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The Cold War

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The Cold War

Many concerns have captivated the world's attention and even attempted to bring the

entire world to a halt, including the world wars, both I and II, and, more recently, the Covid 19

pandemic, which created global mayhem and resulted in the loss of lives and jobs. The impact of

the Cold War on the lives of individuals who lived through it and the role it played as a major

turning point in world history will be discussed in this article.

During World War II, the US and the Soviet Union fought against the Axis powers. The

two countries' relationship, on the other hand, was tense. Americans have long-held suspicions

about Soviet communism and are concerned about the current Russian leader, Joseph Stalin's

totalitarian rule. The Soviets, for their part, were enraged by the Americans' decades-long refusal

to acknowledge the USSR as a legitimate member of the international community, which was

important to them, as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which murdered tens of

millions of Russians ( Schoff, 2017).

As World War II came to a close, the Cold War began. From 1945 through 1989, there

was a long-running confrontation between the Soviet Union and the US. Because neither the

Soviet Union nor the United States, who were the major participants in this war, could announce

open war on each other clearly, the term "cold war" was practically settled to describe this

otherwise tense but low-key conflict. This also implied no large-scale direct fighting between

these two superpowers. Their primary motivation for engaging in such a heinous act was to test

their prowess by finding new ways to measure it.

Psychological warfare, media operations, Spying, or deploying spies are common tactics

governments use to collect political and military information. Far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at
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sporting events, and scientific rivalries like the Space Race were all used to show the struggle for

dominance in indirect ways. The United States capitalized on this by sending its students into

space to improve aerospace capabilities, including the development of artificial satellites.

The Cold War had three main characteristics: the threat of nuclear war was on the

horizon, the struggle for newly independent states' allegiance, and military and economic support

to each other's adversaries around the world, all of which were exploited to breed abject hatred

and to provoke either of the superpowers in the war to retaliate and declare open war on the

other. The Cold War hurt American foreign policy and political ideology; it also harmed the

domestic economy, the president, and Americans' daily lives, creating an atmosphere of expected

consistency and normalcy. By the end of the 1950s, there had been a rise in dissent, which

peaked in the late 1960s (Heynen et al., 2019).

The Western Bloc was led by the United States, which included other First World

countries that were typically liberal democratic but were tied to a network of authoritarian states,

the bulk of which was their former colonies. The Soviet Union and its Communist Party

dominated the Eastern Bloc, which wielded power throughout WWII and was linked to a

network of authoritarian countries; as a result, they believed they had a better chance of winning

this superiority.

The US government supported anti-communist regimes and uprisings, while the Soviet

government supported left-wing parties and revolutions. Between 1945 and 1960, nearly all

colonial states acquired independence, making them Third World battlegrounds for this war that

was expected to wreak havoc.

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After the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new era emerged. This era played a major role in

causing a divide and separating China and the Soviet Union, which hampered relations inside

the Communist domain. At the same time, France, a member of the Western Bloc, requested

more action autonomy where they wanted the Union to give them the ability and the mandates to

work on their own. Invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968 to put down the

Prague Spring. At the same time, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests were

tearing the country apart, which caused great havoc and dissatificatio within the commune group.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a global peace movement formed among citizens worldwide.

There were large anti-war demonstrations, anti-nuclear weapons testing campaigns, and calls for

nuclear disarmament. By the 1970s, both sides had begun to make peace and security

concessions, ushering in a period of détente characterized by the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

and the United States' retaliatory opening of its embassy in Moscow. On the other hand, the

tension had already shown to be terrible and had been well-planned.

After the Soviet-Afghan War began in 1979, détente ended after a decade. In the early

1980s, there was another period of heightened tension. When the Soviet Union was already in

economic stagnation, the US imposed diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on it without

giving it a second thought or exhibiting sympathy for its precarious situation.

In the mid-nineties, new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev implemented the liberalizing

reforms of glasnost and perestroika, and Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was ended in 1988.

As calls for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev refused to provide

military assistance to their regimes; as a result, he backed off and offered no assistance when it

was desperately needed (Heynen et al., 2019). Because it was the first time large-scale nuclear
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conflict became a real threat, the Cold War shocked the world. The Cold War was a period of

high geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted over 45

years, from 1947 to 1991, with no outright conflicts. By delving into the important events of the

Cold War, historians can gain a clearer understanding of the conflict's immense scope.

Containment of Russia was a major outcome of the conflict. At the end of WWII, most

American officials thought that the best approach to oppose the Soviet Union's political and

aggressive growth was to implement a containment strategy that would help limit Soviet

development while safeguarding Western democratic ideals. American diplomat George Kennan

described this strategy as "a political movement dedicated fanatically to the notion that there can

be no permanent modus vivendi [peace between opposing groups] with the United States,"

concluding that America had only one alternative.: "long-term, gradual, but tough and attentive

restraint of Russian expansionist impulses" In 1947, President Harry Truman prioritized Soviet

Union containment, laying the framework for the Cold War, which his incendiary sections

promised would occur (Johnson, 2005).

The US's containment strategy also offered justification for a massive arms buildup. The

National Security Council Report NSC–68, published in 1950, repeated Truman's suggestion that

the US use military force to halt communist expansionism wherever it appeared to be occurring.

To reach this goal, the research advocated a four-fold increase in the defense budget, which

would have a negative economic impact on the United States by diverting funds that could have

been utilized to strengthen the country's infrastructure.

In particular, officials in the United States pushed for the creation of atomic weapons

akin to those used to end WWII. As a result, there was a fatal "arms race." In 1949, the Soviet
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Union conducted an atomic test. President Truman, the country's leader at the moment, replied

by proclaiming that the United States would develop an even more lethal atomic weapon: the

hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin was a direct descendant of him.

The Cold War moved aggressively to other countries, where it had an impact. The fight

against subversion in the United States reflected a growing concern about the Soviet threat on the

international stage. The Cold War's first military action came in June 1950, when the Soviet-

backed North Korean People's Army invaded its pro-Western southern neighbor. Many

Americans were concerned that this was the beginning of a communist takeover attempt and that

nonintervention was no longer an option. Truman sent American soldiers to Korea, but the fight

dragged on indefinitely, concluding in 1953. (Gaddis et al., 1997).

The US and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members accepted West

Germany to NATO in 1955, allowing it to remilitarize. This was a calculated move to entice the

Soviets into retaliating, which they dutifully did. The Warsaw Pact was the Soviet Union's

response. This mutual defense organization joined the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania,

Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria together under Soviet Union Marshal

Ivan S. Konev to form a single military command.

More international confrontations arose after that. In the early 1960s, President John F.

Kennedy's hemisphere was beset with several difficult difficulties. The Bay of Pigs invasion in

1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year appeared to show that the real communist

threat posed by the postcolonial now in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World." The Cold War

influenced US foreign policy, but it also had a huge home impact. Americans have long feared

radical subversion, and during the Red Scare of the year  1919 to the following year 1920, the
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government tried to neutralize perceived dangers to American civilization. After WWII, even

more, efforts were made in the US to destroy communism (Whitfield, 1996).

Foreign events and spy revelations drove the anti-communist fervor of the time. The

Soviet Union exploded a nuclear bomb in 1949, scaring Americans and prompting them to

assume that the United States would be attacked. In 1948, Whitaker Chambers, a former Soviet

agent, accused Alger Hiss, Roosevelt's Yalta adviser and assistant secretary of state, of being a

communist spy. Hiss fought the charge, but in 1950 he was found guilty of perjury. Finally, in

1950, authorities found a British-American spy network sending information to the Soviet Union

concerning the development of nuclear weapons. This image was heightened by the arrest and

conviction of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for revealing atomic secrets.

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References

Whitfield, S. J. (1996). The culture of the Cold War. JHU Press.

Gaddis, J. L., & Bothwell, R. (1997). We now know: rethinking cold-war history. International

Journal, 52(3), 537.

Johnson, R. D. (2005). Congress and the cold war. Cambridge University Press.

Renwick, N., Poku, N., & Ralph, J. G. (2017). Beyond the Security Dilemma: Ending America’s

Cold War. Routledge.

Schoff, J. L. (2017). Unique alliance for the common good: the United States and Japan after the

cold war. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Heynen, H., & Loosen, S. (2019). Cold War History beyond the Cold War Discourse: A

Conversation with Łukasz Stanek. Architectural Histories, 7(1).