Other Definitions
cold war (dict)
|
Cold WarThe Cold War (1947-1991) was the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between groups of nations practicing different ideologies and political systems. On one side was the Soviet Union and its allies, often referred to as the Eastern bloc. On the other side were the United States and its allies, usually referred to as the Western bloc. The struggle was called the Cold War because it did not actually lead to direct fighting between the superpowers (a "hot" war) on a wide scale. The Cold War dominated U.S. and Soviet foreign policy from 1947 (when the term was first used) until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Overview The Cold War was characterized by extreme mutual distrust, suspicion, and misunderstandings by both the United States and the Soviet Union, and their allies. At times, these conditions increased the likelihood of a third world war, which could easily have escalated to nuclear war. The United States accused the Soviet Union of seeking to expand its version of communism throughout the world. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, charged the United States with practicing imperialism and attempting to stop revolutionary activity in other countries. The Cold War is usually periodized roughly as having occurred from the end of World War II until the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were some of the occasions when the tension between those two ideologies took the form of an armed conflict, but much of it was conducted by or against surrogates and through spies and traitors who were working undercover. In those conflicts, the major powers operated in good part by arming or funding surrogates, a development that lessened direct impact on the populations of the major powers. The major world powers never entered into direct armed conflict against each other, but the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was the occasion when the Cold War was the closest to escalating into a hot one. In the 1970s, the Cold War gave way to dtente and a more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer clearly split into two clearly opposed blocs. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize their common interest in trying to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons (see SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). U.S.-Soviet relations would deteriorate once again in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but improved as the Eastern bloc started to unravel in the late 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia lost the superpower status that it had won in World War II. One major hotspot of conflict was Germany, particularly the city of Berlin. Arguably, the most vivid symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall. The Wall isolated West Berlin (the portion of the city controlled by West Germany and the Allies) from East Berlin and the territory of East Germany, which completely surrounded it. Another major feature of the cold war was the arms race between the Soviet Union and NATO, especially the United States but also the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and several other European powers. This race took place in a great many technological and military fields and resulted in enormous leaps in the state of the art. Particularly revolutionary advances were made in the field of rocketry and led to the space race (most, if not all of the rockets used to launch humans and satellites and to get to the Moon were originally military designs). Other fields in which arms races occurred include jet fighters, bombers, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, regular artillery, surface-to-surface missiles (including SRBMs and cruise missiles), inter-continental ballistic missiles (as well as IRBMs), anti-ballistic missile technology, armored vehicles, rifles, rocket propelled grenades and other anti-tank weapons, submarines and anti-submarine warfare, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, electronic intelligence, signals intelligence, reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites... the list is virtually endless. All of these fields required massive scientific and manufacturing investment and many identify the enormous cost of the arms race to the Soviet Union, whose inefficient economic system could barely afford it, as part of the reason for its eventual dissolution. Indeed, U.S. President Ronald Reagan commented in later years that it was the Soviet Union's economic weakness that encouraged him to structure U.S. military policy around high-technology -- and thus expensive -- weapons systems. The Soviet Union could ill afford such an economic showdown but had no choice if it intended to try and keep up with the United States militarily. Although the Western bloc arguably fielded weapons in many of these areas with superior effectiveness, mainly due to their lead in digital computers and reluctance to spend enough money to develop systems with brute force superiority, the Eastern bloc wins hand down in most areas for sheer number of designs in each field, number of weapons built, and, in many cases, for raw performance. This makes comparing the Eastern and Western technology very subjective, and there is much debate about which systems are superior. One potential indicator of the success (or lack thereof) of Eastern bloc military hardware versus Western systems is the 1991 Gulf War between Iraq and a coalition of Western nations following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. During the war, Iraqi forces equipped with some of the latest Soviet-built tanks and anti-aircraft defenses were decisively defeated by state-of-the-art U.S. military technology such as the M1A1 Abrams tank and F-117 stealth fighter in one of the most lopsided military victories in the history of armed conflict. Western forces sustained more casualties from friendly fire and traffic accidents than were inflicted by Iraqi forces. Critics argue Iraqi forces were poorly trained compared to their Western counterparts, resulting in the poor performance of the Soviet-era weapons systems. One thing is certain: after the breakup of the Soviet Union, many extremely advanced technologies became available on the open market. Fighter jets, anti-aircraft missles, small arms, and even nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons were rumored to have changed hands. In some cases, former Soviet-bloc states seized assets such as naval vessels moored in "their" ports and, being unable to staff or maintain such vessels, later auctioned them off to the highest bidder. One prominent feature of the nuclear and especially nuclear ICBM arms race was the concept of deterrence via mutually assured destruction or "MAD". The idea was that the Western bloc would not attack the Eastern bloc or vice versa, because both sides had more than enough nuclear weapons to reduce each other to nothing and, indeed, to make the entire planet uninhabitable. Therefore, launching an attack on either party would be suicidal, and so neither would attempt it. Both sides produced so many nuclear weapons that it was frequently questioned whether their numbers were superfluous to any "practical" need, and whether wars could really be deterred by the mere existence of nuclear weapons. Indeed, it was far from certain that a global nuclear war couldn't have resulted from smaller regional wars, which heightened the level of concern for each conflict. This tension shaped the lives of people around the world almost as much as the actual fighting did. The term "Cold War" was coined by British author George Orwell, in an essay entitled You and the Atomic Bomb (1945). Orwell wrote: - We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications--this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbours.
Historiography Western, Soviet and Eastern European historians have different views of the Cold War. There have been three distinct periods in the Western study of the Cold War. For more than a decade after the end of World War II, few American historians saw any reason to challenge the official U.S. interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War: That the breakdown of relations was a direct result of Stalin's violation of the Yalta accords, the imposition of Soviet-dominated governments on an unwilling Eastern Europe, Soviet intransigence, and aggressive Soviet expansionism. This view is generally shared by historians from the Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. However, later historians, especially William Appleman Williams in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and Walter LaFeber in his 1967 America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1968, articulated an overriding concern: U.S. commitment to maintaining an "open door" for American trade in world markets. Some revisionist historians have argued that U.S. provocations, aggressions, and imperial ambitions pursued by the Truman administration from 1945 to 1953 were at least equally to blame, if not more so. In short, historians have disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of U.S.-Soviet relations and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable. This revisionist approach reached its height during the Vietnam War when many began to view the American and Soviet empires as morally comparable. In the later years of the Cold War, there were attempts to forge a post-revisionist synthesis by historians, and since the end of the Cold War, the post-revisionist school has come to dominate. Prominent post-revisionist historians include John Lewis Gaddis and Robert Grogin. Rather than attributing the beginning of the Cold War to either superpower, post-revisionist historians focused on mutual misperception, mutual reactivity, and shared responsibility between the superpowers, the post-revisionists borrowed from the realist school of international relations, and essentially accepted U.S. European policy in Europe, such as U.S. aid to Greece in 1947 and the Marshall Plan. According to this synthesis, "Communist activity" was not the root of the difficulties of Western Europe, but rather it was the disruptive effects of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe. In addition, the Marshall Plan rebuilt a functioning Western economic system, thwarting the electoral appeal of the radical left. For Europe, economic aid ended the dollar shortage and stimulated private investment for postwar reconstruction. For the United States, the plan spared it from a crisis of over-production and maintained demand for American exports. The NATO alliance would serve to integrate Western Europe into the system of mutual defense pacts, thus providing safeguards against subversion or neutrality in the bloc. Rejecting the assumption that communism was an international monolith with aggressive designs on the "free world", the post-revisionist school nevertheless accepts U.S. policy in Europe as a necessary reaction to cope with instability in Europe, which threatened to drastically alter the balance of power in a manner favorable to the USSR, and to devastate the Western economic and political system. This synthesis is unacceptable for historians from the countries of Eastern Europe. Soviet terror and occupation of these countries, which began in World War II with the Soviet-Nazi Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and lasted throughout the Cold War, can be only equated to Nazism which also caused millions of deaths. In the view of these historians, this cannot be compared to even the worst behavior of the United States during the Cold War, and thus any attempt to view the American and Soviet empires as equivalent actors falling victim to mutual misperceptions is morally spurious. Some Western historians like Norman Davies try to balance Western and Eastern view of the Cold War. The role of security intelligence agencies The armies of the countries involved rarely had much direct participation in the Cold War; the war was primarily fought by intelligence agencies like the CIA (United States), MI6 (United Kingdom), BND (West Germany), Stasi (East Germany) and the KGB (Soviet Union). The abilities of Echelon, a United States-United Kingdom intelligence sharing organization that was created during WWII, were used against the USSR, China and their allies. Echelon's heavy U.S.-UK bias led to Canadian (CSIS), New Zealander (NZSIS) and Australian (ASIO) security intelligence agencies participating in the Cold War either as signals intelligence gathering units or as initial processors of raw intelligence. The agent war of mutual espionage, both of civilian and military targets, may have caused most casualties of the Cold War. Agents were sent both to the East and the West, and spies were also recruited on location or forced into service. When detected, they were either killed instantly or exchanged for other agents. Spy airplanes and other surveillance aircraft were likewise regularly shot down upon detection. The propaganda battle Another manifestation of the Cold War was the propaganda battle between the two blocs. The Cold War saw several stages of expansion of international broadcasting activities between the United States, United Kingdom, and their allies. This expansion was equaled, if not surpassed by the USSR and its Eastern European allies. Most international broadcasting took place on shortwave. In Europe and the Middle East, MW and LW were also heavily used for international broadcasting. It is estimated that some 100 megawatts of transmission capacity was added to the shortwave broadcasting bands from 1950-1990. A figure of 125 megawatts of transmission capacity takes into account sales of high power MW and LW transmitters in Europe, the Middle East and Asia over this same timeframe. When jamming stations are taken into account, an approximate total of 150 megawatts is reached. There has been an estimated 15% decrease in transmission capacity since the end of the Cold War, mostly taking into account the cessation of jamming by the USSR. Radio Australia's Chinese service played a minor part in the Cold War in Asia. Radio Australia here is more of a demonstration of the geographical extent of the Cold War. By the late 1980's the international broadcasting Cold War had settled into a purely ideological U.S.-UK versus USSR stalemate on shortwave. Jamming by the USSR ceased in the late 1980's. China, Myanmar (then Burma), North Korea and Cuba still jam U.S. and UK state broadcasters, and their surrogates. Related articles and links External links
|
 |