The Cold War

Origins

The Cold War emerged from the deteriorating relationship between the Western Allies (the United States and the United Kingdom) and the Soviet Union in the final phase of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The wartime alliance had been an alliance of necessity rather than shared political commitment. By the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, mutual suspicion had substantially replaced wartime cooperation. By 1946 — the year of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri (5 March 1946) and George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” articulating the case for U.S. containment of Soviet expansion (February 1946) — the strategic outlines of the subsequent four decades were substantially settled.

The triggers of the open Cold War in 1947–1948 were the Truman Doctrine (March 1947, pledging U.S. military and economic support for non-communist governments resisting “armed minorities or outside pressures”), the Marshall Plan (June 1947, $13 billion in U.S. economic aid to rebuild non-communist Western Europe), the Czechoslovak coup (February 1948, Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia), the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 – May 1949, Soviet attempt to force the Western Allies out of West Berlin, broken by the Berlin Airlift), and the formation of NATO on 4 April 1949 — the binding mutual-defence alliance between the Western European democracies, the United States, and Canada.

The early Cold War

The Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons in 1949 (the first Soviet atomic test was on 29 August). The U.S. nuclear monopoly that had ended the Pacific War in 1945 was over within four years. Both sides began to build the nuclear stockpiles that would define the strategic balance of the next four decades.

The first major Cold War proxy war was the Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953), in which a North Korean invasion of South Korea produced United Nations intervention (substantially American) on behalf of the South and Chinese intervention on behalf of the North. The war killed approximately 3 million people including 36,000 American military dead. It produced the demarcation of the 38th parallel as the dividing line between North and South Korea — a line that remains in effect 70 years later — and confirmed that the post-1945 international order would be substantially structured around military competition between the two superpower-led alliances.

The 1950s saw the arms race intensify with the development of the hydrogen bomb by both sides (1952 U.S., 1953 USSR), the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles by both sides (USSR 1957, U.S. 1959), the Sputnik launch (4 October 1957, initiating the Space Race), and the political-cultural articulation of mutual deterrence under the strategic doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The closest the Cold War came to nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had authorized the deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles to Cuba, partly to compensate for the substantial U.S. advantage in deployed ICBMs and partly in response to the previous American deployment of Jupiter missiles to Turkey. The crisis was resolved through 13 days of intense diplomatic and military signaling between Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy, eventually producing a Soviet withdrawal of the Cuban missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret agreement to withdraw the Turkish Jupiters.

The crisis produced the direct Moscow-Washington hotline (1963) and a substantial reduction in the political tolerance of either side for further direct nuclear-confrontation crises. The pattern of the subsequent Cold War shifted toward intensifying proxy conflicts in the developing world.

Détente and proxy wars

The 1960s and 1970s produced both substantial proxy conflicts and substantial periods of negotiated arms control. The Vietnam War (1955–1975, with substantial American military involvement 1965–1973), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989), the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), and the Nicaraguan-American conflict of the 1980s were all wars at the Cold War’s geographic periphery in which proxy forces fought one side or the other of the superpower confrontation.

The parallel détente of the 1969–1979 period produced the SALT I (1972) and SALT II (1979) arms-control treaties, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), the Helsinki Accords (1975) on European security and human rights, and substantial Soviet-American summit-level diplomacy. The détente broke down at the end of the 1970s under the convergent pressure of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979), the Iran hostage crisis (1979–1981), and the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency (November 1980).

End

The Cold War ended substantially through political-economic developments within the Soviet Union itself during the 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of the Soviet leadership in March 1985 produced the political reforms of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), explicit Soviet abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine of military intervention to preserve Communist governments in Eastern Europe, and substantial arms-control progress (the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991).

The Eastern European satellites collapsed in 1989: Poland’s Solidarity-led government in June, the Hungarian opening of the Austrian border in September, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution in November–December, and the Romanian revolution (with the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu) on 25 December 1989. The Soviet Union itself dissolved on 26 December 1991 after the August 1991 coup attempt, the Belavezha Accords (8 December 1991), and Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation on Christmas Day 1991. The 44-year Cold War was over.

Legacy

The Cold War shaped the political-territorial, military-strategic, economic, technological, cultural, and intellectual landscape of the second half of the 20th century. It produced the United Nations system, the European Union, modern American military-political dominance, the post-1989 transition of Eastern Europe into the European Union and NATO, the substantial technological developments associated with the space race and the early development of the computer industry, the contemporary American political-cultural identification with the defence of liberal-democratic government, and the Russian-American geopolitical-strategic relationship that has continued (in modified form) to define great-power politics into the 21st century.

The Cold War also produced approximately 100 million dead worldwide through its various proxy wars, communist-state political violence (the Soviet purges, the Cambodian genocide, the Chinese Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution), and the political-economic disruption of the early post-colonial period.