The Cold War was a long period of political division and tension. It began near the end of World War II (1945) and lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The Cold War was dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. It is sometimes assumed that the Cold War was a ‘war without fighting’. While the two superpowers certainly avoided war with each other, the Cold War contained a large number of proxy wars, coup d’états, hostile confrontations and skirmishes, covert actions and dangerous incidents. The phrase ‘cold war’ was itself coined by British author George Orwell, first appearing in an October 1945 essay on the atomic bomb. Orwell predicted that the rise of atomic weapons would “put an end to large-scale wars, at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.” This new world, he wrote, would be “horribly stable, like the slave empires of antiquity”.
At the heart of this post-war division was Germany. In 1945, Germany was invaded and occupied by the Americans and British in the west and the Soviet Red Army in the east. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30th and the Nazi government surrendered to the Allies nine days later. There was much debate about the future of post-war Germany. Many, such as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, wanted Germany broken up into several smaller states, to prevent any prospect of another war. The four Allied powers occupied Germany which, in time, evolved into two nations: US-backed West Germany and socialist East Germany. The German capital, Berlin, was also divided into two sectors: one controlled by the Allies, the other by East Germany. For four decades, the divided city of Berlin was the crucible of the Cold War. In 1948 the East Germans and Soviets attempted to starve the Western powers out of Berlin; this siege was thwarted by the largest airlift in history. In 1961 the East German government, facing a mass exodus of its own people, were forced to lock down the city’s transit points and construct a giant barrier. The Berlin Wall, as it was known, become one of the Cold War’s most enduring symbols.
The Cold War gave rise to unparalleled levels of suspicion, mistrust, paranoia and secrecy. The American and Soviet intelligence agencies, the CIA and KGB, carried covert activities around the world, gathering information about different states, regimes and leaders. They also supported and supplied underground movements, uprisings and conflicts, sometimes leading to so-called ‘proxy wars‘. There were frequent accusations of espionage and underhandedness, such as the Powers incident in 1960, when an American spy-plane was shot down and captured by the Soviets. The most perilous flashpoint of the Cold War occurred in 1962 with the discovery of Soviet-installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, not far from the United States coastline. The stand-off over the Cuban missiles saw the superpowers hurtle towards war and a possible nuclear exchange. Tensions were short-circuited at the last minute by a secret deal between US president John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
The intensity of the Cuban missile crisis was followed by a long period of relative calm. This phase of the Cold War was known as Détente. There were several factors that contributed to Détente, including the rise of pragmatic leaders like Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, as well as domestic economic problems in both the US and USSR. During Détente, leaders on both sides demonstrated a greater willingness to communicate and negotiate. There were several international visits and summits, while Washington and Moscow signed arms reduction treaties and other agreements. In 1972, Nixon visited communist China, visited its leader Mao Zedong and, later, formally recognised his government. The leaders of East and West Germany, previously hostile to each other, also engaged in state visits and negotiations. But while Détente facilitated better communication and more cordial relations, many aspects of the Cold War continued unabated.
The Cold War was reignited in the 1980s. The election of new leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan produced a revival in hostile rhetoric and increases in military spending, leading to a new arms race. Reagan condemned communism and the Soviet Union at every turn, describing the latter as an “evil empire”. Rather than containing and tolerating communism, as the leaders under Détente had done, Reagan and Thatcher were determined to roll it back. Meanwhile, the Soviet economy was stagnating internally, with falls in production and shortages of food and consumer goods. The emergence of a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, heralded the introduction of significant political and economic reforms. As Soviet power waned, ordinary people in eastern Europe began calling for change in their own countries. The year 1989 was a pivotal one, with demonstrations, political reforms and, in November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Within two years, the two Germanys had been reunified and the Soviet Union was dissolved, bringing the Cold War to an end.
“Hollywood made hay with the Cold War, plundering the conflict for profit and propaganda from beginning to end. Cold War themes appeared in a multitude of genres including musicals, Westerns, Biblical epics, romantic comedies, science-fiction fantasies, documentaries, detective thrillers and absurdist biopics. The result was thousands of images – some bland, some compelling – that helped millions of people worldwide to grasp the ‘real’ meaning of a conflict that for most of them was peculiarly abstract, and for many Americans especially was fought solely on an imaginary level.”
Tony Shaw, historian
Ordinary people who lived through the Cold War experienced it in real-time – though many did not fully understand it. The Cold War fuelled some of the most virulent propaganda and fear campaigns in human history. Leaders revealed information when it had propaganda value and concealed it when it had none. Westerners were taught to fear those on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Civilians were warned of the possibility of spies, subterfuge and surprise nuclear strikes. School children learned about air-raid drills, bomb shelters and nuclear fallout. Government agencies conducted this symphony of nuclear paranoia but had willing accomplices among writers, filmmakers and television studios. The generation that followed World War II became one of the most prosperous in modern history – but grew up believing that the nuclear clock was ticking and the destruction of mankind was imminent.
1. The Cold War was a long period of international tensions and confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union and their allies. It lasted from 1945 to 1991.
2. The Cold War was sparked by political and ideological divisions over the fate of post-war Europe, particularly the expansion of the Soviet Union and the division of Germany.
3. Though the US and USSR never went to war, the Cold War was marked by several secondary conflicts, proxy wars and dangerous incidents, such as the Cuban missile crisis.
4. The late 1960s and 1970s was a period of Détente or improved communications, however, Cold War tensions were revived by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
5. The Cold War was brought to an end by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the reunification of Germany (1990) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991).
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