10.9 Lecture – The Cold 10.9 Lecture – The Cold WarWar

I. Cold War: Superpowers Face OffA. For more than a century political and economic leaders

committed to free markets and untrammeled capital investment had loathed socialism in its several forms.

1.Western leaders quickly came to perceive the Soviet Union as the nerve center of world revolution and as a military power capable of launching a war as destructive and terrible as the one that had recently ended.

B. The Allies Become Enemies1. Yalta Conference: A postwar Plan

a. The Leaders of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union met at the Soviet Black Sea resort of Yalta.

1. They agreed to divide Germany into zones of occupation controlled by the Allied military forces.2. Germany also would have to pay the Soviet Union to compensate for its loss of life and property.

C. The United Nations1. In 1944 representatives from the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China drafted proposals that finally bore fruit in the treaty called the United Nations Charter, ratified on October 24, 1945.2. Two main bodies:

a. General Assembly, with representatives from all member states.b. Security Council, with five permanent members – China, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union – and seven rotating members.

3. Various agencies focused on specialized international problemsa. UNICEF - United Nations Children’s Emergency Fundb. FAO – Food and Agriculture Organizationc. UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

4. Unlike the League of Nations, which required unanimous agreement in both deliberative bodies, the United Nations operated by majority vote, except that the five permanent members of the Security Council had veto power in that chamber.5. Peacekeeping was the sole preserve of the Security Council,

became a vexing problem.a. Throughout the Cold War the United Nations was seldom able to forestall or quell international conflicts, though from time to time it sent observers or peacekeeping forces to monitor truces or agreements otherwise arrived at.

D. Differing US and Soviet Goals1. The United States and the Soviet Union split sharply after the war.

a. The war had affected them very differently.2. The United States, the world’s richest and more powerful country, suffered 400,000 deaths.

a. Its cities and factories remained intact.3. The Soviet Union had at least 50 times as many fatalities.

a. One in four Soviets was wounded or killed.b. Many Soviet cities were demolished.

E. Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain1. Soviets Build a Buffer

a. Soviet troops pushed the Nazis back across Eastern Europe.b. At war’s end, these troops occupied a strip of countries along the Soviet Union’s own western border.

1. Stalin regarded these countries as a necessary buffer, or wall of protection.2. He ignored the Yalta agreement and installed or secured Communist governments in Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and Yugoslavia. 3. Stalin’s reluctance to allow free elections in Eastern European nations was a clear violation of those countries’ rights.4. Truman pressed Stalin to permit free elections in Eastern Europe.

i) Stalin refused.ii) Stalin declared that communism and capitalism could not exist in the same world.

F. Capitalism and Communism 1. In July 1944, with Allied victory a foregone conclusion,

economic specialists representing over forty countries met at Bretton Woods, a New Hampshire resort, to devise a new international monetary system.

a. Agreed to fix exchange rates and to create the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (formally the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development). b. The IMF was to use currency reserves from member

nations to finance temporary trade deficits, and the World Bank was to provide funds for reconstructing Europe and helping needy countries after the war.

1. Went into effect in 1946.2. While the United States held reserves of gold and the rest of the world held reserves of dollars in order to maintain the stability of the monetary system, the Soviet Union established a closed

monetary system for itself and the new communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

3. In the Western countries, supply and demand determined prices; in the Soviet command economy government agencies allocated goods and set prices according to governmental priorities, irrespective of market forces.

4. Many leaders of newly independent states, having won the struggle against imperialism, preferred the Soviet Union’s socialist example to the capitalism of their former colonizers.

a. The relative success of economies pattered on Eastern or Western models became part of the Cold War rivalry.

5. During World War II the US economy finally escaped the lingering effects of the Great Depression.

a. Increased military spending and the draft brought full employment and high wages.b. The wartime conversion of factories from the production of consumer goods had created demand for those goods. c. With peace, the United States enjoyed prosperity and an international competitive advantage because of massive destruction in Europe.

6. The economy of Western Europe was heavily damaged during World War II, and the early postwar years were bleak in many

European countries.a. With prosperity in the United States was able to support the reconstruction of Western Europe.

7. In 1957 France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg signed a treaty creating the European Economic Community, also known as the Common Market.

a. By the 1970s the Common Market nations had nearly overtaken the United States in industrial production.b. The economic alliance expanded after 1970, when Great Britain, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, and Austria joined.

1. The enlarged alliance called itself the European Community (EC).

8. Prosperity brought dramatic changes to the societies of Western Europe.

a. Average wages increased, unemployment fell, and social welfare benefits were expanded.b. Governments increased spending on health care, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, public housing, and grants to poor families with children.c. The combination of economic growth and income redistribution raised living standards and fueled demand for consumer goods, leading to the development of a mass consumer society.

9. From the 1920s the Soviet state relied on bureaucratic agencies and political processes to determine the production, distribution, and price of goods.

a. Housing, medical services, retail shops, factories, the land – even musical compositions and literary works – were viewed as collective prosperity and were therefore regulated and administered by the state. b. The Soviet command economy had enormous natural resources, a large population, and abundant energy at its disposal.

1. Soviet planners had made large investments in technical and scientific education, and the Soviet state had developed heavy industry.2. As a result, recovery was rapid at first, creating the structural basis for modernization and growth.

3. As the post war period progressed, bureaucratic control of the economy grew less responsive and efficient at the same time that industrial might came to be more commonly measured by the production of consumer goods such as television sets and automobiles, rather than be tons of coal and steel.4. In the 1970s the gap with the West widened.

i) Soviet industry failed to meet domestic demand for clothing, housing, food, automobiles, and consumer electronics, while Soviet agriculture inefficiency compelled increased reliance on food imports.

10. Outside Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in provided loans and grants and supply arms (at bargain prices) to countries willing to align with them.

G. An Iron Curtain Divides East and West1. Europe now lay divided between East and West.

a. Germany had been split into two sections1. The Soviets controlled the eastern part, including half of the capital, Berlin.

i) Under a Communist government, East Germany was named the German Democratic Republic.

2. The western zones became the Federal Republic in 1949.

b. Churchill’s phrase “iron curtain” came to represent Europe’s division into mostly democratic Western Europe and Communist Eastern Europe.

H. United States Tries to Contain Soviets1. Containment

a. It was a policy directed at blocking Soviet influence and stopping the expansion of communism.

1. Containment policies included forming alliances and helping weak countries resist Soviet advances.

2. Truman Doctrinea. Truman’s support for countries that rejected

communism.b. Congress immediately authorized more than $400 million in aid to Turkey and Greece.

3. Marshall Plana. In 1947, US Secretary of State George Marshall proposed that the United States give aid to needy European countries.b. Would provide food, machinery, and other materials to rebuild Western Europe.c. As Congress debated the $12.5 billion program in 1948, the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia.

1. This plan was a spectacular success.

4. The Berlin Airlifta. Germany

1. The Soviets wanted to keep their former enemy weak and divided.2. In 1948, France, Britain, and the United States decided to withdraw their forces from Germany and allow their occupation zones to form one nation.3. The Soviet Union responded by holding West Berlin hostage.

b. Although Berlin lay well within the Soviet occupation zone of Germany, it too had been divided into four zones.

1. The Soviet Union cut off highway, water, and rail traffic into Berlin’s western zones.

i) The city faced starvation.2. Stalin gambled that the Allies would surrender West Berlin or give up their idea of reunifying Germany.3. Americans and British officials flew food and

supplies into West Berlin for nearly 11 months.4. In May 1949, the Soviet Union admitted defeat and lifted the blockade.

II. The Cold War Divides the WorldA. A cold war is a struggle over political differences carried on by

means short of military action or war.1.Beginning in 1949, the superpowers used spying, propaganda, diplomacy, and secret operations in their dealings with each other.

a. Until the Soviet Union finally broke up in 1991, the Cold War dictated not only US and Soviet foreign policy, but influenced world alliances as well.

B. Superpowers Form Rival Alliances1.In 1949, ten western European nations joined with the United States and Canada to form a defensive military alliance.

a. Called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).1. An attack on any NATO member would be met with armed force by all member nations.

2. The Soviet Union saw NATO as a threat and formed it’s own alliance in 1955 and it was called the Warsaw Pact.

a. Included the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania.

b. In 1961, the East Germans built a wall to separate East and West Berlin.

1. The Berlin Wall symbolized a world divided into rival camps.

C. A Threat of Nuclear War1. The United States already had atomic bombs.

a. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic weapon.

2. President Truman was determined to develop a more deadly weapon before the Soviets did.

a. He authorized work on a thermonuclear weapon in 1950.b. The hydrogen or H-bomb would be thousands of times more powerful than the A-Bomb,c. In 1952, the United States tested the first H-Bomb.

1. The Soviets exploded their own in 1953.3. Brinkmanship

a. The willingness to go to the brink, or edge, of war.b. Required a reliable source of nuclear weapons and airplanes to deliver them.c. The United States strengthened its air force and began producing stockpiles of nuclear weapons.d. The Soviet Union responded with its own military buildup, beginning an arms race that would go on for four decades.

D. The Cold War in the Skies1. In August 1957, the Soviets announced the development of a rocket that could travel great distances – an Intercontinental

Ballistic Missile, or ICBM.2. On October 4, the Soviets used an ICBM to push Sputnik, the first unmanned satellite, above the earth’s atmosphere.3. In 1958, the United States launched its own satellite.4. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started secret high-

altitude spy flights over Soviet territory in planes called U-2s.a. In May 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 plane, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured.

1. This U-2 incident heightened Cold War tensions.