COLD WAR

WHAT WAS IT?• 1) This was an era of confrontation between

the US and the Soviet Union that lasted from 1945 – 1990.

• In many ways this was inevitable. When the first half of the twentieth century was over, there were only two major powers that had not destroyed themselves twice in WWI and II.

• The suspicion grew out of : a) US and allied invasion of Russia in 1918 to overthrow the communist regime of Lenin b) refusal of US to recognize USSR until 1933 c) WWII suspicions based on Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 as Nazi Ally and US refusal to open second front quickly in 1942

• This ‘cold’ war would make both sides remain on a war footing for the next 45 years.

• The economies of both paid a huge price by putting so much into the military/industrial complex. The US was able to produce more and eventually won by outspending the Soviets.

SOVIET SECURITY CONCERNS

• The Soviets had sustained 26,600,00 military and civilian deaths in the Second World War.

• Twice in 26 years the Germans had invaded Russia.

• The West had invaded Russia in 1918 to overthrow the Communist government

• The Soviets wanted a buffer between them and the Germans.

• They also wanted to export their revolution to western European nations. Yes they were imperialist.

US ECONOMIC CONCERNS

• Most American economist thought that the war had been caused by The Great Depression and the Great Depression had been caused by restricted trade

• So the US wanted to have as many countries open to trade as possible

• The US also believed that the Depression would come back after the war

• So this means that the US had to make economic recovery the most important issue in post war Europe.

SOVIET DOMINANCE OF EASTERN EUROPE

• The Soviets had attacked Germany through Eastern and Southern Europe.

• This was a result of a plan to get as much of Europe under their control as possible before the end of the war.

• The Soviets did this because they believed they had paid for it in blood and because they were an imperial nation.

• 6)These nations became Satellite Nations. They were supposedly independent, but were completely controlled by the Soviets.

YALTA CONFERENCE• 2. During the war, FDR had met with Stalin to

talk about the post war world. • At Yalta, the Soviets and the Allies split over the

issue of Poland. • There were two governments in Poland. One

was the government that fled to England in 1939 and the other was made up of Polish Communists.

• The Soviet Union obviously wanted the Communist government recognized. They could control them and also, Poland stood between Germany and the USSR

• The Allies wanted the prewar government to be recognized.

• This split almost broke up the alliance. • FDR wanted the Soviets to come into the Pacific

War.• They compromised by agreeing to recognize

the communist government as long as it had members from the pre war government and if free elections were held as soon as possible.

• Stalin, of course, agreed. People have said this is proof that FDR was really a secret communist (no really). What it proved was that he only had two weeks to live and was dying.

US, USSR AND GERMANY

• 3) Both sides agreed that Germany would have to be divided in the immediate post war world.

• They also agreed that Germany would pay reparations for the war. The West wanted it to be based on what Germany was able to pay. The Soviets wanted to weaken Germany and wanted to control the Eastern sector of it.

• The US wanted Germany as a market, the Soviets wanted to end the German threat forever

TRUMAN AND STALIN• 4) FDR dies in April of 1945

before the Japanese are defeated.

• FDR didn’t tell Truman about anything, particularly the Manhattan Project. When he became president, Truman said “I feel like the Moon and the stars fell on me”.

• He is the polar opposite of FDR in many ways, but mostly because he is confrontational. Nothing much scares Harry.

• Short, foul mouthed and unafraid of bullies, he and Stalin are on a collision course.

POTSDAM

• 5) The Allies meet one more time at Potsdam Germany to plan for the Pacific War.

• Remember that FDR wanted Stalin to come into the Pacific War because the Americans were getting ready to invade the Japanese home islands and they expected 1 million casualties. So FDR wanted the Soviets to attack the Japanese and get them to surrender. That’s the reason he made so many bad deals at Yalta.

POTSDAM• 5) Truman learns that the Atomic

Bomb was successfully tested just before the conference. This means he doesn’t need Soviet help.

• He doesn’t tell Stalin about the bomb at the conference. Stalin already knows because the Manhattan Project had Soviet spies. The fact that Truman doesn’t tell him makes him even more suspicious. This is not good, Stalin is a paranoid sociopath already.

• Truman, who had gotten his first pair of glasses as a very small child, was bullied as a kid. He hated bullies and had learn to fight back. He recognized Stalin for what he was, a bully. The conflict is inevitable.

CONTAINMENT• 1) If the world was going to be divided up between the US and

USSR as it appeared, then the US needed a strategy.• The Soviets had one already, get whatever it could however it

could.• The American strategy was developed by George Kennan. He

was the American diplomat in Germany and he sent the State Department his strategy, called “containment” in a loooong telegram.

• What Kennan said was that communism was bound to fail sooner or later and what the US needed to do was to keep it out of the rest of the world and “contained” in the Soviet Union. That way the Soviets could only rely on their own economy to support them and that it would eventually fail.

• Kennan was absolutely correct. What he didn’t put in the telegram was that it would take 45 years to do this. Americans always think everything is going to happen overnight.

THE US TAKES OVER THE BRITISH EMPIRE

• 2) The Soviets were putting pressure on Iran and Turkey. The US had to back them down with Atomic threats.

• In August 1946, Greek communists without the help of Stalin, started a revolution against a very oppressive government. The Greek government had pretty much been put in place by the Nazis.

• Traditionally, the Mediterranean was the province of the British. Most of their colonies were dependent on the Suez canal and they controlled most of the Middle East. So, they usually took care of these things.

• The British were ruined. They had been in two wars in 26 years and were exhausted.

• The British announced that they were pulling their fleet out of the Mediterranean because they couldn’t afford the fuel (true).

• This appeared to leave the way open for the communists, but Truman said the US would take over for the British.

• He also issued the Truman Doctrine, which essentially said that the US would fight communist revolutions anywhere in the world.

• The US is now policeman of the world. Congratulations.

THE MARSHALL PLAN• 2) Marshall was the Chief of Staff of the Army and

later Secretary of State under Truman. • Marshall knew the primary problem in Europe was

going to be keeping the communists out of the governments.

• He knew that if people are hungry they will vote for whoever will feed them. Europe was destroyed and starving. If the US didn’t do something about it, the Soviets would.

• He also believed that the American economy couldn’t survive without European markets. So he came up with a plan to rebuild Europe.

• The Marshall Plan offered financial aid to all the countries of Europe, including the Soviet bloc satellite nations.

• Everybody except the Soviet bloc nations accepted the aid and over the course of the next 20 years were able to rebuild their economies.

• This aid was responsible for the “German Miracle” in which Germany, which was essentially a pile of rubble in 1945 was able to rebuild to the point of being one of the leading economies of the world by 1960 (15 years)

• It also allowed the American economy to enter the greatest economic period of American history

Germany 1945

BERLIN BLOCKADE• 4) By 1948, things were pretty tense in Europe. The Marshall Plan made it hard for

the Soviets to make any political progress.• The CIA was formed under Truman and its’ first successes were fixing the French

and Italian elections to exclude the communists.• The Greek communists were repelled and Mossadeq in Iran was replaced by the

Shah who was pro western.• This placed enormous pressure on the Soviets to have some kind of success to

convince new nations in Africa and Asia to become communist allies.• The Soviets decided to test how far they could push the West in Germany. So they

blockaded the road and railroad into Berlin. This was the only access for the West to Berlin for supplies.

• It looked like there might be a nuclear war until the US started the Berlin Airlift, in which they flew everything needed to supply Berlin by air. This was another in that line of BIG things that the US does so well. Planes took off and landed at the Berlin airport every 15 minutes 24 hours a day for a year. They landed 13,000 tons of supplies every day.

• Eventually the Soviets lifted the blockade, but they were humiliated and started looking for somewhere else they could outdo the Americans.

NATONORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORG.• 5) The Berlin Blockade and other events convinced

the Americans that it was just a matter of time until the Soviets tried to attack the west.

• The Americans promised the Europeans that if the Soviet tanks did roll into West Germany, then the US would use the Atomic Bomb.

• This did not make the Europeans feel better because they didn’t believe that the US would follow through and, if they did, that meant that the US would nuke Europe to save it. Another method had to be found.

• That method was NATO which was a defense treaty between the US and the Western European nations, except France which refused to join. The French would pose problems for the US throughout the Cold War.

• In the NATO Alliances, all the nations of Europe would contribute troops and equipment to mutual defense. This included rearming the Germans, which is why the French initially backed out.

• Everyone thought the conflict would break out in Germany. It broke out halfway across the world.

KOREAN WAR 1950

KOREAN WAR 1950• 6) North Korea and South Korea had been separated at the end of the Pacific War in1945. The

south had been ruled by Japan for years and the north had been conquered by the USSR in the months right before the end of the war.

• They were divided at the 38th Parallel.• When China went communist in 1949, the Soviets withdrew and were replaced by North Korean

troops. • In June of 1950, North Korean troops flooded across the parallel and drove the South Korean

and American troops all the way south, almost to the sea.• 7) Immediately the US went to the United Nations and got a group of nations to send troops to

South Korea to fight alongside the Americans. • The Americans were driven back to the Pusan Resevoir. With new equipment coming in, the

Americans were able to fight back.• Douglas MacArthur commanded an American amphibious invasion at Inchon, behind the enemy

lines and started to the drive the North Korean troops back. He was spectacularly successful. • MacArthur thought he was invincible and continued to drive north. When he got near the Yalu

River that separates China from Korea, the Chinese warned the Americans that if MacArthur crossed the Yalu, they would enter the war.

• 9) MacArthur was ordered by Truman not to go any farther, MacArthur ignored him and went ahead. The Chinese entered the war and drove MacArthur all the way back to the 38 th Parallel. He panicked and asked Truman to use nuclear weapons. Truman refused.

• 10) MacArthur was fired as commander by Truman for insubordination. He should have been shot.

• This was very unpopular at home and Truman was probably defeated in the 1952 election for it.

CHINESE REVOLUTION 1949• 8) China had been ruled by outsiders for most of its’ existence.

• Beginning in 1933, there was a civil war in China between the Communists, led by Mao Zedong and the Nationalists, led Chiang Kai-Shek.

• This civil war continued through the Second World War and the US backed Chiang with money and equipment.

• After the war, the conflict grew widespread and the Nationalist eventually lost, due mostly to corruption and military incompetence.

• In 1949, China became a Socialist Republic under Mao.

• This completely freaked out the US. We had put billions of dollars of money and equipment into China and we believed that we should have won. We never thought that maybe the Chinese made up their own mind and that we backed the wrong horse.

• Since American technology and money cannot possibly lose, the reason for the “loss” of China (it was never ours) had to be domestic spies and traitors in the US and led to the Second Red Scare.

• It is interesting that the line of reasoning, that the only possible reason for the ball of China was domestic treason in the US, is pretty much the line of reasoning of the Germans when they elected Hitler, that it couldn’t possibly be that they backed the wrong horse during WW I and suffered logical consequences, it had to be domestic treason in the form of the Jews.

RED SCARE

SOVIET SPIES IN AMERICA

• 1) Today we look back and can’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Americans in the 1950’s were afraid of spies everywhere.

• There were Soviet spies in America. Klaus Fuchs was a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project. The Rosenbergs were spies in New York that passed the information from Fuchs to the USSR. Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada with a list of spies.

• There was solid evidence for the presence of spies in America, but nowhere near to the extent implied by the witch hunters of the Mcarthy Era.

THE RED SCARE• 2) There were a number or

reasons for the fear of spies that came to America in the fifties.

• The first was the inability of Americans to understand that their role as leader of the west also meant that they were hated by some.

• Second was a series of unrelated incidents in the late forties and early fifties like the fall of China and the Korean War that made it seem as though everything was falling apart.

• Third was the desire of the Republican party to return to power after the Roosevelt years. They used the communist menace fear for political purposes.

Loyalty Review Program

• Subversion – the effort to secretly weaken a society and overthrow its government

• 3) To try and calm public suspicion, Truman issued an executive order to create the Loyalty Review Program to screen all federal employees for loyalty.

• 14,000 screened, 2,000 “quit”, 212 fired for “questionable loyalty”

• Then you have J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee)

- This is how Martin Luther King Jr. gets labeled as a Communist.

The hunt for Soviet spies• Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the

“pumpkin papers”

• The Hollywood blacklist

• 4) The Rosenbergs

McCarthyism

• 5) Senator Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin

• “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”

McCarthyism – n. the practice of publicizing accusations of treason with insufficient evidence.

What goes up, must come down

Not satisfied with only accusing politicians, celebs, and other political figures of Communist ties, McCarthy turns his attention on the United States Army.

The Army-McCarthy trials were broadcasted live on TV. This was his undoing.

Project Venona

• 6) In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency broke a half century of silence by releasing translations of Soviet cables decrypted back in the 1940s by the Venona Project. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union, including those chronicled in NOVA's "Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies."

• On the right is one of the Venona cables that provided information that condemned the Rosenbergs for giving away details of the atomic bomb and highly sensitive technologies.

• The code word for the Manhattan Project is “Enormous”www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/venona_docs.html

McCarran Act• 7) (also known as the Internal

Security Act) required all Communist organizations to register with the US Attorny General. It also established the Subversive Activities Control Board.

• Members of these groups couldn’t be citizens, or even be allowed into the country. Current citizens could be denaturalized for five years.

• Truman tried to veto, but Congress went around him.

Duck and cover

• 8) As more and more people became convinced a nuclear third world war was imminent, they began to build fallout shelters in their backyards.

• Fallout is basically the radiation and radioactive debris from a nuclear bomb.

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