European map should look, and how borders would be drawn, following the war. Each side held dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security. The western Allies desired a security system in which democratic governments were established as widely as possible, permitting countries to peacefully resolve differences through international organizations. However, the Soviet Union sought to increase security by dominating the internal affairs of countries that bordered it.
Finally, probably the latest starting date and cause for the Cold War that's been argued is 1947, the year in which the Soviets acquired the knowledge to make nuclear weapons. Because the Cold War is so heavily wrapped up into nuclear technology—and technology in general—some will argue that it was caused by the Soviet challenge to American nuclear power, which had been demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Events
Post-war Vision
Truman worked tirelessly to clean up the post-war mess and establish a new international order. He helped create the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and funded the rebuilding of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur. After prosecuting Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, Truman in 1947 also outlined the Marshall Plan, which set aside more than $10 billion for the rebuilding and reindustrialization of Germany. The Marshall Plan was so successful that factories in Western Europe were exceeding their pre-war production levels within just a few years
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Although Stalin joined with the United States in founding the United Nations, he fought Truman on nearly every other issue. He protested the Marshall Plan as well as the formation of the World Bank and IMF. In defiance, he followed through on his plan to create a buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany by setting up pro-Communist governments in Poland and other Eastern European countries. As a result, the so-called iron curtain soon divided east from West in Europe. Stalin also tried unsuccessfully to drive French, British, and American occupation forces from the German city of Berlin by blocking highway and railway access. Determined not to let the city fall, Truman ordered the Berlin airlift to drop food and medical supplies for starving Berliners.

Yalta Conference

The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4–11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. The conference convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta, in the Crimea.
The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, Yalta became a subject of intense controversy. To some extent, it has remained controversial.
All three leaders were trying to establish an agenda for governing post-war Germany. Churchill's attitude towards the Soviet Union differed vastly from that of Roosevelt, with the former believing Stalin to be a "devil"-like tyrant leading a vile system.

Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological conflict and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolized efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its dependent and central European allies off from open contact with the west and non-communist areas. On the East side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the former Soviet Union. On either side of the Iron Curtain, states developed their own international economic and military alliances: * Member countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact, with the Soviet Union as the leading country. * Member countries of the European Community and of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and associated countries with the United States as the leading country.
Physically, the Iron Curtain took the form of border defences between the countries of Europe in the middle of the continent. The most notable border was marked by the Berlin Wall and its Checkpoint Charlie which served as a symbol of the Curtain as a whole.

Formation of United Nations
After the League of Nations failed to prevent World War II (1939–1945), there was widespread recognition that humankind could not afford a third world war. Therefore, the United Nations was established to replace the flawed League of Nations in 1945 in order to maintain international peace and promote cooperation in solving international economic, social, and humanitarian problems. Franklin D. Roosevelt first coined the term 'United Nations' as a term to describe the Allied countries. The term was first officially used on 1 January 1942, when 26 governments signed the Atlantic Charter, pledging to continue the war effort. On 25 April 1945, the UN Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco, attended by 50 governments and a number of non-governmental organizations involved in drafting the United Nations Charter. The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945 upon ratification of the Charter by the five then-permanent members of the Security Council—France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Berlin Airlift
Post war German was divided into three sectors-the allied part was controlled by the United States, Great Britain and France and the other part by the Soviet Union. The city of Berlin, although located in the eastern soviet half, was also divided into four sectors-West Berlin occupied by Allied interests and East Berlin occupied by Soviets. In June 1948, the Soviet Union attempted to control all of Berlin by cutting surface traffic to and from the city of West Berlin. Starving out the population and cutting off their business was their method of gaining control. The Truman administration reacted with a continual daily airlift which brought much needed food and supplies into the city of West Berlin. This Air Bridge lasted until the end of September of 1949-although on May 12, 1949, the Soviet government yielded and lifted the blockade.

NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was born shortly after World War II ended. At that time, large numbers of Soviet troops remained in Eastern Europe as occupation forces. Governments set up by these forces were pro-communist and have come to be called the Warsaw Pact countries. Besides the USSR, these countries include Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.
Because of the threat posed by the large numbers of Soviet troops along the border of West Germany, 15 Western nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or sometimes called, the Atlantic Alliance, in 1949. The member nations agreed that an attack on any one of them would be considered an attack against all.
Warsaw Pact
Similar to the NATO the Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defence organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states.
The Warsaw Pact, so named because the treaty was signed in Warsaw, included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. The treaty called on the member states to come to the defence of any member attacked by an outside force and it set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. They aimed for a communist establishment whereas NATO aimed for democratic establishment as a result the alliances were against each other in the Cold war.
Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and her main allies in the Warsaw Pact – Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary and Poland – invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to halt Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring political liberalisation reforms.
In the operation, codenamed Danube, 500,000 troops attacked Czechoslovakia; approximately 500 Czechs and Slovaks were wounded and 108 killed in the invasion. The invasion successfully stopped the liberalisation reforms and strengthened the authority of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
The United States and NATO largely turned a blind eye to the evolving situation in Czechoslovakia. While the Soviet Union worried it might lose an ally, the United States had absolutely no desire on gaining it.
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin.
The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period.
The Korean War
Cold War tensions between the United States and the USSR eventually exploded in Korea when Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in1950. Determined not to let Communism spread in East Asia, Truman quadrupled military spending and ordered General MacArthur to retake the southern half of the peninsula. MacArthur succeeded and then pushed the North Koreans almost up to the Chinese border. Threatened, over a million soldiers from Communist China poured into Korea, forcing MacArthur to retreat back to the 38th parallel, which had originally divided North Korea from South Korea.
When MacArthur began to criticize Truman publicly for his unwillingness to use nuclear weapons in Korea, Truman was forced to fire his top general for insubordination. United States forces remained entrenched at the 38th parallel for two more years, at the cost of more than 50,000 American lives. Both sides declared a cease-fire only after the new U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatened to use nuclear weapons in 1953.

The Cuban Crises
The Cuban Missile was a 13-day confrontation between the Soviet Union and Cuba on one side, and the United States on the other, in October 1962. It was one of the major confrontations of the Cold War, and is generally regarded as the moment in which the Cold War came closest to turning into a nuclear conflict. It is also the first documented instance of the threat of mutual assured destruction being discussed as a determining factor in a major international arms agreement.
After provocative political moves and the failed US attempt to overthrow the Cuban regime (Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose), in May 1962 Nikita Khrushchev proposed the idea of placing Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba to deter any future invasion attempt. During a meeting between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro that July, a secret agreement was reached and construction of several missile sites began in the late summer. Such a move would also neutralize the US's advantage of having missiles in Turkey. These preparations were noticed and on 14 October, a US U-2 aircraft took several pictures clearly showing sites for medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles (MRBMs and IRBMs) under construction. These images were processed and presented on October 15, which marks the beginning of the 13-day crisis from the US perspective.
The United States considered attacking Cuba via air and sea, but decided on a military blockade instead, calling it “quarantine" for legal and other reasons. The US announced that it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba, demanded that the Soviets dismantle the missile bases already under construction or completed, and return all offensive weapons to the USSR. The Kennedy administration held only a slim hope that the Kremlin would agree to their demands, and expected a military confrontation.
The confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when Kennedy and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached an agreement with Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba.
End of Cold War
In the late 1980s, the Cold War came to a dramatic end. The economies of nations behind the Iron Curtain were in trouble. People in East Germany, for instance, could see the prosperity and wealth of their West German neighbours. In Russia, there were long lines of people waiting to buy food. They had to have coupons from the government just to buy socks. Some historians believe that the trillions of dollars that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. spent on nuclear arms and conventional armies had caused the problems in Russia. There was also a lot of pent up demand for freedom in the citizens living behind the Iron Curtain.
These forces came to a head in the 1980s. Russia responded by electing Mikhail Gorbachev as the leader of the U.S.S.R. The new leader decided to loosen the repression on liberties that the old governments had used to keep people in line. The new leaders found they couldn't control the desires of their people and those in Iron Curtain countries. * 1985 — Gorbachev comes to power. * 1987 — Reagan and Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in Washington. It removes more than 2,600 medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe. * March 1989 — Hungary decides to allow free elections and take down the fence between Hungary and Austria. Gorbachev says he will not stop the moves. * June 1989 — Poland holds its first free elections. The Solidarity (labour) Party beats the Communists. * October 1989 — East German leaders celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Communist GDR. Two days later 70,000 protesters demand an end to the regime. Russian troops stay in their barracks and GDR soldiers and police back down. Communist leader Honecker is voted out of office by the Politburo. * November 1989 — Soldiers in East Berlin open some of the gates in the Berlin Wall. Crowds respond by tearing the wall down. * November 1989 — Bulgaria’s communist party leader resigns. Free elections held in June, 1990. * December 1989 — Protesters in Czechoslovakia jangle keys in front of the government saying, "Your time is up." The government gives up without violence, and elections are held. * December 1989 — Romanian communist forces kill 73 in riots. Crowds storm the government and later capture the leader Ceausescu. He and his wife are tried and executed. Elections are held. * June 1991 — In Yugoslavia, the provinces of Croatia and Slovenia declare their independence igniting a decade of fighting and genocide. Eventually, the country splits into Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the region of Kosovo. * August 1991 — Russian military leaders put Gorbachev under house arrest and take over governing in order to save the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian Republic, occupies the Parliament building, defying the coup. The Army backs down. * December 1991 — The republics of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine act to dissolve the Soviet Union, finally freeing Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

Conclusion

The Cold War period includes many high and low points for the two superpowers and the world as a whole. Perhaps the greatest threat to all was the distinct possibility of nuclear annihilation. While that didn’t occur, it could have, and some of these turning points they’ve considered may have made the difference. Through a series of treaties and agreements, the U.S. and Russia have begun to reduce the numbers of nuclear warheads each possesses. The fact is that the jury is still out: some of the most well-informed scholars of our day disagree on the effects of various policies and decisions made by our Cold War presidents. What may be still more important, however, are the lessons we should be applying to our post-Cold War world.