The Cold War 1945–1991

The Cold War 1945–1991 is one of six Peace and Conflict options in Section III: one 25-mark extended response (choose one of two alternatives), about 1,000 words. The syllabus key features are: origins and development of the Cold War; the influence of communism and capitalism; the origins, nature and impact of détente; changing policies, strategies and responses; the impact of crises on superpower relations; the arms race and disarmament; and the reasons for the end of the Cold War.

• Survey — origins 1945–1953: the 1945 conferences and the emergence of the superpowers; emerging differences; the Truman Doctrine and its consequences; the early crises (the Berlin blockade and airlift, China becoming communist in 1949, the Korean War).
• Development to 1968: containment, the domino theory and peaceful coexistence; the arms race and space race; the crises of Berlin (1961), Cuba (1962) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
• Détente: economic and political reasons; geopolitical developments (Vietnam, the Sino-Soviet split, the Middle East); features and consequences.
• Renewal and end: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Reagan; Gorbachev; disarmament agreements 1978–1991; the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

A cold war is a state of hostility without direct large-scale fighting between the main rivals. The superpowers competed through alliances, propaganda, the arms race, economic aid and proxy wars.

The 1945 conferences

• Yalta (February 1945): Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed to divide Germany into zones, to hold free elections in liberated Eastern Europe (Declaration on Liberated Europe) and on the UN; the USSR would join the war against Japan.
• Potsdam (July–August 1945): Truman, Stalin and Churchill (then Attlee) argued over Poland's borders and German reparations. Truman told Stalin of a powerful new weapon; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima followed on 6 August.

Emerging differences

1946: Kennan's Long Telegram described the USSR as expansionist; Churchill's Fulton speech spoke of an ‘iron curtain’.

The Truman Doctrine and its consequences

On 12 March 1947 Truman asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey and announced containment. The Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program, 1948–52, about $13 billion) rebuilt Western Europe; Stalin refused it for the Eastern bloc and set up the Cominform (1947) and Comecon (1949). The Czechoslovak communist coup (February 1948) completed Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

Early crises

• Berlin blockade (June 1948 – May 1949): triggered by the new Western currency; the Berlin Airlift kept West Berlin supplied. Results: NATO (April 1949) and two German states (1949).
• 1949: the USSR tested an atomic bomb (August) and the communists won China (1 October). In the USA this led to NSC-68 (1950), which called for a huge military build-up.
• Korean War (1950–1953): North Korea invaded the South (25 June 1950); a UN force led by the USA fought, China intervened, and an armistice (27 July 1953) left Korea divided near the 38th parallel. The Cold War had become global and militarised.

Strategies

• Containment and the domino theory (Eisenhower, 1954) justified alliances (NATO, SEATO 1954) and intervention in Asia.
• Massive retaliation under Eisenhower and Dulles, later replaced by flexible response under Kennedy.
• Peaceful coexistence: Khrushchev (from 1956) argued the two systems could compete without war, but he still crushed Hungary (1956).

Arms race and space race

The logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) meant neither side could win a nuclear war, which deterred direct war but encouraged an ever larger build-up.

Crises

• Berlin 1961: the Wall (13 August) stopped the flood of East Germans leaving through West Berlin. It reduced a dangerous flashpoint while symbolising division.
• Cuba 1962: Soviet missiles in Cuba; Kennedy's naval quarantine; Khrushchev withdrew the missiles in exchange for a no-invasion pledge and the secret removal of US Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Afterwards: the hotline and the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963).
• Czechoslovakia 1968: the Prague Spring under Dubček was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion (August 1968); the Brezhnev Doctrine claimed a right to intervene. The West protested but did not act — evidence that both sides accepted spheres of influence.

Reasons: the fright of Cuba, rough nuclear parity and the cost of the arms race; US exhaustion and division over Vietnam; the Sino-Soviet split (border clashes in 1969) that let Nixon and Kissinger play China against the USSR; the Soviet need for Western grain and technology; West German Ostpolitik under Willy Brandt.

Features:

• SALT I and the ABM Treaty (May 1972).
• Nixon's visit to China (February 1972).
• The Basic Treaty between the two German states (1972).
• The Helsinki Final Act (1975): recognition of post-war borders in exchange for human rights commitments, which dissidents in the Eastern bloc later used.
• SALT II (1979), signed but never ratified by the US Senate.

Limits and consequences: rivalry continued in the Middle East (the 1973 Yom Kippur War brought a US nuclear alert), Angola and the Horn of Africa; both sides built multiple-warhead missiles; Soviet SS-20 missiles in Europe alarmed NATO. Détente collapsed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979).

• Afghanistan: a long, costly war for the USSR; the USA boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics and armed the mujahideen.
• Reagan: a large military build-up, the ‘evil empire’ speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative (both March 1983); the NATO exercise Able Archer (November 1983) caused a dangerous war scare. From 1985 Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev.
• Gorbachev (leader from March 1985): glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring) and ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy; summits at Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986); withdrawal from Afghanistan (completed February 1989); abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine.
• Disarmament agreements: SALT II (1979), the INF Treaty (1987, eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles), the CFE Treaty (1990, conventional forces), START I (July 1991).
• 1989: Solidarity won Poland's partly free elections (June); the Berlin Wall opened (9 November); communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe, mostly peacefully (violently in Romania).
• 1990–91: German reunification (3 October 1990); the failed hardline coup in Moscow (August 1991); the dissolution of the USSR (December 1991).

On the end of the Cold War, the ‘triumphalist’ view credits Reagan's pressure, while others stress Gorbachev's choices, the Soviet economy and popular movements in Eastern Europe.

Worked example (not a bank question). _‘Assess the impact of the Korean War on the development of the Cold War.’_

1. Thesis: Korea turned a mainly European, political rivalry into a global, militarised confrontation.
2. Militarisation: NSC-68 put into practice; US defence spending more than tripled; NATO given an integrated command.
3. Globalisation: containment applied to Asia — US support for Taiwan and for the French in Indochina, and later SEATO.
4. Sino-American hostility: China's intervention made the PRC and the USA enemies for two decades.
5. Limits: Europe stayed the central arena; the armistice showed both sides accepted limited war.
6. Conclusion with a clear assessment.

• Mixing up the two Berlin crises (1948–49 and 1961).
• Writing a chronological narrative of crises instead of arguing.
• Calling détente the end of the Cold War; it reduced tension but rivalry continued.
• Listing historians without connecting them to your argument.
• Ignoring the second part of two-part questions, such as ‘reasons for, and consequences of’.
• Treating Reagan's 1987 Berlin speech as the cause of the Wall's fall in 1989.

• Learn precise terms: containment, domino theory, brinkmanship, peaceful coexistence, MAD, détente, proxy war, glasnost, perestroika.
• Use the ‘changing policies’ thread: Truman (containment) → Eisenhower (massive retaliation) → Kennedy (flexible response) → Nixon (détente) → Carter (human rights, then a harder line) → Reagan (pressure, then negotiation); Stalin → Khrushchev → Brezhnev → Gorbachev.
• Use a few well-chosen figures: about $13 billion in Marshall aid; about 2.7 million people leaving the GDR before 1961; 13 days of the Cuban crisis (16–28 October 1962).
• Weigh the influence of ideology against security and economics; it is often the hidden question.

• The core covers the founding of the UN; the Security Council veto explains why the UN was often paralysed in the Cold War.
• Conflict in Europe 1935–1945 ends where the Cold War begins: the wartime alliance and the division of Germany.
• Russia and the Soviet Union 1917–1941 explains the ideology and foreign policy traditions Stalin brought to 1945.