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The Cold War Part I

by Nicholas White
Exchange History Writer

      The Cold War began with the United States and Russia vying for world supremacy post World War II.  (Add the link to my nuke article please)  The "war" was dominated by an aptly named policy, MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction.  Being the two superpowers of the world, and not trusting each other led the United States and the Soviet Union into a foreign policy that looks, on the face of it, absurd.  Make as many weapons as possible, so that even if the other country attacks, they will not survive to celebrate their victory.  Absurd, but it kept the United States and then Soviet Union from directly attacking each other, due to the risk of annihilation.  Although they did fight through proxy, the soviets supplying the communists in Vietnam and Korea.

     Another favored policy was brinkmanship.  This was the United States’ method to get the soviets to cave in to demands.  They would push their point until it seemed war was almost imminent, and expect the soviets to back down from them because the US had more and better weapons. Once again, a foreign policy of dubious logic, but it worked.  Espionage was used extensively throughout the cold war as well, on both sides.  Notably, stolen information aided the soviet building of nuclear weapons to begin with.

     The allies from World War II established NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to counter the rising power of the Soviet Union.  NATO was essentially a mutual protection pact, to defend against common threats.  It gave the United States access to military bases in Europe, and places to base ballistic missiles targeted at the Soviet Union.  6 years after NATO was signed in 1949, the soviets came out with their own opposing version, the Warsaw Pact.  Essentially the same premise of NATO, it was made up of the Soviet Union and several of its satellite nations.

      These concepts come together beautifully in a wonderful fiasco presided over by President John F Kennedy.  The infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  Following the CIA’s failed invasion of Cuba with armed Cuban exiles in the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, Fidel Castro was more than happy to invite the soviets to his country to protect it against America.  Given the large amount of nuclear missiles pointed at Russia from US military bases in Europe, the soviets wanted to point more missiles of their own at the United States, and Cuba was a perfect location.  To be fair to the soviets, they only acted as they should have to protect their country.  The American brinkmanship, including a slightly illegal blockade of Cuba in international waters almost drove things to war, but after getting a US promise to remove missiles from Turkey, the soviets agreed not to place more in Cuba, and remove those already there.

      The Cuban Missile crisis is considered by many to be the closest the world has gotten to nuclear war.  This may be, but it was not the last by far.  To the contrary, despite this brush with the end of everything, both the United States and the Soviet Union continued to make massive amounts of nuclear warheads, and test larger and larger bombs, including some that could be measured in thousands of times more powerful than the first ones made during World War II.