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The Cold War: The Best One-Hour History
by Robert Freeman
5 Major Themes
Just as the events of the Cold War defined its milestones, its major themes defined its
character. They range from the conflicts in the “Third World” (itself an invention of the
Cold War) and McCarthyism, to arms races, economic conflicts, and détente. The events
and themes of the Cold War largely defined global culture in the last half of the twentieth
century.
A Truly World-Wide Conflict
World War I was essentially a European War. World War II included the Pacific theater
and parts of North Africa but was still really localized to Europe and the Pacific approach
to Asia. The Cold War on the other hand was a truly World-Wide War.
The Cold War included armed hostilities on every continent of the globe except
Antarctica and Australia. The contours of the conflict had been laid down in Europe and
many of its most critical battles were fought there. But fierce battles were also fought in
East and Southeast Asia, in Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and
Malaysia. Southwestern Asia was the site of many conflicts as well—several still
unsettled—including those in Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Iran, and Iraq.
Africa became the scene of dozens of wars between East and West, frequently with the
Americans and the Soviets using local forces as surrogates for their own forces. Nigeria,
Angola, Egypt, Congo and Ethiopia are all examples of such fighting. And wars in South
and Central America were frequently fought under the aegis of the larger Soviet versus
American conflict. Though not as many people would die in the Cold War as did in
World War II, the duration, the scope, the stakes, and the danger, made it even a greater
conflict for all the world.
The Last European Civil War
By 1945, Europe had been devastated by three continental civil wars in only 150 years:
the Napoleonic Wars; World War I; and World War II. Yet, from the very same ashes
sprouted the seeds of still another war, this one to be fought by the two surviving
descendants of European civilization, one from the West, one from the East.
The United States was genetically a true descendant of Europe. It was born as a full
expression of the European Enlightenment and grew to maturity on the science,
democracy and capitalism which, in all the world, only Europe had invented. The Soviet
Union was less fully European, an amalgam of European, Slavic and Asian influences.
But the communism which defined its ideology was entirely European, a reflection of
Karl Marx’s theory about the natural evolution of industrial capitalism.
Europe was not only the seed bed, but the staging ground for many of the War’s most
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critical battles. The Soviets controlled all of Eastern Europe and dominated conflicts in
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania. Communist parties
fought ferocious underground battles in France, Italy, and Greece. Even as the War
spread beyond the confines of Europe, to China, Africa, the Middle East, and South
America, it was always championed by one or another of these European-spawned
gladiators.
Containment
The doctrine which governed U.S. policy during the Cold War was known as
“Containment.” Containment was conceived by George F. Kennan, an official in the U.S
embassy in Moscow. It was first laid down in his “Long Telegram” to the State
Department in February 1946. It began with the assumption that the Soviet Union
possessed an “inherently neurotic view of world affairs.” As a result, wrote Kennan, it
was unable to compromise or work with Western countries. The Russians, according to
Kennan, were “impervious to reason but highly sensitive to the logic of force.”
The policy implications of Containment flowed directly from this last statement: the U.S.
must confront Soviet aggression wherever in the world it occurred. For the next two
decades, U.S. foreign and military policy would embody this prescription. In the Berlin
Blockade, in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, in the Middle East, and
in dozens of other places throughout the world, the U.S. would seek to thwart Soviet
advances and undermine governments viewed as favorable to Moscow.
By 1959, the U.S. was operating over 1,400 military installations surrounding the Soviet
Union, from Canada, Greenland and West Germany, to Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea,
Taiwan and Japan. Two hundred and seventy of these facilities contained missiles,
bombers or submarines capable of delivering nuclear weapons. This vast network of
bases encircling the Soviet Union was the direct expression of Containment translated
into military terms.
McCarthyism
Early Soviet gains in the aftermath of the War created an atmosphere of near-hysteria in
Washington. This mood was manipulated by right-wing demagogues who saw
Roosevelt’s New Deal, child labor laws, and even women’s suffrage as communist
inspired “red plots.” They claimed that Soviet-directed communist spies had infiltrated
the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the State and Defense Departments,
and that these spies were working to effect the overthrow of the U.S. itself. The most
celebrated of these fear mongers was Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy used his position as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Governmental
Operations to conduct a series of what became known as “witch hunts,” sham hearings in
which hundreds of people were smeared as being communists or communistsympathizers. The hearings became a device to destroy political opponents, using
rumors, innuendos, unsupported charges, and guilt by association. The FBI under the
leadership of its fervently anti-communist head, J. Edgar Hoover, supported McCarthy’s
campaign with forged documents, illegal searches, and whisper campaigns against all
manner of liberals and centrists.
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McCarthy’s methods and charges went unchallenged for years but eventually drew
rebuke from powerful opponents. When Harry Truman left office, he declared,
“It is now evident that the present administration has fully embraced, for political
advantage, McCarthyism…It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the
due process of law. It is the use of the Big Lie…It is the rise to power of the
demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of
faith in every level of society.”
Though thousands lost their jobs and saw their careers ruined, none of McCarthy’s
sensational charges were ever proven. In 1954 he was censured by the Senate for
violation of ethics and bringing disrespect to the Senate. Many laws that were written
under the hysterical influence of McCarthyism were later found to be unconstitutional.
Arthur Miller wrote the play, The Crucible, to characterize how easily a society under
stress can be manipulated by those wielding “theological” influence and seeking
illegitimate power. But the memories of how easily people had been destroyed scarred
many leading politicians including John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon,
all of whom vowed never to be seen as being “soft on communism.” This resolve led
each of them to prolong the Vietnam War long after it was known to have been lost.
Anti-Colonial/Anti-Imperial Complications
The Cold War was primarily about the conflict between Soviet and American systems.
But the main fighting was carried out not in the “First World” of the U.S. and its allies, or
in the “Second World” of the Soviets and its allies, but in the “Third World”—in Asia,
the Middle East, Africa and South America. This was the time that countries in these
regions were throwing off European colonial control. They were the prizes over which
both sides in the Cold War fought.
In much of the Third World, “Wars of National Liberation” were sponsored by the Soviet
and later Chinese governments. Immediately following World War II, British colonies in
Burma, India, Pakistan, and Nepal all sought independence. All would either confront or
adopt communist- or socialist-leaning governments. In 1949, the Dutch effort to retain
control of Indonesia against a communist insurgency produced one of the bloodiest, most
protracted battles of the Cold War. Before Vietnam was a U.S. war to contain
communism, it was a war by the Vietnamese to oust the French who had occupied it for
over a century. The same was true with Vietnam’s neighbors, Laos and Cambodia.
In Africa, such wars became a torrent. Between 1960 and 1964, England lost Nigeria,
Kenya, Botswana, and Rhodesia, all with communist-supported factions fighting. In
Angola and Ethiopia fighting continued for decades with the U.S. and Soviet Union
supplying and supporting respective proxies in each country. In the Middle East, former
European colonies Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, and the Sudan would all embrace the
communist cause and receive weapons, technical aid, and financial support from the
Soviet Union. Not all of these countries continued their amicable relations with the
Soviet Union and communism didn’t work well for any of them. But they used Soviet
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help to break the domination of Western imperial powers. In this way, they proved a
threat in the capitalist system’s global battle with communism.
Cold War as Economic War
All wars, if they last long enough, become contests of rival economic systems. Which
side can field and replace more men? Which side can back them up with more and better
weapons and supplies? Which side can support its civilian populations while still
carrying out sustained combat? And which side can better arm and enrich allies to fight
in its stead? As much as it was a war of weapons, ideas, and strategy, the Cold War was
a direct contest between two starkly different economic systems.
The communist system of the Soviet Union relied on central governmental planning for
economic decision-making and on group rewards for incentives. The capitalist system of
the United States used diffuse, market-based processes for decision-making and personal
self-interest for incentives. This was the essential ideological conflict of the Cold War.
The U.S. system won hands down.
U.S. leaders believed from the beginning that the capitalist system would beat the
communist system. They designed policies and economic institutions that reflected this
belief and carried the War to economic battlegrounds around the world. The Marshall
Plan poured $13 billion into Europe to help rebuild it from the destruction of World War
II. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank provided Western-leaning
countries with loans, currency reserves, and technical assistance to develop industrial,
resource, and agricultural systems. The “economic miracles” of Japan, Germany,
Korea, and Taiwan were as much political victories in the Cold War as they were
economic accomplishments for their respective peoples. They showed that the capitalist
system “delivered the goods” while no such exemplars could demonstrate equal success
with communism.
The Western economic system proved so superior to the Soviet system that by 1960, West
Germany had not only recovered from the devastation of World War II, it was producing
more than all of the economies of Eastern Europe combined! By the end of the Cold War,
thirty years later, the U.S. would be outspending the Soviets three-to-one in military terms
while out-producing them five-to-one in economic terms. More than missiles and
megatons, it was this vast superiority in economic productivity that eventually won the
Cold War for the West.
Arms Races
A race to see which side could build the greatest number and most sophisticated weapons
systems became a central feature of the Cold War. The “arms race,” as it became known,
actually began with the U.S. Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The arms
race took many forms. The first form focused on the destructive power of the weapons
themselves. Atom (A) bombs gave way to Hydrogen (H) bombs. Then, small H-bombs
became monstrously large H-bombs. The fifteen kiloton “Fat Man” A-bomb of
Hiroshima was quickly dwarfed by 20-, 30-, and 40-megaton H-bombs of the late 1950s,
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weapons that were thousands of times more powerful. Greater destructive power was
used to compensate for the inaccuracy of delivery vehicles.
Delivery systems themselves became another important dimension of the arms race.
Initially, bombs were to be delivered by airplanes—bombers. Then, propeller-driven
airplanes became jet powered. Then, nuclear warheads were placed atop missiles. Then,
missiles were mounted in submarines and on railroad cars to make them invulnerable.
Then, missiles were equipped with multiple warheads that could be targeted to different
destinations.
To ballistic missiles (those that passed through space) were added short-range missiles
that flew hundreds of feet above the ground and could reach their targets in minutes.
This prompted a frightful “launch on warning” imperative where, in the event of a
warning, both sides had to “use them or lose them.” Missile accuracy was improved to
the point that they could traverse the planet and land within yards of their target. And so
on in a seemingly unending search for advantage.
Finally, in addition to destructive power and delivery systems, the arms race focused on
sheer numbers. By the end of the Cold War, the U.S. possessed over 30,000 nuclear
warheads poised on a combination of air, land and sea-based delivery systems. The
Soviet Union possessed some 40,000 weapons on a similar range of delivery systems.
Since even a few hundred such weapons, if exploded, could have ended life on the planet,
the logic of the arms race had become almost clinically insane. It is this insanity itself
and the terror it inflicted on generations of the earth’s people that is one of the enduring
legacies of the Cold War.
Brutal Communist Repression
The Soviet Union was a brutal police state. Many of those countries which fell into its
orbit, its “satellites,” were police states as well, especially the countries of Eastern
Europe. Almost all communist leaders stayed in power by ruthlessly suppressing their
own people, using their armies to maintain order and vast internal police forces to spy on
their people. Dissidents in the Soviet Union were sent to prison camps in Siberia called
“Gulags.”
The Soviet Union encouraged its puppet states to use similar tactics on their people. In
1956, when the people of Hungary rose up to protest oppressive Soviet-backed rule, the
Soviet Union sent tanks to Budapest, the capital of Hungary, to put down the rebellion.
In East Germany, so many people were leaving to go to the West that in 1961 the
communist leadership had to build a wall—the Berlin Wall—to keep them imprisoned
within their own country. In 1968, when the people of Czechoslovakia protested
communist rule, they were rewarded with the same Soviet tanks and state-directed
violence which had defeated the uprising in Hungary 12 years before.
This behavior, and similar behavior in other communist countries, revealed the truth
about the Soviet and, later, Chinese systems: they were simply dictatorships
masquerading as “peoples’ republics.” Mao Zedong, the leader of communist China,
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revealed this truth with his slogan for the communist revolution: “Power comes from the
barrel of a gun.”
America’s Authoritarian Proxies
The Cold War was not the finest hour for the U.S. in terms of its choice of friends. Many
U.S. allies were themselves dictators, oppressing their people with no less brutality than
did the allies of the Soviet Union their people. But they had sworn their allegiance to the
capitalist system and to the U.S. and this made them tolerable, even favorable. In the
immediate aftermath of World War II, the U.S. supported a number of fascist
governments against the democratic resistance of their people. This included the
governments of Greece, mentioned above, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. In Italy, the U.S.
secretly intervened in national elections to throw the outcome to its slate of candidates
against a more popular communist party.
The U.S. installed a right-wing government in Japan that included leaders who had
fought against it in World War II. In Iran, in 1953, the U.S. overthrew the democratically
elected leader, Mohamed Mossadegh, who wanted to take back the country’s oil from the
one-sided contract the British has imposed in 1925. In his place, the U.S. installed a
puppet, the Shah of Iran, whose policies were notoriously brutal and “authoritarian” but
more to the liking of the U.S.
In Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, South Africa, Vietnam,
Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, and many other countries, the U.S. supported
repressive right-wing dictatorships in the belief that this was the only way to counter
communism. Most of these regimes brutally suppressed their people, much as Sovietsupported regimes did theirs. In many cases there was no real threat of communist
takeover but the U.S. needed them and their natural resources to continue to expand its
own empire and to carry out its larger global fight against communism.
In this manner, the U.S. betrayed its own ideal that people are entitled to “selfdetermination” as the Americans had demonstrated in their own Revolution of 1776.
During the final years of the Cold War, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, tried to make a distinction between “authoritarian” (right-wing) and
“totalitarian” (left-wing) states. It was a distinction without a difference and in
retrospect, many of these alliances simply provided ammunition for the communists to
label America as “imperialist.”
Detente
By the late 1960s, and especially following the near catastrophe of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, both the United States and the Soviet Union realized that aggressive confrontation
with each other would eventually lead to actual war and that such an event would destroy
not only both countries but, quite possibly, all life on the planet. In response to this
recognition, they adopted a policy of “agreeing to disagree,” or Détente.
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Détente was a “cooling off” between the rival superpowers. It began in the early 1970s
under the administrations of U.S. president Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev. The most immediate outcome of Détente was a series of agreements to limit
the size and number of nuclear weapons. The Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) Talks,
begun in 1969, led to the first reductions in nuclear weapons since the Cold War began.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed in 1972, prohibited each side from
fielding defensive missile systems. It remained the cornerstone of nuclear arms control
between the two countries for thirty years, until it was unilaterally abrogated by George
W. Bush in 2002.
By the late 1970s, however, Détente was seriously weakened. Soviet-supported Arab
states in the Middle East placed an embargo on oil being shipped to the West, seriously
damaging Western economies. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to quell
an Islamic revolution. The U.S. believed this was an attempt by the Soviets to gain
control of the vital oil fields of the Middle East on which the industrial world depended.
So, the U.S. abandoned Détente and did not ratify the second round of SALT agreements
which had also been reached in 1979.
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