by Norman Lowe
The situation in Berlin
The western powers were still refusing to give official recognition to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which the Russians had set up in response to the creation of West Germany in 1949. In 1958, perhaps encouraged by the USSR’s apparent lead in some areas of the nuclear arms race, Khrushchev announced that the USSR no longer recognized the rights of the western powers in West Berlin. When the Americans made it clear that they would resist any attempt to push them out, Khrushchev did not press the point.
In 1960 it was Khrushchev’s turn to feel aggrieved when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over a thousand miles inside Russia. President Eisenhower declined to apologize, defending America’s right to make reconnaissance flights. Khrushchev stormed out of the summit conference which was just beginning in Paris, and it seemed that the thaw might be over.
In 1961 Khrushchev again suggested, this time to the new American president, John F. Kennedy, that the West should withdraw from Berlin. The communists were embarrassed at the large numbers of refugees escaping from East Germany into West Berlin – these averaged about 200 000 a year and totalled over 3 million since 1945. When Kennedy refused, the Berlin Wall was erected (August 1961), a 28-mile-long monstrosity across the entire city, effectively blocking the escape route (see Map 7.3 and Illus. 7.2).
Map 7.3 Berlin and the wall, 1961
Illustration 7.2 The Berlin Wall: an 18-year-old East Berliner lies dying after being shot during an escape attempt (left); he is carried away by East Berlin guards (right)
7.4 THE NUCLEAR ARMS RACE AND THE CUBAN MISSILES CRISIS (1962)
(a) The arms race begins to accelerate
The arms race between East and West arguably began in earnest towards the end of 1949 after the Russians had produced their own atomic bomb. The Americans already had a big lead in bombs of this type, but the Russians were determined to catch up, even though the production of nuclear weapons placed an enormous strain on their economy. When the Americans made the much more powerful hydrogen bomb towards the end of 1952, the Russians did the same the following year, and had soon developed a bomber with a range long enough to reach the USA.
The Americans remained well ahead in numbers of nuclear bombs and bombers, but it was the Russians who took the lead in August 1957 when they produced a new type of weapon – the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This was a nuclear warhead carried by a rocket so powerful that it could reach the USA even when fired from inside the USSR. Not to be outdone, the Americans soon produced their version of an ICBM (known as Atlas), and before long they had many more than the Russians. The Americans also began to build nuclear missiles with a shorter range; these were known as Jupiters and Thors, and they could reach the USSR from launching sites in Europe and Turkey. When the Russians successfully launched the world’s first earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in 1958, the Americans again felt that they dared not be left behind; within a few months they had launched an earth satellite of their own.
(b) The Cuban missiles crisis, 1962
Cuba became involved in the Cold War in 1959 when Fidel Castro, who had just seized power from the corrupt, American-backed dictator Batista, outraged the USA by nationalizing American-owned estates and factories (see Section 8.2). As Cuba’s relations with the USA worsened, those with the USSR improved: in January 1961 the USA broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and the Russians increased their economic aid.
Convinced that Cuba was now a communist state in all but name, the new US president, John F. Kennedy, approved a plan by a group of Batista supporters to invade Cuba from American bases in Guatemala (Central America). The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a kind of secret service, was deeply involved. There was a general view in the USA at this time that it was quite permissible for them to interfere in the affairs of sovereign states and to overthrow any regimes which they felt were hostile and too close for comfort (see Chapter 26). The small invading force of about 1400 men landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, but the operation was so badly planned and carried out that Castro’s forces and his two jet planes had no difficulty crushing it. Later the same year, Castro announced that he was now a Marxist and that Cuba was a socialist country. Kennedy continued his campaign to destroy Castro, in various ways: Cuban merchant ships were sunk, installations on the island were sabotaged and American troops carried out invasion exercises. Castro appealed to the USSR for military help.
Khrushchev decided to set up nuclear missile launchers in Cuba aimed at the USA, whose nearest point was less than a hundred miles from Cuba. He intended to install missiles with a range of up to 2000 miles, which meant that all the major cities of the central and eastern USA such as New York, Washington, Chicago and Boston would be under threat. This was a risky decision, and there was great consternation in the USA when in October 1962, photographs taken from spy planes showed a missile base under construction (see Map 7.4). Why did Khrushchev take such a risky decision?
The Russians had lost the lead in ICBMs, so this was a way of trying to seize the initiative back again from the USA. But it would be wrong to put all the blame for the crisis on the USSR.
In 1959 the Americans had signed an agreement with Turkey allowing them to deploy Jupiter nuclear missiles from bases in Turkey. This was before any top-level contacts between Castro and the Russians had taken place. As Khrushchev himself put it in his memoirs, ‘the Americans had surrounded our country with military bases, now they would learn what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you’.
It was a gesture of solidarity with his ally Castro, who was under constant threat from the USA; although the Bay of Pigs invasion had been a miserable failure, it was not the end of the US threat to Castro – in November 1961 Kennedy gave the go-ahead for a secret CIA operation known as Operation Mongoose which aimed to ‘help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime’. Hopefully, the Russian missiles would dissuade such an operation; if not, they could be used against invading American troops.
It would test the resolve of the new, young, American President Kennedy.
Perhaps Khrushchev intended to use the missiles for bargaining with the West over removal of American missiles from Europe, or a withdrawal from Berlin by the West.
Map 7.4 The Cuban missiles crisis, 1972
Kennedy’s military advisers urged him to launch air strikes against the bases. General Maxwell Taylor urged Kennedy to launch a full-scale invasion of Cuba; but he acted more cautiously: he alerted American troops, began a blockade of Cuba to keep out the 25 Russian ships which were bringing missiles to Cuba and demanded the dismantling of the missile sites and the removal of those missiles already in Cuba. The situation was tense, and the world seemed to be on the verge of nuclear war. The Secretary-General of the UN, U Thant, appealed to both sides for restraint.
Khrushchev made the first move: he ordered the Russian ships to turn back, and eventually a compromise solution was reached. Khrushchev promised to remove the missiles and dismantle the sites; in return Kennedy promised that the USA would not invade Cuba again, and undertook to disarm the Jupiter missiles in Turkey (though he would not allow this to be announced publicly). Castro was furious with Khrushchev for ‘deserting’ him apparently without consulting the Cubans, and Cuban–Soviet relations were extremely cool for several years.
The crisis had only lasted a few days, but it was extremely tense and it had important results. Both sides could claim to have gained something, but most important was that both sides realized how easily a nuclear war could have started and how terrible the results would have been. It seemed to bring them both to their senses and produced a marked relaxation of tension. A telephone link (the ‘hotline’) was introduced between Moscow and Washington to allow swift consultations, and in July 1963, the USSR, the USA and Britain signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, agreeing to carry out nuclear tests only underground to avoid polluting the atmosphere any further.
At first Kennedy’s handling of the crisis was h
ighly praised. Most American commentators argued that by standing up to the Russians and by resisting pressure from his own army Chiefs of Staff for a military response, Kennedy defused the crisis and achieved a peaceful settlement. The president’s brother Robert was one of his chief supporters, particularly in his book Thirteen Days (1969). In order to lay all the blame for the crisis on the USSR, the Americans emphasized that Khrushchev and various Russian diplomats had repeatedly lied, insisting that they had no intention of building missile bases in Cuba. However, some later historians were more critical of Kennedy. A few accused him of missing a chance to solve the problem of Cuba once and for all – he ought to have called Khrushchev’s bluff, attacked Cuba and overthrown Castro. Others criticized Kennedy for causing the crisis in the first place by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey and repeatedly trying to destabilize the Castro regime. It was also pointed out that since Soviet long-range missiles could already reach the USA from Russia itself, the missiles in Cuba did not exactly pose a new threat.
(c) The race continues into the 1970s
Although in public the Russians claimed the outcome of the missiles crisis as a victory, in private they admitted that their main aim – to establish missile bases near the USA – had failed. Even the removal of American Thors and Jupiters from Turkey meant nothing because the Americans now had another threat – ballistic missiles (known as Polaris, later Poseidon) which could be launched from submarines (SLBMs) in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Russians now decided to go all-out to catch up with the American stockpile of ICBMs and SLBMs. Their motive was not just to increase their own security: they hoped that if they could get somewhere near equality with the Americans, there would be a good chance of persuading them to limit and reduce the arms build-up. As the Americans became more deeply involved in the war in Vietnam (1961–75), they had less to spend on nuclear weapons, and slowly but surely the Russians began to catch up. By the early 1970s they had overtaken the USA and her allies in numbers of ICBMs and SLBMs. They had brought out a new weapon, the anti-ballistic missile (ABM), which could destroy incoming enemy missiles before they reached their targets.
However, the Americans were ahead in other departments – they had developed an even more terrifying weapon, the multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV); this was a missile which could carry as many as 14 separate warheads, each one of which could be programmed to hit a different target. The Russians soon developed their version of the MIRV, known as the SS-20 (1977). These were targeted on western Europe, but were not as sophisticated as the American MIRV and carried only three warheads.
At the end of the 1970s the Americans responded by developing Cruise missiles, which were based in Europe; the new refinement was that these missiles flew in at low altitudes and so were able to penetrate under Russian radar.
And so it went on; by this time both sides had enough of this horrifying weaponry to destroy the world many times over. The main danger was that one side or the other might be tempted to try and win a nuclear war by striking first and destroying all the other side’s weapons before they had time to retaliate.
(d) Protests against nuclear weapons
People in many countries were worried at the way the major powers continued to pile up nuclear weapons and failed to make any progress towards controlling them. Movements were set up to try to persuade governments to abolish nuclear weapons.
In Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which was started in 1958, put pressure on the government to take the lead, so that Britain would be the first nation to abandon nuclear weapons; this was known as unilateral disarmament (disarmament by one state only). They hoped that the USA and the USSR would follow Britain’s lead and scrap their nuclear weapons too. They held mass demonstrations and rallies, and every year at Easter they held a protest march from London to Aldermaston (where there was an atomic weapons research base) and back.
No British government dared take the risk, however. They believed that unilateral disarmament would leave Britain vulnerable to a nuclear attack from the USSR, and would only consider abandoning their weapons as part of a general agreement by all the major powers (multilateral disarmament). During the 1980s there were protest demonstrations in many European countries, including West Germany and Holland, and also in the USA. In Britain many women protested by camping around the American base at Greenham Common (Berkshire), where the Cruise missiles were positioned. The fear was that if the Americans ever fired any of these missiles, Britain could be almost destroyed by Russian nuclear retaliation. In the long run, perhaps the enormity of it all and the protest movements did play a part in bringing both sides to the negotiating table. And so the world moved into the next phase of the Cold War – détente (see Sections 8.6 and 8.7 for détente and the end of the Cold War).
FURTHER READING
Aylett, J. F., The Cold War and After (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996).
Behrman, G., The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe (Aurum, 2008).
Dockrill, M., The Cold War 1945–63 (Macmillan, 1998).
Foss, C., Fidel Castro (Alan Sutton, 2006).
Gaddis, J. L., The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (Columbia University Press, 1972).
Gaddis, J. L., The Cold War: A New History (Allen Lane, 2006).
Lovell, S., The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
Lowe, P., The Korean War (Macmillan, 2000).
McCauley, M., Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1949 (Longman, 3rd edition, 2008).
Mills, N., Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (Wiley, 2008).
Skierka, V., Fidel Castro: A Biography (Polity, 2004).
Taylor, F., The Berlin Wall (Bloomsbury, 2006).
Westad, O. A., The Global Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Williams, W. A., The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (World Publishing, revised edition, 1962).
QUESTIONS
In what ways did the Marshall Plan, the dividing of Berlin, the communist takeover of power in Czechoslovakia, and the formation of NATO contribute to the development of the Cold War?
How accurate is it to talk about a ‘thaw’ in the Cold War in the years after 1953?
What were the causes of the Cuban missiles crisis? How was the crisis resolved and what were its consequences?
Assess the reasons why Berlin was a major source of tension in the Cold War from 1948 to 1961.
How important was the Marshall Plan in bringing about the recovery of Western Europe between 1947 and 1951?
There is a document question about the causes of the Cold War on the website.
Chapter 8
The spread of communism outside Europe and its effects on international relations
SUMMARY OF EVENTS
Although the first communist state was set up in Europe (in Russia in 1917), communism was not confined to Europe; it later spread to Asia where several other communist states emerged, each with its own brand of Marxism. As early as 1921, encouraged by the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been formed. At first it cooperated with the Kuomintang (KMT), the party trying to govern China and to control the generals, who were struggling among themselves for power. As the KMT established its control over more of China, it felt strong enough to do without the help of the communists and tried to destroy them. Civil war developed between the KMT and the CCP.
The situation became more complex when the Japanese occupied the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931 and invaded other parts of China in 1937. When the Second World War ended in the defeat and withdrawal of the Japanese, the KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, with American help, and the communists under their leader Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), were still fighting it out. At last, in 1949, Mao triumphed, and Chiang and his supporters fled to the island of Taiwan (Formosa); the second major country had followed Russia into communism
(see Section 19.4). In 1951 the Chinese invaded and occupied neighbouring Tibet; an uprising by the Tibetans in 1959 was crushed, and the country has remained under Chinese rule ever since.
Meanwhile communism had also gained a hold in Korea, which had been controlled by Japan since 1910. After the Japanese defeat in 1945, the country was divided into two zones: the north occupied by the Russians, the south by the Americans. The Russians set up a communist government in their zone, and since no agreement could be reached on what government to have for the whole country, Korea, like Germany, remained divided into two states. In 1950 communist North Korea invaded South Korea. United Nations forces (mostly American) moved in to help the south, while the Chinese helped the north. After much advancing and retreating, the war ended in 1953 with South Korea still non-communist.
In Cuba, early in 1959, Fidel Castro drove out the corrupt dictator Batista. Although Castro was not a communist to begin with, the Americans soon turned against him, particularly in 1962 when they discovered that Russian missiles were based on the island (see Section 7.4(b)). These were later removed after a tense Cold War crisis which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
In Vietnam, a similar situation to that in Korea occurred after the Vietnamese had won their independence from France (1954): the country was divided, temporarily it was thought, into north (communist) and south (non-communist). When a rebellion broke out in the south against a corrupt government, communist North Vietnam gave military assistance to the rebels; the Americans became heavily involved, supporting the South Vietnamese government to stop the spread of communism. In 1973 the Americans withdrew from the struggle, following which the South Vietnamese forces rapidly collapsed, and the whole country became united under a communist government (1975). Before the end of the year, neighbouring Cambodia and Laos had also become communist.
