The Cold War
Two superpowers dominated the world after World War II; the
capitalist USA and the Communist USSR. The post-war conflict between
the United States and the Soviet Union was known as the Cold War. For
30 years peace was based on Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), a
strategy that meant that no power could "win" a nuclear war.
The 1970's saw the beginning of détente - relaxation of Cold War
tension - when the USA and the Soviet Union agreed to limit their
nuclear weapons through SALT - the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.
A renewed arms race in the 1980s ended with a new agreement - the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, by which Ronald
Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to
scrap certain Soviet and American nuclear missiles. This treaty led to
even more far-reaching nuclear disarmament agreements, and effectively
marked the end of the Cold War.
The conflict between the Communist bloc and the West between 1945
and 1989 may have been "cold" (without fighting), but the
spy war was often violent. A complete "American" town was
built in Russia to train spies for infiltration and service in the
USA, and the Russians recruited many Westerners sympathetic to
Communism as agents:
Donald Maclean kept the Russians informed of US and British secrets
while he was a high official in the British Embassy in Washington.
"Kim" Philby, another double agent spy, reached a high rank
in the British Secret Service (MI6) while working for the Soviets.
Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant German physicist who fled the Nazis in
1933 and settled in Britain. He took part in the top secret
development of the atom bomb, during which time he passed technical
details to a Russian agent.
The West also found sympathizers in the Soviet Union. Oleg
Penkovsky was a colonel in Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) who
offered to work for the British in 1961. He passed over 5,000 photos
of secret documents before he was arrested, tried and executed for
treason in 1963.
The USA (and several Western countries) lived under the constant
threat of a Soviet invasion, which seemed very real at the time.
Various public, underground locations were designated as civil defence
shelters and in theory, you could go there when Russia dropped the
bomb. Companies sold backyard Fallout
Shelters to protect families, and schools in the US had air raid
drills and students learned how to get under a desk with their heads
and necks covered.
In 1963, a direct "hotline" was set up between the White
House and the Kremlin, to reduce any sudden East-West tensions. It was
hoped the direct link would reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war,
and enable a faster, more secure exchange of information between the
leaders of the two most powerful nations in the world.
By the 1980's, the world economy was becoming a single organism,
and it was no longer possible for any one state to develop separately
from the whole. In 1985 Soviet Leader Mikhail
Gorbachev started economic and government reforms. Within a few
years, the USSR had disintegrated and the Communist regimes of Eastern
Europe were history. |
