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The Cold War


John L. Tomkinson

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Contents

Preface ............................................................................................... 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. Dominance and Dependency ...................................................... 9 The Roots of the Cold War ........................................................ 13 The Cold War (1945-53) ........................................................... 23 The German Problem ................................................................ 35 Eastern Europe (1945-50) ......................................................... 41 The Korean War ....................................................................... 53 The Thaw (1953-55) ................................................................. 59 The Cold War (1956-63) ............................................................ 63 Cuba and the Cuban Missile Crisis .............................................. 71 The Vietnam Wars ..................................................................... 87 Dtente .................................................................................. 97 The Junta of the Greek Colonels ................................................105 Eastern Europe (1979-85) ....................................................... 111 Chile ..................................................................................... 115 China and the Cold War .......................................................... 123 The Cold War (1979-85) ......................................................... 129 The Afghan War ....................................................................... 135 Central America ..................................................................... 141 The End of the Cold War .......................................................... 151 The Interpretation of the Cold War ............................................ 165 Writing Essays about the Cold War ............................................ 173

Cold War 1945-53 (b) The plan contributed greatly to the rapid renewal of the Western European chemical, engineering, and steel industries. (c) It established nancial stability (d) and expanded trade. 8. The motives behind the Marshall Plan were: (a) to remove economic distress, and so reduce the attractiveness of communism; (b) to bind western states economically, and therefore politically, to the USA; (c) to provide leverage (threat of withdrawal of aid) to consolidate US inuence and dominance over the countries of Western Europe; (d) to pre-empt the rise of socialist and government controlled economic systems in Western Europe, whose benets might appeal to the American people, and so threaten capitalism and the interests of the wealthy elite in the USA; (e) to generate markets for future US trade. 9. Stalins refusal to accept aid, and his denunciation of the Plan, ensured that there would be no economic co-operation between East and West, and separate economic development would take place. The Molotov Plan was set up by the USSR, supposedly provide aid for the countries of Eastern Europe. 10. On 5th October the European Communist parties were placed more rmly under Soviet control by the formation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). 11. On 25th January 1949 the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) was founded to integrate the economies of the Soviet bloc. 12. Zhdanov and Molotov accused the USA of: (a) seeking to isolate and strangle the USSR; (b) seeking to solve its economic problems by economic penetration of Western Europe, Japan and the colonies of the imperial powers, (c) effectively seeking world domination.

The Secret War


1. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created by the US National Security Act of 1947, to: (a) conduct espionage outside the USA; (b) conduct sabotage outside the USA; (c) ensure the obedience of client governments; (d) maintain and spread US power throughout the world; 2. Elections were interfered with to ensure the election of governments favourable to US policies.

Some Elections Subject to US Interference


Australia 1974-5; Bolivia 1966; Brazil 1962; Chile 1964-70; Dominican Republic 1962; Greece 1950-61; Guatemala 1963; Guyana 1953-64; Haiti 1987-8; Indonesia 1955; Italy 1948-70s; Jamaica 1976; Japan 1958-70s; Laos 1960; Lebanon 1950s; Nepal 1959; Nicaragua 1984,90; Panama 1984,89; Portugal 1974-5; Vietnam 1955. e.g. When Italy seemed likely to elect a leftist government in the elections of 1948, the rst task of the CIA was to ensure a pro-American government. Pressure was put on the electorate: (a) by recruiting and paying former blackshirts from the Fascist Party, collaborators with the
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Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedys response to the Cuban missiles been as cool and level-headed as Khrushchevs was to the Turkish missiles, there would have been no crisis at all. The Causes of, and responsibility for, the Crisis 1. It is clear that the Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by President Kennedy when he: (a) instituted a blockade of Cuba, (b) threatened to sink Soviet ships (c) demanded the withdrawal of the existing Soviet missiles (d) and did so in a dramatic public confrontation. 2. Thus while the actions of Khrushchev in placing the missiles on Cuba was a causal factor, the engineering of the crisis was a conscious choice made by Kennedy. Therefore a causal investigation must concern itself with his motives. 3. By 1962 the USA had recently been humiliated: (a) by the U-2 spy-plane* incident (b) by the failure of the Bay of Pigs expedition, and the establishment of a pro-Soviet state in a region over which the USA had previously exercised hegemony.* 4. Kennedy was determined not to be seen as a weak president, and felt that he needed to force and win a showdown in order to secure his election for a second term, and was apparently prepared to place all life on the planet on a knife-edge crisis to secure this. 5. There is also some evidence that Kennedy felt so surrounded by aggressive warmongers among the US military that if he did not act aggressively, he would be impeached. Robert Kennedy was of the opinion that the US military would have seized power. The Signicance of the Cuban Missile Crisis 1. The importance of the Cuban Missile Crisis cannot be overestimated. It was the nearest point at which the superpowers came to all-out nuclear war, threatening all life on the planet. It was therefore the most dangerous point in human history. 2. Therefore the deliberate engineering of the crisis was the most criminally insane act of any leader or politician in world history. The crimes of Hitler and Stalin were vast and horric; but neither of them ever threatened the existence of all mankind, as Kennedy did. 4. The Western media presented Kennedy as a young champion of the Free World who had won a great and unmitigated victory over the sinister forces of Communism. The myth is usually created to disguise an opposite truth: that the US President was a dangerous fool. 5. The crisis was not, in any case, an unqualied victory for Kennedy: (a) Kennedys pledge never to overthrow Castro by force meant that the US would have to tolerate a Communist base in the Caribbean; although the Kennedy administration, in breach of promises made, secretly tried many times to destabilise the Castro regime with a campaign of assassination and terrorism. (b) The Cuban missile crisis hardened Soviet determination never again to be humiliated by being exposed in a position of military inferiority. Khrushchev and his successors thus began the largest peacetime arms race in history. By the 1970s the Soviet Union had achieved near-parity with the United States in nuclear forces, and in the ability to project naval power into the oceans of the world. 6. The Soviets humiliation in Cuba gave ammunition for Khrushchevs enemies and played an important part in securing his fall from power in October 1964. Yet every man, woman and child alive on the planet today owes his/her existence to Khrushchevs humane preparedness to back down in public, with all the personal and political consequences for himself which that would entail.
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Interpretation

Some Basic Observations about the Cold War


The Balance of Power 1. Both sides accepted an initial share-out of the globe at the end of the Second World War. (a) The USSR exercised the predominant inuence in the area occupied by the Red Army. (b) The USA exercised the predominant inuence in: (i) The Western Hemisphere (since the Monroe Doctrine*); (ii) The capitalist world; (iii) The empires of the old imperial powers. These spheres of inuenced were: (i) well-dened within Europe, e.g. by the agreement on the post-war administration of Germany and Austria, and by the terms of the Percentages Agreement; (ii) rather less well-dened outside Europe. 2. This was a very unequal division of power which reected the realities of power politics in 1945. (a) The USSR: (i) At the beginning of the century Russia had been the most backward of the Great Powers, and the last to industrialize signicantly. (ii) Since that time it had undergone: ghting on its soil during the First World War, with huge losses of manpower; revolution; civil war with foreign intervention; huge social upheaval under Stalin. (iii) In the Second World War it had suffered, in total, greater destruction than any state had ever undergone in world history, with unprecedented losses of manpower and infrastructure. (b) The USA: (i) had been the only Great Power to have made a prot out of the First World War without suffering any destruction of infrastructure. (ii) During the Second World War it had: suffered less than 2% of the manpower losses of life of the USSR; emerged wealthier than before; the undisputed world superpower; the worlds only nuclear power. 3. Thus the main issues in 1945 were: (a) for the USSR: to preserve its independence from the worlds only nuclear superpower; (b) for the USA: the maintenance of virtual world dominion. The Soviet threat against the USA was hardly genuine, due to: (i) the imbalance of power; (ii) the desperate state of the USSR after the destruction of the Nazi invasion; (iii) the Soviet government had turned away from Trotskys belief in encouraging world revolution when Stalin took power in the late 1920s under the slogan Socialism in one country. 4. Despite these realities, and despite the wartime propaganda which portrayed Stalin as the brave leader of a great democracy, the Truman administration in the USA chose to change this view and to portray:
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Interpretation (a) Stalin as an evil dictator, like Hitler (despite having so recently been that great democrat and ally Uncle Joe); (b) the USSR as a totalitarian* society; (c) the power of the USSR and Communism as dark, looming threats to the entire world, including the USA. Given the nature of Soviet society, the rst two were easy to do, simply by revealing the state of Soviet society and relying upon the evidence. The only problem was embarrassment at claiming, in 1946, the opposite of what had been claimed during 1941-45. This last, was more difcult. Thus: (d) the extent of Stalins ambitions; (e) the strength of Soviet conventional forces in Europe; were systematically exaggerated. This sustained and systematic exaggeration of Soviet power was to continue until the end of the Cold War. 5. Being portrayed by the Americans as a powerful rival, threatening the world superpower, suited the leaders of the USSR: (a) It attered their vanity; (b) It enabled them to draw their own people together defensively against the real threat posed by the USA. 6. In time, the USSR was able to put up a reasonable show as a competing superpower. Under Stalin it acquired nuclear weapons, and under Khrushchev, ICBMs. In the space race it launched the rst successful orbiting unmanned and manned satellites. Under Kosygin and Brezhnev it was able to project Soviet power across the world. 7. However, neither side tried directly to extend their hegemony into an area clearly in the sphere of inuence of the other. Thus the USSR did not intervene to help the Communists in the Greek Civil War; and the USA did not intervene to help the Hungarians in the Hungarian Uprising, or the Czechs in the Prague Spring. 8. The two superpowers did compete: (a) in the area of the new post-colonial states; (b) in the oceans of the world. 9. Although the Cold War was in considerable part a public show, the nuclear arsenals were real, and the main danger to the world was of: (a) nuclear war by accident: (i) due to the misinterpretation of events by one side as an attack by the other, such as reading a mark on radar caused by a ock of migrating birds as an incoming nuclear missile; (ii) due to the misinterpretation of the intentions of one side by the other, e.g. Gorbachev subsequently revealed that during the early 1980s the Soviet leadership feared that Reagan and Thatcher were planning a rst strike, on the basis of the hostility and bellicosity* of their speeches and actions. (b) Miscalculation by the leaders of one side seeking a propaganda victory over the other side by forcing them to back down on some issue in order to gain prestige at home. This use of the Cold War as a virility test was a problem mainly with the US leadership, because of presidents desires to win re-election for a second term, e.g. Eisenhowers condemnation of the Truman administration as soft on Communism and the Kennedys generation of the Cuban Missile Crisis to give him an opportunity to win a propaganda victory. 10. The real threat by the USSR to the USA was not military but political. Secretary of State John
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Order The Cold War

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