The Cold War

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With the conflict and tension of Stalin taking over all of Germany with communism, Harry Truman who took over from Roosevelt after he died came in with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. These were put into place to aid countries from becoming communist state and from Stalin control. It also aided with recovery and building back of European countries that wanted to become democratic states. The Marshall Plan had been very effective in preventing the spread of communism in Western Europe and had created economically strong democratic allies for the USA. Stalin retaliated with the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) which was created in 1947 in Warsaw, Poland (Zubok, 2007). This was designed to spread communism and to protect states from US aggression. The USA saw Cominform as a serious challenge to the West. Relations between the superpowers deteriorated further. The Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine were very successful in creating a strong, democratic Western Europe. After the Berlin crisis of 1948-49, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was formed as a military alliance of most of the Western European countries and the USA. All members agreed to go to war if any one of them was attacked. Stalin tried to respond to the Marshall Plan with Comecon and to the Truman Doctrine with Cominform. When Stalin died in 1953 there was a ‘thaw’ in relations between the superpowers, but when West Germany joined NATO in 1955, Soviet fears were revived. The Warsaw Pact of 1955 was a military alliance controlled by the Soviet Union made up of all the communist Eastern European countries. This was the USSR’s response to NATO. Europe was now divided economically, politically and militarily into two armed gangs of hostile opponents.

When Stalin died in 1953, it appeared that the relationship between the USA and the USSR would improve. With the emergence of Khrushchev as Stalin’s successor in 1956, this belief seemed to take effect. However, Khrushchev was an old-school communist, with no wish to diminish the USSR’s status as a rival superpower to the USA. By the late 1950s, relations between the two states had deteriorated as a result of a series of crises: the Hungarian Uprising, the Arms Race and the Space Race. The communist satellite states of Eastern Europe expected that they too would benefit from destalinisation and the thaw. This was a mistake. Khrushchev could not allow the Eastern European states to go through a similar process of destalinisation, he believed that this would undermine communism in these countries, they might then break away from the USSR and it would lose its barrier against the capitalist West. Revolts against the USSR had broken out in East Germany in 1953 and in Poland in 1956; these had been put down mercilessly. In 1956 the people of Hungary also tried to break free from Soviet control.

Many Hungarians saw the thaw as an opportunity to break free from the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev could not allow this to happen. If the USSR backed down over Hungary, similar protects might have spread to other communist states in Eastern Europe. (This is what happened in 1989 when communism in Eastern Europe came to an end). The USSR invaded Hungary in November 1956, many were killed and many fled to the West. The USA, NATO and the West could do nothing to aid the Hungarians. To attempt to stop the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary would have been seen as an act of war. Despite all the tension between the USA and USSR, each could not afford to risk all-out nuclear with each other. Therefore, the USA held back from going to Hungary’s aid. The result of the Hungarian Uprising was to cause a further deterioration in relations between the USSR and USA.

Khrushchev wanted to prove that the USSR could hold its own with the USA. In sport, science, technology, military and diplomatic spheres, the USSR sought to show that it could compete and do better than the USA. This led to challenges, tension and conflict. The two most important areas of tension were known as the Arms and Space Races. In 1945 the USA had detonated two nuclear bombs over Japan to help bring an end to the Second World War. Japan was very nearly at the point of defeat before the nuclear bombs were used, so some historians believe that the USA wanted to use their atomic weapons in order to warn the USSR that they had weapons of mass destruction and were prepared to use them. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened just as the Cold War began. With the drop of the hydraulic bombs (H-Bomb) by the US killing over thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the USSR to a place of being on their defensive. The USSR challenged the West’s lead in nuclear weapons. By 1949 the USSR also had nuclear weapons. The Cold War became very much more serious in the 1950s as each of the superpowers built more and more atomic weapons. The growth in the huge stockpile of weapons was known as the Nuclear Arms Race. The Space Race was connected to the Arms Race (Swift, 2009). Until the late 1950s, long-range aircraft would have delivered nuclear weapons. But in the 1950s the USSR and the USA began to develop missile technology that would be able to put rockets into space. These rockets would be capable of delivering nuclear warheads across continents and at very high speeds. Both sides set about building Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMS) capable of travelling thousands of miles and killing tens of thousands of people. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957. By 1960 the USA had developed a missile system launched from submarines called Polaris. Both sides tried to locate missiles in friendly countries that neighboured their enemy – the USA had missiles in Turkey, the USSR tried to put missiles on Cuba in response. By 1963 the Arms and Space Races had brought the Cold War to the brink of all-out nuclear war. Both superpowers believed that possessing nuclear weapons would prevent the other power from going to war, this was known as nuclear deterrence. For years this brought stability to the world, however, both sides had nuclear weapons, so there was a chance they might be used. Between 1946-1962 there were over 800 disarmament meetings to try to reduce the Arms Race. In 1962 Khrushchev and President Kennedy pledged to consider disarmament seriously at the Geneva Disarmament Conference.

Discuss THREE factors which led to the end of the Cold War

It should be comprehended that the end Cold War was a multifarious event with back-and-forth factors involved over a decade. Factors which have played a major in speeding up the end of the Cold War will clearly elaborate the end of the Cold war known as the superpowers struggle from 1945-1991