Cold War (19531962)

The Cold War (19531962) discusses the period within the Cold War from the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Following the death of Stalin unrest occurred in the Eastern Bloc, while there was a calming of international tensions, the evidence of which can be seen in the signing of the Austrian State Treaty reuniting Austria, and the Geneva Accords ending fighting in Indochina. However, this "thaw" was only partial with an expensive arms race continuing during the period.

EISENHOWER AND KHRUSHCHEV

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as U.S. President in 1953, the Democrats lost their twodecades-long control of the U.S. presidency. Under Eisenhower, however, the United States' Cold War policy remained essentially unchanged. Whilst a thorough rethinking of foreign policy was launched (known as "Operation Solarium"), the majority of emerging ideas (such as a "rollback of Communism" and the liberation of Eastern Europe) were quickly regarded as unworkable. An underlying focus on the containment of Soviet communism remained to inform the broad approach of U.S. foreign policy. In 1953, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev took his place. A period of DeStalinization began and Khrushchev was trying to reverse many of the things Stalin did. The impact on Soviet politics was immense. The speech stripped Khrushchev's remaining Stalinist rivals of their legitimacy in a single stroke, dramatically boosting the First Party Secretary's power domestically. Khrushchev was then able to ease restrictions, freeing some dissidents and initiating economic policies that emphasized commercial goods rather than just coal and steel production.

US STRATEGY - "MASSIVE RETALIATION" AND "BRINKSMANSHIP" Conflicting objectives When Eisenhower entered office in 1953, he was committed to two possibly contradictory goals: maintaining or even heightening the national commitment to counter the spread of Soviet influence; and satisfying demands to balance the budget, lower taxes, and curb inflation. The most prominent of the doctrines to emerge out of this goal was "massive retaliation," which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced early in 1954. Eschewing the costly, conventional ground forces of the Truman administration, and wielding the vast superiority of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and covert intelligence, Dulles defined this approach as "brinksmanship" in a January 16, 1956, interview with Life: pushing the Soviet Union to the brink of war in order to exact concessions. Eisenhower inherited from the Truman administration a military budget of roughly US$42 billion, as well as a paper (NSC-141) drafted by Acheson, Harriman, and Lovett calling for an additional $79 billion in military spending. With Treasury Secretary George Humphrey leading the way, and reinforced by pressure from Senator Robert Taft and the cost-cutting mood of the Republican Congress, the target for

the new fiscal year (to take effect on July 1, 1954) was reduced to $36 billion. While the Korean armistice was on the verge of producing significant savings in troop deployment and money, the State and Defense Departments were still in an atmosphere of rising expectations for budgetary increases. Humphrey wanted a balanced budget and a tax cut in February 1955, and had a savings target of $12 billion (obtaining half of this from cuts in military expenditures). Although unwilling to cut deeply into defense, the President also wanted a balanced budget and smaller allocations for defense. "Unless we can put things in the hands of people who are starving to death we can never lick communism", he told his cabinet. Moreover, Eisenhower feared that a bloated "militaryindustrial complex" (a term he popularized) "would either drive U.S. to war or into some form of dictatorial government" and perhaps even force the U.S. to "initiate war at the most propitious moment." On one occasion, the former commander of the greatest amphibious invasion force in history privately exclaimed, "God help the nation when it has a President who doesn't know as much about the military as I do." In the meantime, however, attention was being diverted elsewhere in Asia. The continuing pressure from the "China lobby" or "Asia firsters," who had insisted on active efforts to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power was still a strong domestic influence on foreign policy. In April 1953 Senator Robert Taft and other powerful Congressional Republicans suddenly called for the immediate replacement of the top chiefs of the Pentagon, particularly the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Omar Bradley. To the so-called "China lobby" and Taft, Bradley was seen as having leanings toward a Europe-first orientation, meaning that he would be a possible barrier to new departures in military policy that they favored. Another factor was the vitriolic accusations of McCarthyism, where large portions of the U.S. government allegedly contained covert communist agents or sympathizers. But after the mid-term elections in 1954 and censure by the Senate the influence of Joseph McCarthy ebbed after his unpopular accusations against the Army. Soviet Strategy

In 1960 and 1961, Khrushchev tried to impose the concept of nuclear deterrence on the military. Nuclear deterrence holds that the reason for having nuclear weapons is to discourage their use by a potential enemy. With each side deterred from war because of the threat of its escalation into a nuclear conflict, Khrushchev believed, "peaceful coexistence" with capitalism would become permanent and allow the inherent superiority of socialism to emerge in economic and cultural competition with the West. Khrushchev's attempt to introduce a nuclear doctrine limited to deterrence into Soviet military thought misfired. Discussion of nuclear war in the first authoritative Soviet monograph on strategy since the 1920s, Marshal Vasilii Sokolovskii's "Military Strategy" (published in 1962, 1963, and 1968) and in the 1968 edition of "Marxism-Leninism on War and the Army", focused upon the use of nuclear weapons for fighting rather than for deterring a war. Should such a war break out, both sides would pursue the most decisive aims with the most forceful means and methods. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and aircraft would deliver massed nuclear strikes on the enemy's military and civilian objectives. The war would assume an unprecedented geographical scope, but Soviet military writers argued that the use of nuclear

weapons in the initial period of the war would decide the course and outcome of the war as a whole. Both in doctrine and in strategy, the nuclear weapon reigned supreme. Eastern Bloc events As the Cold War became an accepted element of the international system, the battlegrounds of the earlier period began to stabilize. A de facto buffer zone between the two camps was set up in Central Europe. In the south, Yugoslavia became heavily allied to the other European communist states. Meanwhile, Austria had become neutral. 1953 East Germany uprising Following large numbers of East Germans traveled west through the only "loophole" left in the Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions, the Berlin sector border,[7] the East German government then raised "norms"the amount each worker was required to produceby 10%.[7] Already disaffected East Germans, who could see the relative economic successes of West Germany within Berlin, became enraged,[7] provoking large street demonstrations and strikes.[8] A major emergency was declared and the Soviet Red Army intervened.[8] Berlin Crisis of 1961 The crucial sticking point was still Germany after the Allies merged their occupation zones to form the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. In response Soviets declared their section, the German Democratic Republic, an independent nation. Neither side acknowledged the division, however, and on the surface both maintained a commitment to a united Germany under their respective governments. Germany was an important issue because it was regarded as the power center of the continent, and both sides believed that it could be crucial to the world balance of power. While both might have preferred a united neutral Germany, the risks of it falling into the enemy's camp for either side were too high, and thus the temporary post-war occupation zones became permanent borders. During the spring and early summer, the East German regime procured and stockpiled building materials for the erection of the Berlin Wall. Although this extensive activity was widely known, few outside the small circle of Soviet and East German planners believed that East Germany would be sealed off. On June 15, 1961, two months before the construction of the Berlin Wall started, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and Staatsrat chairman Walter Ulbricht stated in an international press conference, "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!" (No one has the intention to erect a wall). It was the first time the colloquial term Mauer (wall) had been used in this context. On Saturday August 12, 1961, the leaders of East Germany attended a garden party at a government guesthouse in Dllnsee, in a wooded area to the north of East Berlin, and Walter Ulbricht signed the order to close the border and erect a Wall.

The four powers governing Berlin (France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) had agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference that Allied personnel would not be stopped by East German police in any sector of Berlin. But on 22 October 1961, just two months after the construction of the Wall, the US Chief of Mission in West Berlin, E. Allan Lightner, was stopped in his car (which had occupation forces license plates) while going to a theatre in East Berlin. Army General Lucius D. Clay (Retired), U.S. President John F. Kennedy's Special Advisor in West Berlin, decided to demonstrate American resolve. The attempts of a US diplomat to enter the East Berlin were backed by US troops. This led to the standoff between US and East German tanks at Checkpoint Charlie on 2728 October 1961. The stand-off was resolved only after direct talks between Ulbricht and Kennedy. The Berlin Crisis saw US Army troops facing East German Army troops in a stand-off, until the East German government backed down. The crisis ended in the summer of 1962 and the personnel returned to the United States. During the crisis KGB prepared an elaborate subversion and disinformation plan "to create a situation in various areas of the world which would favor dispersion of attention and forces by the USA and their satellites, and would tie them down during the settlement of the question of a German peace treaty and West Berlin". n 1 August 1961 this plan was approve d by CPSU Central Committee. Cuba Cuban Revolution The East garnered a huge victory when they formed an alliance with Cuba after Fidel Castro's successful revolution in 1959. This was a major coup for the Soviet Union, which had garnered an ally only miles from the American coast. Before the fall of the pro-U.S. Batista regime, U.S. interests had owned four-fifths of the stakes in the island's utilities, nearly half of its sugar, and nearly all of its mining industries. The U.S. could manipulate the Cuban economy at a whim by merely tinkering with the island's financial services or by tinkering with government quotas and tariffs on sugar the country's staple export commodity. The U.S. landed Marines three times in efforts to support its interests between the ratification of the Platt Amendment in 1902 and the Revolution in 1959, although it had not directly occupied the country since 1909. Castro then signed a trade agreement in February 1960 with communist states, which would emerge as a market for the island's agricultural commodities (and a new source for machinery, heavy industrial equipment, and technicians) that could replace the country's traditional patron the United States. Overthrowing the new regime became a focus for the CIA. Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis The maximum territorial extent of countries in the world under Soviet influence, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961

Hoping to copy the success of Guatemala and Iran in 1961, the CIA, noting the large wave of emigration to the U.S. after Castro took power, trained and armed a group of Cuban exiles who landed at the Bay of Pigs where they were to attempt to spark an uprising against the Castro regime. The assault failed miserably, however The Soviet government seized on the abortive invasion as a rationale for the placing of Soviet troops on Cuba. It was also decided to position on Cuba medium-range nuclear missiles which could strike many points in the U.S. at once. In response, President John F. Kennedy quarantined the island, and after several intense days the Soviets decided to retreat in return for promises from the U.S. not to invade Cuba and to pull missiles out of Turkey. The Cuban Revolution led to Kennedy's initiation of the "Alliance for Progress" program. The program was to provide billions of dollars of loans and aid over the course of the 1960s for economic development in order to stave off socialist revolution. The Alliance also contained counterinsurgency measures, such as the establishment of the Jungle Warfare School in the Panama Canal Zone and the training of police forces. Defense pacts The Eisenhower administration attempted to formalize its alliance system through a series of pacts. Its East Asian allies were joined into the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) while friends in Latin America were placed in the Organization of American States. The ANZUS alliance was signed between the Australia, New Zealand, and the US. None of these groupings was as successful as NATO had been in Europe. Many Third World nations, however, did not want to align themselves with either of the superpowers. The Non-Aligned Movement, led by India, Egypt, and Austria, attempted to unite the third world against what was seen as imperialism by both the East and the West.