Introduction

American and Soviet tanks facing each other across the dividing line in Berlin, 1961. From the U.S. Army Archives.

The Cold War was an ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that simmered, with varying degrees of intensity, between the end of World War II and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The “war,” in which the two sides never fought each other directly, was more like a mutual obsession; each side’s foreign policy was primarily based on trying to counter the other. Each side viewed the other as an active and existential threat that was trying to conquer the world. That view was clearly incorrect, but leaders on both sides pushed it anyway; stirring up fear of a foreign enemy makes people rally around their government in self-defense.

Even prior to World War II, the US and the USSR were antagonistic towards each other. The US did not officially recognize the USSR until 1933, sixteen years after the October Revolution; the capitalist nation, like most of Western Europe, was anti-communist by nature. The Soviet leadership, for its part, combined a traditional Russian distrust of the West with Marx’s assertion that capitalist nations would inevitably try to destroy a communist state. This mutual antagonism was suspended during World War II for the sake of defeating the common enemy of fascism. After the war, the distrust flared up again, this time almost resulting in a third world war.

This chapter will cover the beginning of the Cold War and narrate the chronology of the conflict until the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which began a new period of reduced tensions known as détente.

The Division of Europe and the Truman Policy

Long before the war in Europe ended, allied leaders began considering how they would rebuild Europe and Japan when the fighting ended. Winston Churchill distrusted Josef Stalin and wanted to ensure that the Soviets would not occupy any countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, from which they might threaten British colonial shipping in the future. The British, however, would find themselves too impoverished after the war to push their plans very hard. President Roosevelt was much more concerned that fascism would rise again from the ashes; he emphasized promoting democracy, to prevent the re-establishment of fascism, rather than preparing to counter the communists.

In order to understand the Cold War and how it began, it is very important to understand Josef Stalin’s motivations, which were the subject of much debate in the West. Soviet leadership was very distrustful of the West. Germany had twice invaded Russia (in the world wars), and several Western nations had invaded Russia with a multinational force to prevent the Russian Revolution from succeeding. Furthermore, the imperial powers (Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands) had several hundred years of world conquest and domination to their names, and even the United States had a history of strong-arming Latin American nations (particularly Panama). It was no great leap for Stalin, already notably paranoid, to conclude that the West would attack him once again.

When Stalin reflected on the Soviet experience in World War II, he noted two events which prevented a catastrophic loss to Germany. The first was his pre-war industrialization program, which had given the USSR the necessary production capacity (though just barely) to defeat the fascists. Therefore, he continued this heavy industry program after the war. Second, his annexation of half of Poland in 1939 gave him a sufficient buffer zone – again, just barely – to prevent Nazi forces from reaching Moscow. Therefore, fearing another attack from the West after World War II, he decided that only another buffer zone between the Soviet Union and the West would save his nation in the next war, and he began to create just such a buffer. The freedom of the people living in that buffer zone was of little, if any, concern to him.

One of the stipulations of the Declaration of United Nations was that the Allies would seek no territorial expansion as a result of the war. Stalin agreed to this, but also knew that there were ways to control countries other than outright annexation. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, the Soviet Union occupied the eastern part of Germany (west to the Elbe River), as well as all of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. The allied leaders held wartime conferences to determine what to do with these occupied countries after the war. They agreed to allow the people of these nations to hold elections and determine their own form of government. However, through manipulation and coercion, Stalin engineered the elections in Soviet-occupied countries to ensure that the local socialist parties would win (except in Austria, which was administered by a joint Western-Soviet force until its independence as a democracy in 1955). In Czechoslovakia, when manipulation wasn’t enough, Stalin even encouraged a socialist coup. Next, Stalin consolidated control by merging the new governments’ security forces with those of the USSR and imprisoning or executing independent-minded socialists who would not obey Moscow. The process was over by 1949, and Stalin got his buffer zone of satellite states between himself and the West without technically violating the Declaration of United Nations.

Yugoslavia was an interesting exception to the increasing polarization between the Western democracies and the USSR. The Nazis occupied the nation during World War II and several resistance groups fought the fascist invaders. The largest of these was a socialist cadre led by Josip Tito. When the Germans retreated from Yugoslavia, Tito and his men declared Yugoslavia a socialist state, but one which was not under Soviet sway (much to Stalin’s indignation). This socialist state declared itself part of the neutral “non-aligned movement” and even received some economic aid from the United States. This was the first split among communist nations, demonstrating that communism was not a monolithic bloc bent on world conquest. There would soon be other splits and disagreements among communist nations.

The disposition of Germany was even more complicated than Eastern Europe. The democracies and the USSR wanted to rebuild Germany but could not agree on what type of political or economic structures to create; obviously, each side believed in different systems. Furthermore, the Soviets wanted Germany to pay large reparations to them for the damage caused by the war, and the Western nations did not want to saddle the new Germany with debts it could not pay. Their meetings to iron out these differences went nowhere. Tensions increased between the communist East and the capitalist West, with the war barely over.

The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and disagreements over Germany, made the Western allies highly suspicious. In his writings, Karl Marx had advocated for overthrowing every capitalist nation on earth in a crusade to free the proletariat from their bourgeois masters. Noting Stalin’s authoritarianism, many Western leaders, including President Harry S. Truman of the United States, believed that Stalin’s domination of Eastern Europe represented the first step in a plan to conquer Western Europe, or perhaps even the entire world, in the name of communism. (This author, who grew up during the Cold War, remembers hearing “the communists want to take over the world” more times than he can count.) This, however, was not the case. Although Stalin no doubt would have enjoyed being dictator of the globe, he realized that conquering the world, or even just Europe, was an impossible task and one which was likely to get him killed. Unlike Hitler, Stalin was not an adventurer, and he certainly was not an idealist who would risk war for the sake of the proletariat or anyone else. He was a careful, cold-hearted strategist who knew how to negotiate, compromise, and even retreat if the risk was too great.

President Truman’s view of Stalin and the Soviet Union was overwhelmingly negative. Truman hated communism and viewed the USSR with great suspicion. But Truman, who became president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, had almost no foreign policy experience and lacked the credibility of his long-serving predecessor. He took advice from many different people, including George Kennan, a State Department official who advised a policy of “containment,” or restricting the further spread of communist governments. Furthermore, Truman, like Stalin, had learned lessons from World War II. Western leaders looked back on the Munich Conference, which gave Hitler a green light in Czechoslovakia, as a naïve attempt at bargaining with dictators. Hitler had, of course, negotiated in bad faith and betrayed the agreement. The lesson from this, Western leaders agreed, was that dictators cannot be trusted and must be dealt with forcefully. Stalin was not Hitler, but Truman could not be sure of the Soviet leader’s intentions. In the end, Truman heeded the guidance of his more hawkish advisors (although Kennan later thought the US was being far too aggressive with the USSR) and decided that isolationism was not the path the US would follow after the war. Now, the US would stay engaged in the global community to prevent the spread of communism. This decision would forever change US foreign policy.

The proximate cause of the new policy was the civil war raging in Greece after World War II. Communist rebels in Greece, having previously fought their Nazi occupiers, now continued their armed struggle against the right-wing Greek government. (Interestingly, while Yugoslavia and Albania supported the Greek communists, Stalin wanted to end the war, because he felt that it would antagonize the Western allies. This is a good example of Stalin’s willingness to compromise, when necessary, as well as of the policy split between communist countries.) Determined not to allow a communist stronghold on the Mediterranean, the British dispatched troops to train and equip the new Greek army; however, as impoverished as the UK was after the war, they could not afford to continue this effort. The British government informed President Truman that the only way to prevent a communist victory was for the US to take up the fight and supply the Greek government. This was a profound moment in history: the mighty British Empire, the largest in history, was now offering the torch of world leadership to the United States.

Truman accepted the offer. In a 1947 address before a joint session of Congress, Truman announced a new American strategy, soon known as the Truman Doctrine: “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Although diplomacy forced Truman to use vague language, when he said, “armed minorities,” he meant communists, and “outside pressures” meant the USSR, and everyone knew it. The speech was met with broad approval. Two months later, the US sent $400 million in economic and military aid to Greece. It worked; the communists were defeated in 1949. Thus, the Greek Civil War was the first confrontation of the Cold War. From now on, the US would base its foreign policy on anticommunism, and would remain deeply entrenched in world affairs, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Next, Truman launched a huge economic aid package to support the new doctrine. It was named the Marshall Plan after Secretary of State George Marshall, whose office was the main source of the plan. One problem that the United States faced was that the poverty of Western European nations might benefit socialist parties who would take advantage of the situation to advocate for political change. Furthermore, Europe’s poverty was preventing it from buying US goods, stymying US economic growth. A large aid package would stimulate the Western European economy, reducing poverty. Finally, providing aid to Europe would make those nations dependent on the United States, making it the dominant power in the West.

The United States was the only nation in the world with the financial means to create a continent-wide aid package. The program, amounting to $13 billion, was an economic success, and proved even better as a marketing campaign for American friendship and leadership. Although the US offered the USSR and their satellite states a portion of the money, Stalin rejected the offer and forbade his satellites from accepting it – much to Truman’s relief, since he didn’t really want to provide funds to the communists anyway. The offer was just for propaganda purposes.

The next major conflict in the Cold War came only months after the Marshall Plan was implemented. To understand the Berlin Airlift, one must understand the disposition of the city of Berlin after the war. The nation of Germany was split into zones of control mainly along the final battle lines of the war, with the US, UK, and France controlling different sectors west of the Elbe River, and the USSR controlling the region of Germany to the east. Wartime agreements divided up the capital of Berlin in the same way; the Western allies controlled the western half of the city, and the Soviets had the eastern half. However, the entire city was one-hundred and ten miles inside the Soviet-controlled part of Germany, meaning that it was surrounded by communist forces, and was linked to the Western region by a handful of rail, road, and air corridors. This meant that the Soviets could cut off the city from the West at will as a means of applying pressure – but such a move might trigger a war.

Frustrated with Soviet delays in establishing German economic policy, the United States unilaterally decided to create a new currency for Germany, without Soviet input. The Soviets retaliated by cutting off the land routes to Berlin in June, 1948. Stalin’s plan was to starve West Berlin, so that its citizens would have to ask the Soviets for food and fuel. Stalin would then use that dependency to extort the West into compliance. The problem with this plan was that the Americans might view the blockade as cause for war. To avoid this, Stalin allowed the air routes to Berlin to remain open to the West. Stalin believed that airlift capacity alone would not be able to supply West Berlin with everything it needed to survive; aircraft cannot carry nearly as much cargo as trains. Therefore, Stalin believed that he could bring the West to heel without risking a war.

The allies, who were as keen as Stalin to avoid a war, responded with the Berlin Airlift, the operation to supply West Berlin strictly by air. Over the course of fifteen months, they did exactly what Stalin said they could not, supplying West Berlin entirely by air, with British and American planes landing in Berlin every thirty seconds at the airlift’s peak. Finally, Stalin recognized that his plan had backfired; not only had he failed to starve West Berlin, but he had made himself look like a villain, and the democracies like saviors, to the people of West Berlin. He lifted the blockade. But West Berlin would remain the hot spot of the Cold War, forever tense and determined; its residents proudly called their city “Front-Line Berlin.”

This economic war for Berlin finally killed Western hopes for accommodation with the Soviets over reunifying Germany. In May 1949, the Allies declared that their part of Germany, west of the Elbe River, would now be an independent state, the Federal Republic of Germany (more commonly known in English as West Germany). The only part of Western Germany which did not immediately join the new nation was the province of Saarland, still under French occupation; it joined West Germany in 1957. West Berlin was also a part of West Germany, isolated though it was. The capitol city was Bonn, and the new country was founded as a capitalist democracy, closely allied with the West. The Soviets responded five months later by creating the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany, in their zone of occupation. The mirror image of West Germany, East Germany was a socialist state in the image of the USSR, and indeed served as a satellite state of that nation. The capitol was East Berlin. Stalin proposed a re-unification of the two countries in 1952, but the West did not trust Stalin to negotiate in good faith, and the new government of West Germany wanted no part of Soviet plans. The reunification of Germany would have to wait forty years, a living relic of World War II.

The division of Germany into West (dark green) and East (light green). Note that Berlin, deep within East Germany, is divided between West Berlin and East Berlin in a microcosm of the entire country. West Berlin was part of West Germany despite its location; East Berlin served as the capitol of East Germany. Courtesy of Encarta Encyclopedia.

Both the United States and its European allies feared further Soviet expansion into Western Europe. To prevent this, these nations committed to a military alliance in April 1949, in which an attack on one would be considered an attack on all, bringing them all into battle together; this was essentially an anti-Soviet pact. This organization, called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), initially included twelve nations, among them the United States and Canada. Another four nations joined between 1949 and 1982. This treaty would eventually lead to 400,000 American troops being stationed in Europe, mainly in Germany, to protect against Soviet aggression.

The Soviet Union, of course, saw the founding of NATO as proof of capitalist aggression, fearing that the alliance was planning to invade. The re-armament of West Germany also frightened Eastern Europe, as they feared that Germany would now re-ignite old conflicts over borders. As a result, the USSR joined with its seven satellite states in Eastern Europe in 1955 and formed the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance to prevent a Western invasion.

The division of Europe into NATO (in blue) and the Warsaw Pact (red) during the Cold War. NATO has since expanded to other countries.  From Wikipedia Commons: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.

The division of Europe into two camps, as far as the protagonists were concerned, was complete. Of course, members of the non-aligned movement – for example, democratic Sweden, socialist Yugoslavia, and ever-neutral Switzerland – did not participate in this dualistic view of Europe and concentrated on economically supporting each other. But for member states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Europe was divided into two tribes which could never reconcile. And, especially after the USSR developed the atom bomb in August 1949, no one was in a hurry to settle the issue by force. The casualties would have been too terrible to contemplate.

The division of Europe seemed to go global in 1949, with the victory of Mao Zedong’s communist forces in the Chinese Civil War (see Chapter 6). Although the United States had aided nationalist forces in China against the communists, the government of Chiang Kai-Shek was corrupt and largely inept and could not withstand the communist forces. As China was adjacent to the USSR, communist countries now formed a continuous geographic bloc from East Germany all the way to the Pacific Ocean. To NATO, it appeared as if communism would shortly engulf the entire world. Truman’s commitment to contain communism seemed like a very optimistic project indeed.

Early Cold War Confrontations

As we have seen, the Soviets were committed to protecting their borders from possible aggressors by controlling the nations on those borders (a policy that China would imitate, as we shall see in the next section). But the United States was also determined to prevent any leftist governments which might be pro-Soviet from gaining a foothold anywhere near it – primarily in Latin America, which America considered its “backyard.” To do this, the United States consistently supported anti-communist governments, regardless of whether those governments were democracies. The United States supported dictatorships in Nicaragua, Cuba, the Congo, Peru, Panama, Chile, and elsewhere to guarantee that leftists would not take power. To the Americans, nothing was as bad as a communist; it was willing to tolerate any form of abusive government to contain even the slightest threat of communism.

But the United States also used containment as a cover to eliminate governments which opposed US economic policy as well. The United States overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953 to prop up Reza Pahlavi, the Shah (king) of Iran, to prevent the government from raising the price of oil. It also engineered a coup against the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 for seizing lands from a corrupt American corporation and invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent it from defaulting on loans. While this heavy-handed tactic seemed the most efficient to decision makers at the time, there were negative consequences for the United States. Many nations became distrustful of the United States, and their governments found that they could remain in power by generating anti-American sentiments. The CIA referred to these negative consequences as “blowback” against previous US polices.

The next major conflict in the Cold War came in 1950. After World War II, Korea was divided into two countries, communist North and US-supported South, in an Asian version of divided Germany (see Chapter 5).  Kim Il-Sung, Soviet-selected leader of North Korea, was ambitious and wanted to conquer the South, reuniting the nation under communism; but he was unable to accomplish this without support from the USSR. Stalin realized that this was a gamble for him. He did not want a war with the United States. But he also calculated that a war in Korea would pin down US forces in Asia, making it less likely that the Americans could threaten him in Europe. Aiding North Korea in a victorious war would also lend Stalin credibility among Asian communists.

Stalin hedged his bet by requesting that China commit to sending troops to Korea if it should prove necessary. Mao agreed; now, Soviet troops would not be required in Korea, making a wider war less likely. Stalin would eventually send fighter squadrons to Korea, although they were painted to match North Korean aircraft. With these assurances in place, Stalin sent equipment and advisors to North Korea, and Kim launched the war in June 1950.

A map depicting the political division of Korea into north and south on the eve of the Korean War. The 38th parallel was, by treaty, the dividing line between the two Koreas. After the conflict, a new line was created slightly north of the original. From the Norfolk Museums Service.

President Truman immediately referred the situation to the United Nations Security Counci, requesting a UN military force to protect a rapidly-collapsing South Korea. For the Security Council to approve such a force, all five permanent members would have to vote affirmatively. Since the Soviet Union was a member of the council, one would think that the Soviets would not approve a war against a war they were already supporting. However, the Soviet ambassador to the council was absent when the vote was taken, because the USSR was protesting the fact that the Security Council had removed China from the council after the communist revolution there. Therefore, no communist members voted, and the three remaining members – the US, Great Britain, and France – voted to go to war. It was the only time the UN has launched a full-fledged war. (Incidentally, this rather proves that Stalin wanted the US to get involved, in order to preoccupy it in Asia. Had Stalin wanted to prevent the UN, and the US, from getting involved, the Soviets would not have boycotted that meeting).

While the operation to stop the communists was carried out under UN auspices, only the United States had the money and forces to lead the mission, and most UN troops in Korea would be American. The UN chose American General Douglas MacArthur, a five-star general and Medal of Honor recipient, to lead UN forces in Korea. MacArthur was in Japan, commanding American occupation forces after the war. It was fortunate that he and his troops were so close to Korea, as communist troops had swept aside the South’s army and were about to conquer the entire country.

In a brilliant strategic move, MacArthur landed his forces at Incheon, far north of the current battle lines, cutting off communist forces from the North. Then, pressing his advantage, he drove north, into North Korea itself, and towards the Yalu River, the border with China. Mao warned Truman and MacArthur not to approach the border of China, as he would not tolerate capitalist forces on his border. Neither MacArthur nor Truman took the threat seriously.
They should have. Mao sent three hundred thousand Chinese troops to attack UN forces, and the United States, led by one of its best military minds, was driven into the longest retreat in American military history – all the way back down the Korean peninsula. The entire calculus of the war had changed.

MacArthur approached President Truman with a proposal to use the atom bomb on communist forces, as well as to bomb targets in China. Truman, wary of provoking the USSR into a war, forbade both. MacArthur responded by complaining in writing to several US congressmen that Truman was hampering the war effort by not using maximum force. Truman, angry at this insubordination, had MacArthur removed from his command. He was replaced by General Matthew Ridgway, who led an offensive which drove back communist forces once again. Now the battle lines reached the 38th parallel, the original border between North and South Korea. Truman ordered his forces to stand fast, and the war degenerated into static trench warfare, with neither side able to advance.

Josef Stalin encouraged the Chinese and Koreans to continue fighting, as he felt he was benefitting from US forces being tied down. But Stalin died in March 1953, and the Chinese and Koreans decided to seek an armistice with the South. This they achieved in July 1953, placing the new border near the original 38th parallel. The war had cost five million lives. However, the two Koreas never signed a peace treaty; technically, both sides remain at war, with millions of troops on their border, where violence occasionally flares up. It is the last hotspot of a Cold War which ended decades ago.

It may be that the easy victory in Greece gave US decision-makers the idea that containing communism would be relatively easy. After Korea, they no longer harbored that illusion. President Eisenhower, succeeding Truman, knew that the cost of maintaining a massive military to oppose the communists was draining resources which could be better used elsewhere:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. (Eisenhower, April 1953)

Eisenhower therefore sought to contain communism as cheaply as possible, a task which proved difficult for all successive presidents until the end of the Cold War. Eisenhower’s strategy was called the “New Look” because it contemplated new, less-expensive plans for containment. For example, he instituted a strategy called “massive retaliation,” by which Soviet aggression would be met with nuclear weapons, which were relatively cheap compared to the huge expense of maintaining a large standing army. But the strategy was not a very logical one. Would the US start a nuclear war if the communists re-invaded South Korea, or captured a nation in Africa? Probably not – and the Soviets knew it, which negated the threat. More importantly, Eisenhower initiated a program of alliance-building, creating military coalitions of nations bordering the USSR and China in the hopes of containing communism. Besides NATO, the US helped create the Bagdad Pact (Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, comprised mainly of Philippines and Thailand). People in these nations could view the alliances as guarantees of US assistance in the case of communist attack…or as an attempt by the US to use them as cannon fodder in its containment program. In any case, the Soviets, of course, viewed the new alliances as further proof that the capitalists were conspiring to surround, and then destroy, the USSR, which made them seek alliances of their own (for example, see Cuba, below).

While the Cold War flared hot in Korea, the division of Europe did not mean that the ideological war was over on the continent. The reformist government of Hungary, led by Imre Nagy, was frustrated with poor Soviet economic policy and the continued presence of Soviet troops in their country.  After local anti-communists attacked the communist secret police, Nagy declared that he was withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and transitioning the nation towards democracy. This uprising became known as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

After twelve days of discussion and negotiation, Soviet leadership decided that it could not allow Hungary to leave the Soviet orbit, as it would encourage other satellites to do the same, ending the Soviet buffer against the West. Thousands of heavily armed Red Army troops were sent to suppress the uprising. Six thousand Hungarians died and two hundred thousand fled the country. The USSR installed a new satellite government which would remain loyal to Moscow.

Anti-communist guerillas in the Hungarian Revolt of 1956.

The confrontation set the tone for the rest of the Cold War in Europe. Until the Hungarian Revolution, some American leaders contemplated “rollback,” the concept of liberating Warsaw Pact countries by force. During the Hungarian Revolution many observers, and the revolutionaries themselves, expected the United States to intervene in Hungary and prevent a Soviet invasion. However, the Eisenhower administration rejected the idea, citing the possibility of nuclear war should American troops end up in combat with the Red Army. The West was simply not willing to pay the terrible price for liberating the Hungarians or anyone else. The strategy that followed was along the lines of what George Kennan had termed “containment,” or preventing further communist expansion – for example, into South Korea. There would be no further serious consideration of rollback, and anti-communist strategies would extend only to propaganda and espionage. The Hungarians, for their part, were bitterly disappointed in American inaction.

The Space Race

The propaganda campaigns of the Cold War, carried out mainly in the global media, were designed to convince people that each side’s way of life was superior to the other. And the greatest (and certainly most expensive) propaganda campaign of the Cold War, and all human history, was known as the Space Race.

After World War II, both the United States and the Soviet Union realized that travel beyond the earth’s atmosphere would soon be possible; both nations had captured Nazi military technology and the rocket scientists themselves as the war ended. The initial motivation of capturing, copying, and improving these technologies was strictly military. Each nation was, it was thought, in an existential conflict with the other and needed every possible advantage. The rockets could keep getting larger, and the nuclear bombs smaller, so that eventually the bombs could be put into the rockets for delivery to their targets. A nuclear-tipped missile would be unstoppable, and capable of destroying an entire city. The USSR launched the first such nuclear missile in 1957.

But the destructive power of such rockets was not the only attraction. These rockets were also extremely high technology for the time, and served as examples of a nation’s technical capability. Therefore, the US and the USSR both began a program of trying to achieve the most impressive “firsts” in space, in order to convince the world that their own way of life was superior to the other. This race for perceived superiority was the heart and purpose of the space race.

The Soviets achieved a great early victory in the space race by launching Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on Oct. 4, 1957. The program was led by rocket pioneer Sergey Korolev. The US responded with its own satellite, Explorer 1, only four months later; but the fact that the Soviets had beaten the Americans into space frightened the US, which in July 1958 created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to guide and accelerate US research.

The USSR continued to lead the Americans in the early days of the space race. They launched the first animal (a dog) into space in 1957, put the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space in 1961, and achieved the first soft landing on the moon, with a robotic lander, in February 1966. While the Americans were never far behind, they found it frightening that the communists seemed to have the technical advantage.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space

Nevertheless, President Kennedy decided in May 1961 to dedicate the United States to “landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely, before the decade is out.” That was a very bold statement to make at that time, considering that Yuri Gagarin had only become the first man in space a mere month earlier. Kennedy (and the presidents who followed him) backed this commitment with a lot of money – over $25 billion, reaching just over 4% of the federal budget at one point. The Apollo Program became America’s greatest technological accomplishment, beating the Soviets to the moon in 1969. Many considered this to be the finish line of the Space Race, and the Americans had reached it first.

Another notable event from the early Cold War had a much smaller material effect than Korea or the Space Race but served as the symbol of the conflict. The focal point was again Berlin. East Berliners had been escaping for years from the Soviet sector by simply crossing into West Berlin in broad daylight. Citizens of other Soviet satellite states even travelled to Berlin to cross sides, as it was the easiest place to do so. Anyone crossing into West Berlin was granted political asylum. This led to a “brain drain” in Eastern Europe, as educated workers of every stripe left the East. To stop this, the East German government erected a concrete wall starting in 1961. Known as the Berlin Wall, this concrete barrier ran through the middle of Berlin, dividing the city. The cordon extended into the countryside in the form of barbed wire and minefields. The communist government stated that the wall’s purpose was to prevent Western spies from penetrating East Germany, but anyone going west was shot as well, and hundreds of people died trying to cross the wall. It became the very symbol of the division of Europe.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The escalating tensions of the early Cold War finally came to a head in Cuba in October 1962 in an event that is considered the closest the superpowers ever came to nuclear war: the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The origins of the crisis lay in Fidel Castro’s 1959 victory in the Cuban Revolution (see Chapter 10). Although there was a chance for peace between Castro and the US just after the revolution, the United States took a hard line towards the Cuban government when it expropriated American-owned territory; subsequent American embargoes pushed Castro into the Soviet orbit to seek economic relief. After Cuba aligned with the USSR, the US would go to great lengths to eliminate the communist government only ninety miles from Florida. The CIA armed Cuban exiles who had fled Castro’s regime and sent them to invade Cuba; this resulted in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which utterly failed and only cemented Castro’s popularity in Cuba. Thereafter, the CIA attempted to assassinate Castro in Operation Mongoose, and again failed to remove the Cuban leader. Castro, however, was afraid that the United States would soon attempt an all-out invasion of Cuba, and knew he could not withstand that without help from the only nation that might provide it.

At the same time, Khrushchev of the USSR was disturbed by US medium-range nuclear missiles based in Italy and Turkey, both NATO allies of the US. These missiles, so close to the USSR, were considered a grave danger because their short travel time to their targets gave the Soviets little time to react. The USSR had nowhere to place missiles close to the US in order to balance the threat – until the Cuban Revolution and Castro’s new relationship with the USSR.

Khrushchev offered to place Soviet missiles in Cuba, which would not only let the USSR balance out the US missile threat but would also give Castro some guarantee against US invasion. Also, Khrushchev held a low opinion of US President Kennedy. He viewed Kennedy as a rich playboy lacking in courage. Castro agreed to the plan, believing that it would secure him from invasion. The Soviets dispatched engineers to build launch gantries in Cuba and sent anti-aircraft missiles to protect them. The US government spotted this activity using its U-2 spy plane and was determined to keep Soviet missiles out of Cuba.

A US military aircraft shadows a Soviet freighter enroute to Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Photo by the US Navy.

Kennedy carefully considered the advice of his military advisors. Most of them advocated an invasion of Cuba, but Kennedy was hesitant, believing that the Soviets would retaliate against West Berlin or even launch a nuclear strike against the US or its NATO allies. He decided on a phased approach that would inch towards war only after trying various diplomatic alternatives. He considered a naval blockade of Cuba to prevent nuclear missiles from arriving there from the Soviet Union (unaware that a certain number of nuclear weapons were already present in Cuba). A blockade of all shipping would have violated international law and therefore could have served as a pretense for a Soviet attack; therefore, Kennedy opted for a “quarantine” of Cuba, in which the US would search all ships bound for Cuba and turn them back if they were found to be carrying offensive weapons. Khrushchev stated that he would not accept this, and that seizing Soviet missiles would be grounds for war. After all, the US had missiles in Turkey and Italy. If that was legal, then so were Soviet missiles in Cuba.

The situation off the coast of Cuba became very tense as the Soviet and American navies confronted each other and neither side would back down; each side threatened war. The US prepared not only to invade Cuba, but also to launch nuclear strikes against the USSR. At the critical moment, when war seemed imminent, Khrushchev offered a settlement to Kennedy. He promised to remove missiles from Cuba if the Americans removed missiles from Turkey and Italy and promised not to invade Cuba. Kennedy knew that US missiles in those NATO countries were already obsolete; he had planned to remove them anyway. He agreed to consent to Khrushchev’s plan only if the removal of missiles from Turkey and Italy would remain secret. Khrushchev agreed. Therefore, to the world, it looked as if Kennedy had intimidated the Soviets and forced them to retreat, when the actual situation was much more equitable. In the West, and especially in America, Kennedy appeared a hero – just in time for the next presidential campaign.

Kennedy did not survive to see the next election, as he was assassinated the following year. Khrushchev, for his part, was disgraced in the USSR, where the Cuban Missile Crisis was viewed as a humiliating loss and accelerated his removal from power. The real winner was Castro, who had secured a US promise not to invade his country – though the US continued to try to assassinate him for years to come.

Conclusion

The Cuban Missile Crisis convinced both the Soviets and the Americans that, unless they made a concerted effort to reduce tensions, a nuclear war would eventually happen, whether accidentally or not. In response, the two nations instituted a policy known as détente, a cooling of tensions designed to prevent war. This did not end the Cold War; it merely meant that each side was dedicated to avoiding another close call. The US lifted certain trade embargoes against the USSR and both sides engaged in arms reduction talks. Political rhetoric was cooled, and a system of direct communication between the President and Premier was established to ensure that crises would be immediately defused. Although certain confrontations were still to come – the American phase of the Second Indochina War was just around the corner (see Chapter 7) – both sides took pains to ensure that nuclear war would not result. This policy of détente lasted until 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency of the United States and reversed course, heating up the Cold War once more and resurrecting the specter of nuclear war.