AGLOBAL

HISTORY of the
COLD WAR,
1945–1991
Philip Jenkins
A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991
 Philip Jenkins

A Global History of the

Cold War, 1945–1991
Philip Jenkins
Institute for Studies of Religion
Baylor University
Waco, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-81365-9    ISBN 978-3-030-81366-6 (eBook)

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 Contents

1 Introduction  1

Part I Between Wars? 1945–1967  17

2 Origins: The World in 1946 19

3 The Struggle for Europe 37

4 Nuclear Perils 57

5 Asian Theaters 73

6 Decolonization and Third World Struggles 91

7 Khrushchev and Kennedy107

Part II Living in the Cold War 121

8 National Security and Repression123

9 Spies, Saboteurs, and Defectors137

10 Cold War Cultures151

v
vi  Contents

Part III The Struggle Redefined: 1968–1991 171

11 Crisis of Ideologies: The World in 1968173

12 A Cold Peace, or War by Other Means?187

13 Four Minutes to Midnight: The World in 1980203

14 The New Struggle213

15 Endgame229

16 Conclusion: Winners, Losers, and Inheritors245

Index255
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Near Omaha, Nebraska, stands Offutt air base, which from 1948 through
1992 was the home base for the US Strategic Air Command (SAC). Founded
in 1946, the SAC was tasked with organizing vast nuclear-armed bomber fleets
which ideally would deter any foe tempted to attack the country. Within a few
years, these were increasingly augmented by missiles. Offutt was chosen as
headquarters because Nebraska stood at the heart of the continental United
States and was furthest removed from potential enemy bomber attacks. From
1959, Offutt was defended by powerful surface-to-air missiles. The SAC
remained active and on perpetual watch until it stood down in 1992, following
the end of the global confrontation that we call the Cold War.
Offutt became home to a museum displaying key aircraft in US military his-
tory, which later moved to another Nebraska location to become the Strategic
Air Command and Aerospace Museum. This is an extraordinary place, with
many tangible remains of that frightening era. The stars of the large collection
include such astonishing items as a gigantic Convair B-36 bomber, with its
230-foot wingspan. With a combination of jet engines and multiple piston-­
driven propellers, some versions of the B-36 had an intercontinental range of
10,000 miles. From the time it entered into service in 1948 until its replace-
ment by the B-52 in 1955, the B-36 was a mainstay of the US strategic arsenal,
and over 360 such aircraft were built. These aircraft, and other later weapon
systems, were intended to bear the nuclear arms that would annihilate the
Soviet Union, causing many millions of deaths. At the same time, Soviet equiv-
alents would be extinguishing great cities in the US and Europe.
What makes this museum so distinctive is that it commemorates a war that
was never fought or, at least, in anything like the way that was contemplated.
In consequence, no B-36 ever engaged in combat of any kind. The B-36 never
achieved the legendary fame of other aircraft like the Flying Fortress or the
Spitfire, and never featured in popular culture depictions of heroic deeds or

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
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2  P. JENKINS

futile missions. We can view that achievement—that non-war—in different

ways. We might be extremely thankful that wise policies and effective deter-
rents prevented such a catastrophe, or else we might be outraged and angry
that anyone ever contemplated such horrific slaughter. But the importance of
the story cannot be exaggerated. Both in the threat that was posed to human
civilization and the fact that the ultimate confrontation was averted, we are
looking at one of the most significant facts in human history.

What Kind of War?

If the importance of the Cold War is beyond doubt, its unusual quality raises
some intriguing issues for a historian. When we describe other wars, such as the
Napoleonic conflicts or the Second World War, we know exactly who the par-
ticipants were, when the conflicts began and ended, and where combat
occurred. We can cite the dates on which wars were declared and when peace
agreements ended them. Not only are none of these basic data available to
anyone studying the Cold War, but historians argue at length about basic terms
and details, about the what, why, when, and where. All these questions con-
tinue to divide historians.
By a conventional definition, the Cold War was a confrontation between the
Soviet Union and the US, and the power blocs that each led, which are con-
ventionally termed the East and the West. This situation lasted from just after
the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet state, roughly
from 1945 to 1991. In the English-speaking world, the “Cold War” concept
was framed by George Orwell, in 1945, and again by the US presidential
adviser Bernard Baruch in 1947. It was popularized by the 1947 book The
Cold War, by the journalist Walter Lippmann. The conflict was so called in
contrast to the hot and extremely destructive world war that had just con-
cluded and was instead characterized by rivalry that fell short of military action
between US and Soviet forces.
The question then arises whether this could legitimately be termed a war. In
legal terms, the two powers were never even enemies, as war was never declared.
Fighting certainly did occur between states aligned to one or other of the two
blocs, most famously in Korea and Vietnam, while internal revolutions and
repressions claimed many lives. If we combine these various conflicts, then the
“non-war” between East and West resulted in tens of millions of deaths. Even
if the two superpowers avoided total and direct war with each other—if they
avoided the constantly dreaded Third World War, “WWIII”—this was nothing
like true peace.

Who Fought the Cold War? The West

Nor was it obvious who the competing sides were in this singular war, and that
lack of definition would have enormous policy consequences with which we
still live today. In the late 1950s, say, global confrontations were
 1 INTRODUCTION  3

overwhelmingly likely to be depicted in terms of East and West, between

Moscow and Washington, and that was the model commonly assumed among
policymakers on both sides. The B-36s existed to attack Soviet targets and
Soviet forces. Even if a particular situation or problem did not immediately
have such an obvious dimension, then it would be reported and analyzed as
part of the larger Cold War context. If a war had developed in 1962, there was
little doubt about the nations that would be aligned on each side. Yet as we will
see repeatedly, such a simplistic East-West approach would often be misleading.
“The West” is a problematic concept. As commonly presented at the height
of the Cold War, two worlds confronted each other, with the West representing
democracy and freedom, and, by some accounts, the heritage of European
culture and civilization. In the US, college courses on the “Western Heritage”
were semi-seriously described as ranging “From Plato to NATO.” Yet the
US-led alliance of the 1950s included such long-powerful countries as Britain
and France, which had their own distinctive interests and needs, and which
struggled to resist the demands of their overwhelmingly powerful US ally. Nor
was such a transatlantic alignment historically inevitable. Until 1945, different
combinations of allies viewed Germany as their principal enemy. The US saw
no natural or eternal alliance with France or Britain, and throughout the 1920s,
US war plans had imagined a likely conflict against the British Empire (includ-
ing Canada), which would be allied with Japan.
After the Second World War, the US was closely allied with the British
world, and the critically important intelligence-sharing system known as Five
Eyes includes the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But that
“special relationship” had its definite limits, and the US tried to exclude the
British from nuclear secrets. Britain and Canada meanwhile were much more
open than the US to maintaining diplomatic relations with Communist pow-
ers, including Mao’s China and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Moreover, that close
Anglophone network did not necessarily extend to other North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) states. In 1966, France withdrew from NATO’s formal
military structures, and transatlantic tensions became acute during the Vietnam
War years. British and European allies were often disdainful of American cul-
tural expressions. Western populations also varied enormously in their attitudes
toward Communism. Throughout the Cold War years, Communist parties in
France and Italy were very powerful organizations commanding mass support,
which was certainly not the case in Britain or Canada, leave alone the
US.  Throughout the Cold War, Soviet propaganda and diplomatic efforts
encouraged the detachment of Europe from the US concept of a com-
mon “West.”
Defining “the West” would often be controversial. If indeed the term
referred to a US-led alliance of democratic states opposed to Communism, it
was difficult to include Spain, which  was strictly nondemocratic until after
1975, yet which was de facto integrated into US defense arrangements. At dif-
ferent times, dictatorial regimes in Portugal and Greece clearly defined them-
selves as anti-Communist and therefore Western. The US alliance also included
4  P. JENKINS

such key Asian and clearly non-Western nations—Japan, as well as South Korea
and Taiwan (the Republic of China). In the 1970s, Israel sought to expand the
concept of the West and its struggles beyond that central anti-Communist
theme. Israeli leaders presented the country as a part of the “West” engaged in
common cause against terrorism and against hostile Arab and Islamic states.

Who Fought the Cold War? The East

The concept of “the East”—the Communist world—also demands unpacking.
Although US administrations sometimes presented all Communist powers as
integral parts of a solid Eastern Bloc, that view became ever less tenable as the
decades went on. From the 1950s, although Yugoslavia remained Communist,
it became ever more detached from the Soviet alliance in Europe. Other East
European states followed. The Soviets had to struggle constantly to maintain
the loyalty of members of its alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and to ensure that
domestic reforms in these satellite countries did not lead to defiance of its
hegemony. Even a faithful Soviet ally like Cuba’s Fidel Castro was capable of
independent and provocative actions that angered Moscow. During the 1960s,
China became so hostile to the Soviet Union that the two countries came close
to open war. By that point, definitions of Communism itself were in flux. In the
West, the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s presented itself as equally
disdainful of both American and Soviet regimes, and that perspective became
very popular in many societies.
In the early years of the Cold War, the US and the USSR were so inconceiv-
ably stronger than any possible rivals or competitors that it made some sense to
think of their contest in bipolar terms. As the decades progressed, that assump-
tion became ever less plausible.

Beyond East and West

The issue of diversity within the Communist world—the East—had real politi-
cal consequences. Some states and movements were avowedly and wholeheart-
edly pledged to Communism, but others were not, although their policies
borrowed heavily from the left-wing language and assumptions. So how did
each side assess its potential friends and enemies? What decided whether a hos-
tile or critical government was actually part of the enemy camp?
In the 1950s, many nations defined themselves as part of a Third World,
affiliated neither to the Eastern and Western sides in the Cold War, but pro-
claimed values of nationalism, anti-imperialism, neutralism, and non-­alignment.
From an American or Western point of view, a government that spoke the
language of socialism and anti-imperialism might well be a veiled or unadmit-
ted ally of the Soviets, especially if it acted against US economic interests, and
it thus needed to be treated as an enemy. Such a vision neglected purely local
circumstances, grievances, and loyalties. Some crises, which were at the time
seen as East-West battles, can in retrospect be seen as expressions of
 1 INTRODUCTION  5

nationalism and anti-imperialism, or of legitimate social activism. On occasion,

the strict Cold War interpretation would be correct: Castro’s regime really was
Communist and pro-Soviet. At other times, the view proved incorrect. Despite
an early Communist background, South African leader Nelson Mandela was
anything but a tool of Soviet Communism.
Such a debate over interpretation was pivotal to the Vietnam struggle that
was so critical to the central years of the Cold War. US policymakers differed
fundamentally as to whether Communist North Vietnam acted as it did because
it was an obedient tool of the Soviet-Chinese world front, or if it really was fol-
lowing its announced principles of nationalism. Each interpretation demanded
a very different set of policies and reactions. What we decide about these moti-
vations shapes our understanding of the actual scale and scope of the Cold War.
If North Vietnam was an integral part of the Communist Bloc, then the war
was a principal battlefront of that wider struggle. If we emphasize the national-
ist role in the struggle, then the Cold War context is less central.
The problem of understanding motives was further complicated by the role
of religion in shaping political ideology. To some extent, religious language
and motives ran throughout the whole conflict, and the language of “defend-
ing Christian civilization” was important in the West from the 1940s. But new
dimensions of religion and faith-based activism came to play an ever greater
role in political ideology from the 1970s onward. Both the US and the Soviets
repeatedly failed to comprehend that religion might be an authentic motivator
of political action and resistance, rather than a thin disguise for some secular
cause. When the older bipolar world view failed to pay proper attention to
nationalism and religion, it was ignoring or underplaying very potent drivers of
human affairs. This confusion would become apparent in the understandings
that each side developed of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or successive crises in Iran,
Poland, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.
Complicating the language of “war” is the fact that each of the main partici-
pants sought to undermine its enemy by subversive actions that fell short of
open military combat. If Americans and Russians did not fight an apocalyptic
battle in central Germany, then for almost half a century the two sides actually
did fight through proxies and surrogates, who might or might not wear uni-
forms. But in domestic matters, as in international, reliably identifying such
enemy proxies or agents was not an easy task. Both sides debated whether
protesters and dissidents in their own respective societies were complaining
about authentic injustices, or if they might actually be tools of the other side in
the global confrontation. In the US context, right-wingers often saw a sinister
Soviet hand directing the Civil Rights protests led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Soviet authorities were no less convinced about the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) sponsorship of the country’s human rights activists, or the surging dem-
ocratic movement in Poland. In both cases, governments or political factions
found conspiratorial interpretations valuable because they served at once to
stigmatize and delegitimize troubling social movements, and to emphasize the
direct threats posed by the Cold War enemy. For both sides, guilt by
6  P. JENKINS

association was a powerful theme throughout these years. Of its nature, the
Cold War created a hothouse atmosphere for the breeding and cultivation of
conspiracy theories.

When Was the Cold War?

If the “who” component of the Cold War is debatable—the issue of identifying
the respective combatants—then so is the when. In common parlance, the very
phrase “Cold War” most often summons images from the 1950s or early
1960s. For Americans, these might include the McCarthy hearings into domes-
tic Communism, the Cuba missile crisis, civil defense drills, or images of the
SAC’s bomber fleets; and each individual society has its own distinctive roster
of memories and symbols. Crises accumulated between 1947 and 1954, and
then became ever more acute with the arrival of hydrogen bombs in the
mid-­1950s, and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) delivery systems a
few years afterward. The years between 1958 and 1962 were uniquely perilous.
But such a chronological focus is misleading, as the same fundamental themes,
realities, and dilemmas persisted through the 1980s. So, of course, did the
personalities. The Cold War reached a perilous new height between 1981 and
1984, and the world was arguably as close to annihilation in 1983 as it had
been in the early 1960s.
The chronology issue illustrates very different national approaches. From a
Soviet perspective, the key moment in the story was the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917, which created a new Communist order. From 1919, the Soviet-­
directed Communist International, the Comintern, encouraged Communist
causes and militancy worldwide. The subsequent decades witnessed numerous
assaults intended to destroy that Communist order. In 1936, the grand alliance
between Hitler’s Germany and militarist Japan was called the anti-Comintern
Pact, the Agreement against the Communist International. Between 1941 and
1945, Germany undertook its near-lethal assault on the USSR, but Soviet his-
tory had usually involved bitter contention with capitalist nations, including
the US. From this perspective, what Westerners call the Cold War was only one
phase of a conflict that had been in progress since 1917, made immeasurably
more dangerous by the new nuclear component.
For West European nations like Britain and France, relations with the Soviet
Union in the years between the two World Wars had often involved conflict,
espionage, and subversion, both in home nations themselves and in their colo-
nial territories. In 1924, false charges of Comintern interference in Britain did
much to overthrow a Labour government in that country. Many of the spy
scandals and exposes that we commonly think of as quintessentially Cold War
events involved espionage activities that occurred in the West during the 1930s,
but which were only revealed in the 1950s. In this framework, the Spanish
Civil War of the 1930s was one of the great set-piece military struggles of the
longer-term Cold War, and the heavy Soviet aid supplied to left-wing forces
closely foreshadowed later events in Korea and Vietnam. Both from the Soviet
 1 INTRODUCTION  7

and the West European points of view, the Second World War marked a brief
and unusual period of alliance and cooperation, which speedily and inevitably
collapsed not long after Nazi Germany was destroyed. Between the wars,
Winston Churchill was legendary as a fire-breathing anti-Communist, a role he
promptly resumed after 1945, when he popularized the term “iron curtain.”
Other countries had their own chronologies. For Poland, the post-1945 con-
flict was a phase in a much longer historical struggle for freedom from Russian
rule, which dated back to the eighteenth century. Poles regarded their defeat
of a Soviet Communist invasion in 1920 as a near-miraculous vindication of
that struggle and of their national identity.
Such rewritings affect our sense of historical period. Scholars sometimes
describe the East-West tensions of the 1980s as a “Second Cold War,” the
assumption being that the first or “real” Cold War occurred in the 1950s and
1960s. That whole post-1945 history was itself a second phase, resuming the
open hostility that had prevailed between 1917 and 1941.
However standard it may seem today, the notion that the fundamental
Soviet-Western rivalry was somehow new after 1945 was chiefly an American
perspective. US armed forces had intervened against the Bolsheviks in 1918,
and the country had a lively domestic Red Scare that ran through the 1920s.
In the US Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities began
its fervent quest for Communist infiltrators in 1938. Even so, the nation’s poli-
tics through the interwar years had emphasized isolationism, and avoiding con-
frontation with other powers. (The US still felt entitled to intervene freely in
its poorer neighbors in the Caribbean and Central America.) The administra-
tion of Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) sought peaceful relations with the
Soviets, and in 1933, the US finally gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet
state. Roosevelt also placed the US in opposition to the European powers in
matters involving the colonial empires and decolonization. Only after some
serious internal debate was the US  prepared to take the lead against Soviet
advances after 1945. From such an American viewpoint, the Soviet confronta-
tion appears more novel and demanding of explanation than it might appear
elsewhere in the world. American predominance over popular culture and the
academic world ensured that the  US chronological perspective became the
norm in other nations that increasingly forgot their own older experiences.
Although the period used here for the Cold War—from 1945 through
1991—does have a clear unity and historical utility, it was to some extent an
American construct.

What Was the Cold War About?

The matter of periodization guides our understanding of the issues at stake in
the Cold War, and the question of what the global struggle was actually about.
The Soviet emphasis on 1917 suggests that this was above all an ideological
contest between Communism and capitalism, or as others might have said,
8  P. JENKINS

between Soviet tyranny and Western freedom. But the conflict was at least as
much geopolitical as ideological.
Historically, states tend to follow certain long-term policies regardless of the
administration in power at any given time, or its ideological coloring. For rea-
sons of economics or geography, they define their spheres of influence in par-
ticular ways. Such long continuities are evident in the Soviet case. In the
nineteenth century, the absolute monarchy of the Tsars regarded certain
regions as essential to its security, and the country’s future growth. The
Russians occupied most of Poland, and a potent pan-Slavist vision presented
Russia as the ultimate guardian of all Slavic and/or Orthodox peoples in
Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Russian governments looked south for the
future expansion of which they dreamed, into the Ottoman Empire and the
Levant, and toward Persia and Afghanistan. A map of Tsarist territorial ambi-
tions around 1900 would also provide a valuable guide to the directions of
Soviet policy through the Cold War. In 1940, Stalin’s government declared
that, beyond redrawing borders in Europe, “its territorial aspirations center
south of the national territory of the Soviet Union, in the direction of the
Indian Ocean.”1 During the Cold War as I am defining it here, both Turkey
and Persia (Iran) would repeatedly be the setting for superpower tensions and
clashes. In pursuing its international goals, the Tsarist regime used intelligence
and secret police systems in ways that strongly foreshadowed later Soviet
behavior. That included the use of surrogates and proxies to carry out terrorist
acts on Western soil, with a view to discrediting the regime’s enemies.
Long continuities are no less apparent in the US instance. From the 1820s,
the US had attempted to exclude European powers from the Americas, north
and south, suggesting that it saw all these territories as within its sphere of
influence: this was the so-called Monroe Doctrine. Throughout the early twen-
tieth century, US forces frequently intervened in Caribbean or Latin nations,
sometimes in countries that would later be pivotal to Cold War rivalries, such
as Cuba and Nicaragua.
Historians dislike counterfactuals, but as a thought experiment, we might
imagine how affairs might have developed if we take Communism out of the
political picture. Suppose that the Russian regime in power in the 1940s was
neither Soviet nor Communist, that it was monarchist or even democratic.
Further assume that this alternative Russia had played such a decisive role in
smashing Nazi Germany, leaving a world balance much like what we actually
know in 1945. The hypothetical non-Communist Russia would still see a vital
interest in expanding its power over Eastern Europe, to supply a buffer against
future invasion, and it would be an obvious tactic to create puppet regimes.
Further West, Russia would confront a vast power vacuum in what had been
the heart of Europe, with the collapse of Germany and Italy, and the extreme
weakness of the Allied victor states, of France, Britain, and the Netherlands.

1
 Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945: series D. US Department of State
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960).
 1 INTRODUCTION  9

Europe was conspicuously in play, and both Russia and the US would face
heavy pressure to fill that resulting vacuum. The twilight of the colonial and
imperial powers created a host of new opportunities and pressures on a global
scale inviting Russian expansion into that country’s historically defined sphere
of expansion, and beyond.
The fact that US and Russian military forces were by far the world’s most
powerful would be central to any future relationships. Even without the ideo-
logical element, something like the Cold War would have been easily imaginable.
But pursuing such a mental exercise also points to its limitations. Of itself,
Marxist ideology did not determine Soviet views of the wider world, but with-
out that ideology, the Soviet Union would never have secured the broad and
devoted international support that so often proved vital to its interests. In
Tsarist times, liberals and radicals around the world had loathed Russia as a
symbol of tyranny and authoritarianism, just as, after 1917, so many would
laud the Soviets as the exemplars of a heroic future. However much outsiders
admired the cultural achievements of Tsarist Russia—all the magnificent litera-
ture, music, and art—these splendors were evidently not associated with the
regime or its policies. Matters were quite different under the Soviets, who com-
manded vast and highly appealing resources in the form of propaganda and soft
power, which exercised immense influence in many parts of the world.
Moreover, these messages were inextricably associated with Communist ideol-
ogy and Soviet politics. This sympathy acquired an institutional foundation
through flourishing Communist parties and affiliated movements in many
nations. In the post-1945 context, this ideological power gave Communism
and Soviet causes real advantages in societies struggling against colonialism in
Africa and Asia, or against imperialism and exploitation in the Americas. The
resulting ideological contest shaped every aspect of Cold War thought, policy-
making, and rhetoric.

How Did Technology Shape the Cold War?

The Cold War was also a technological confrontation, in ways that transcended
ideological struggles. It is tempting, but usually misleading, to describe human
affairs in terms of revolutionary new technologies, to fall into the error of tech-
nological determinism. While such breakthroughs might transform human
interactions, they can never be discussed in isolation. In the case of the Cold
War, it is difficult to avoid such a central emphasis on new forms of weaponry,
above all the nuclear menace, and in popular parlance, the two are inextricably
linked. The Cold War is recalled as the age of intense nuclear fears and vice versa.
At first, nuclear weapons did not greatly escalate the destructive potential of
warfare. Using massed fleets of bombers armed with conventional weapons,
both the Americans and British had caused immense casualties in enemy cities
between 1942 and 1945. But as nuclear weapons grew in effectiveness in the
late 1940s, they raised the prospect of swiftly destroying an enemy nation, at
huge human cost. This trend was vastly amplified in the 1950s, with the
10  P. JENKINS

coming of the hydrogen bomb, which raised the stakes in the struggle to an
almost infinite degree. The first US weapon tested, in 1952, was 450 times
more powerful than the bomb used against Nagasaki, and the Soviets tested
their own device the following year. Actual deployable weapons followed a
couple of years later. Ballistic missiles enormously accelerated the speed with
which such weapons could be delivered anywhere in the world. By 1959, both
the US and the Soviets deployed their intercontinental ballistic missiles,
or ICBMs.
Together, these changes transformed both warfare and international poli-
tics. From the start, they gravely undermined the great Soviet superiority in
conventional military forces in Europe. Although the US and Britain had
deployed very large armies against the Germans, the nature of their societies
made these efforts very difficult to support for any lengthy period. The nuclear
element changed everything. Before 1949, the Soviets had no such resource
themselves, and the West retained a crushing superiority in nuclear arms into
the early 1960s. The existence of thermonuclear weaponry raised the prospect
that a Western attack might swiftly eliminate the Soviet state and much of the
population. Without the potential nuclear threat, it is difficult to imagine how
the Soviets could have resisted military actions against a profoundly weakened
Western Europe during numerous crises from the late 1940s onward. But even
the weaker Soviet nuclear forces could still pose enough of a threat to the
Western powers, and above all to the US, to discourage conventional military
operations that would otherwise have proved very tempting. This would for
instance have included a US invasion of Cuba in 1962. Nuclear weapons played
an essential role in ensuring that the Cold War did not become an outright
world war and also in determining its long time-span.
The nuclear balance of terror ensured that a direct confrontation between
the two key players had to be avoided, literally as a matter of life and death.
This determined the nature of conflict and the means through which rivalries
would be pursued, commonly through clandestine and covert tactics. This
placed a high premium on subverting the rival’s position in his own territories,
to combating his allies and supporters, and building up friendly forces. Guerrilla
and low-intensity operations proliferated, as it was vital to allow each super-
power to deny that it was directly involved in military assaults on its rival. When
the Soviets orchestrated major military interventions in several African nations
in the mid-1970s, they did so largely through Cuban allies and proxies (who
had long dreamed of aggressively expanding their revolution in these direc-
tions). Rather than using massed military forces of their own, the two sides
deployed small numbers of personnel as advisors, trainers, or special forces.
Intelligence and surveillance, both international and domestic, acquired
unprecedented significance. So did effective internal security mechanisms and
policing. All that would have been true regardless of the ideological coloring of
the respective sides, and the key protagonists.
The Cold War is much more than merely “the nuclear age,” or indeed
“nuclear paranoia.” But it is incomprehensible without the nuclear dimension.
 1 INTRODUCTION  11

Where Did the Cold War Take Place?

The Cold War was truly global, even more so than the very wide-ranging activ-
ities associated with the two World Wars. Apart from military encounters or
revolutions, surveillance activities brought East-West competition into every
area of the globe, including the poles, as well as the deep seas, and space itself.
Although the main ground forces confronted each other in Europe, crises and
conflicts could erupt anywhere in the globe, from Laos to Congo, from
Nicaragua to Angola. As it was suggested earlier, the broad range of societies
affected should make it impossible to speak in simple East-West terms, as each
individual situation had its own particular set of circumstances and world views.
Profoundly affecting the shape and outcome of these various global situa-
tions was the break-up of the old colonial empires and subsequent decoloniza-
tion. This constituted a revolutionary change in global affairs as they had
existed over the previous quarter-millennium, when European powers had for-
mally or informally ruled much of the world’s surface. Occupation, defeat, or
near-bankruptcy made it impossible for those once great powers to maintain
that rule, and some faced bloody revolutions and civil wars. Between 1945 and
1965, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy lost most or all of
their once-vast imperial possessions in Africa and Asia, and Portugal followed
in the mid-1970s. This is sometimes considered to mark the end of formal
decolonization, although the Soviet Union itself included many conquered
peoples, predominantly Muslims, who had been incorporated into the Russian
Empire in Tsarist tines.
Of itself, that tectonic change did not result from the Cold War, but was
rather an immediate outcome of the Second World War, and just like the revo-
lutionary impact of nuclear weapons, it began quite independently of US-Soviet
rivalries. If the Cold War had not happened, this imperial collapse would still
have proceeded, and it would have resulted in conflicts and chaos across vast
regions of the planet. But as the transformation occurred, it could not fail to
become a factor in this larger East-West strife. Dozens of newly independent
nations came into being, from enormous entities such as India, Indonesia, or
the Democratic Republic of the Congo to tiny statelets. The share of the
world’s population in these regions grew steadily over the coming decades in
consequence of very rapid population growth, which by the 1960s was exciting
Western fears of a population explosion. Many of the new nations were in stra-
tegic locations, or controlled strategic resources, often in huge quantities: the
Congo was a crucial source of uranium. Particularly in the Middle East, the
quest to gain and secure oil resources would always prove a powerful tempta-
tion for both Russia and the US.
For policymakers on both sides, the new opportunities were intoxicating.
And if the overall situation originated outside the Cold War context, matters of
ideology soon became extremely important. With the critique of imperialism
that was fundamental to their value system, the Soviets had an obvious advan-
tage in this emerging battle, and they worked strenuously to build up their
12  P. JENKINS

anti-colonial credentials, arming and training national liberation movements

and revolutionary regimes. The Americans and their allies had to compete
imaginatively, through a combination of economic and political solutions, as
well as direct military efforts. On occasion, the West leaped to assume Soviet
inspiration in particular situations that were in fact entirely local in nature, and
over-reacted accordingly.

Was the Cold War Inevitable?

Time and again, the Cold War involved actions and decisions that seem unpar-
donable and by no means only as they are judged with the benefit of hindsight.
On many occasions, both sides ran risks that could easily have resulted in global
destruction on an apocalyptic scale, with millions dead. Even if such a cata-
clysm was averted, there is plenty of blame to be allocated.
Having said this, it is not easy to imagine circumstances in which the basic
antipathy could have been avoided, especially given the circumstances at the
end of the Second World War. Together, the destruction of the European
power balance, the threat to the imperial systems, and the tremendous might
of the two superpowers—each with its historic needs and demands—made a
confrontation all but certain. Just how this clash would develop was shaped
and constrained by the new environment created by nuclear weapons. At many
points in this book, we will encounter moments when different paths might
have been taken, for better or worse. But the fundamental realities of the Cold
War itself suggest a tragic inevitability.

How Do We Tell the Story of the Cold War?

The Cold War, then, was far more than a simple bipolar clash between a righ-
teous US-led West and an aggressive Communist East. That complexity and
nuance has increasingly been reflected in historical writing on the struggle
through the decades, and the present book seeks to take full account of these
insights.
Through that evolving literature, the historiography, we see the powerful
influence of new kinds of source materials as they became available, but no less
significant were shifting political attitudes, as each society projected its contem-
porary interests and obsessions into the historical past. To that extent, each era
has told its own story of the Cold War, which might be scarcely recognizable
to readers just a decade or so before or afterward. And however much serious
scholars would dislike such language, they have often tried to identify their
particular heroes and villains, who have similarly changed over time. When
consulting any book or scholarly article on this era, we should always begin by
noting the date of publication, as this will tell us much about the amount and
character of the source material available to the particular historian prevailing
at the time of writing, and the attitudes.
 1 INTRODUCTION  13

For Americans at least, the heroic image of the conflict was the normal
interpretation well into the 1960s. Even then, there were dissident voices
who presented a very different view of specific confrontations such as the
Korean War, and one much more sympathetic to Communist motivations
and behavior. Such minority views became much more commonplace as the
US became ever more disenchanted with its experience in Vietnam. In the
1970s, the exposure of vast amounts of materials about the misdeeds of
Western intelligence agencies caused a radical rethinking of many aspects of
the post-1945 Cold War, both within Western nations and, especially, in the
Third World or Global South. Liberal and left-oriented historians became
much more sympathetic to narratives that would once have been confined to
devoted Communist writers. In particular, domestic “Red Scares” and anti-
Communist purges in Western nations were treated as monstrously wrong
and unjustified, as cynical “witch-­hunts.” (We will repeatedly describe these
events in the present book.)
The balance changed again in the 1990s, with the release of masses of hith-
erto secret material from Eastern Bloc nations and also of declassified Western
intelligence materials. This often confirmed the reality of Soviet and
Communist clandestine activities around the world and further allowed a
thorough revision of historic confrontations like the Cuba Missile Crisis. The
release of Eastern Bloc materials has utterly revised our interpretation of ter-
rorist movements in Western nations and often confirmed what were once
speculations about clandestine Communist involvement. Meanwhile, the US
has released information about their surveillance activities in Eastern Bloc
nations, with data that were once regarded as the most secret crown jewel of
the intelligence community.
In the past quarter century, the Cold War has been an immensely fruitful
field for historical research, with a huge outpouring of scholarship that can
barely be touched upon here. Some key themes should however be mentioned.
One is the globalization of research, with the much greater coverage of affairs
in Global South nations. This allows us to understand particular conflicts in
terms of the specific and local forces at work in a society, without imposing the
simplistic East-West framework that might once have been used. This approach
has the added advantage of allowing us to see local groups and individual actors
operating according to their own interests and ideologies, which might or
might not coincide with those of Moscow or Washington.
Throughout the modern wave of globalized studies, scholars must wrestle
with the question of intent. When a situation developed in a particular way, can
we assume that a state or group actively sought that outcome? When, for
instance, we see the expansion of Communist power in Eastern Europe in the
1940s, earlier historians might have seen a simple Soviet plot, directed by Stalin
personally. Closer examination suggests a much more nuanced and contingent
view, closely attuned to diplomatic needs and pressures at any given moment.
In Vietnam, similarly, we have also seen how scholars debate the motivations of
14  P. JENKINS

participants: is it more useful to frame the North Vietnamese as Communist,

or as nationalist? On some such questions, highly experienced and able histori-
ans are still unable to achieve consensus, for instance in the role of Communist
ideology and organization in the early phases of the Cuban Revolution. Was
Fidel Castro a secret Communist from the start? Did he adopt that stance for
strategic reasons? Such debates abound.
Perhaps our greatest problem in telling this story is that we already know the
ending, and that has to condition how we tell the narrative. We know that the
US-Soviet nuclear standoff would eventually be resolved and that Offutt would
ultimately stand down. But during the Cold War itself, such an outcome would
have seemed improbable, to the point of seeming a fairy tale. Modern historical
writing proceeds according to the knowledge that the conflict would end
peacefully, but it is vital not to fall into the trap of assuming that inevitability.
On multiple occasions, the survival of human civilization really was at risk.

Further Reading

As the Cold War affected so much of the world over such a lengthy period, the
volume of possible sources is immense, even if we confine ourselves to mate-
rials in English. The sheer breadth of topics and ongoing debates is sug-
gested by the articles appearing in the prestigious Journal of Cold War
Studies, which has been publishing since 1999. Throughout this book, each
chapter will suggest readings, but from the nature of the topic, these are very
selective indeed, and they lean heavily toward recent work, mainly from the
past decade.
One indispensable collection of essays is Melvyn P.  Leffler and Odd Arne
Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (three volumes, 2010),
and see the important contributions in Richard H.  Immerman and Petra
Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013). Each of these
volumes contains multiple essays on detailed aspects of the Cold War, with
specific chronological, regional, and thematic studies. I have not referred to
these studies individually in the chapters that follow, but they are highly rel-
evant and extremely informative about the particular topics discussed.
There are several fine single volume surveys of the Cold War, including John
Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005); Michael L.  Dockrill
and Michael F. Hopkins, The Cold War, 1945–1991 2nd ed. (2006); Melvyn
P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind (2007); Norman Stone, The Atlantic and
its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (2010); and John Lamberton
Harper, The Cold War (2011).
Odd Arne Westad stresses global and Global South dimensions in The Global
Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005),
and in his The Cold War: A World History (2017). Compare Lorenz M. Lüthi,
Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (2020). Global conflicts also form
the subject of Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s important study of The Cold War’s
 1 INTRODUCTION  15

Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (2018). Robert Cowley, ed., The
Cold War: A Military History (2005) addresses the military dimensions of
the conflict. See also Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold
War: The Politics of Insecurity (2012); Ralph B. Levering, The Cold War: A
Post-Cold War History (2016); and Christopher R.  W. Dietrich, ed., A
Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present (2020).
Dianne Kirby addresses a critical theme in Religion and the Cold War (2003).
For (very) long continuities in political attitudes, see David S. Foglesong, The
American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia”
Since 1881 (2007).
Throughout this book, I will often refer to works of fiction, whether films,
television productions, or novels, as excellent illustrations of strictly contem-
porary attitudes. Some works in particular are fine historical sources in their
own right, in showing how shrewd individuals responded to the situations
they observed. Some of these fictional productions actually contributed sig-
nificantly to contemporary debates about the issues they were covering. A
list of such possible fictional items could be extended indefinitely.
 PART I

Between Wars? 1945–1967

 CHAPTER 2

Origins: The World in 1946

In 1946, two Western leaders delivered speeches in which they offered radically
different visions of the world. On March 5, at Fulton, Missouri, recently
unseated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned of growing Soviet
dominance in Eastern Europe:

The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of
Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers
and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are
prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no
true democracy.1

As he famously declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the

Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent,” turning the
East into a “Soviet sphere” controlled by Moscow. The Soviet threat was obvi-
ous in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Iran. The Western nations, acting through
the United Nations, must demonstrate their will to resist Soviet expansion.
Far less remembered than Churchill’s was a speech delivered that September
in New York City, by the former US Vice President Henry Wallace, who was
then serving as Commerce Secretary under President Harry Truman. Wallace
scorned claims of potential Russian ambitions on Western Europe or Latin
America. At the same time, he declared that the US had no business interfering
in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, which he
consigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. The two sides should coexist
peacefully, each practicing its particular visions of social and economic
arrangements until they would ultimately converge, with growing freedoms in
the Soviet bloc. He favored establishing international control over all nuclear

1
 “The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain Speech’), March 5, 1946,” https://winstonchurchill.
org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_2
20  P. JENKINS

weapons. We should recall that if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died a

year or two earlier than he actually did in April 1945, then he would have been
succeeded by Wallace. Wallace, in turn, might easily have won the 1944 presi-
dential election in his own right, as FDR’s symbolic heir. As President, Wallace
would then have applied his distinctive principles to post-war relations with
Stalin and the Soviets. That is another of the intriguing might-have-beens of
history.
In retrospect, most would agree that Churchill’s analysis of Soviet ambitions
and tactics was largely correct, while Wallace’s view was optimistic at best. But
without hindsight, it was not clear that the emerging post-war world could not
have found a happier and less threatening accommodation. Only by under-
standing then-recent events, can we understand the deeper forces and pressures
driving toward division and dissension, rather than reconciliation.

From Marx to Lenin

Marxist ideology was thoroughly embedded in the very name of the Soviet
Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which supplanted the
Russian Empire after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The development of
that ideology is essential to understanding the behavior of the Soviet state dur-
ing and after the Second World War. To say that is certainly not to lay all blame
for the emerging struggles at the feet of the Soviets, but rather to define the
critical issues at stake, and to understand the basic vocabulary.
From the 1840s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formulated the theory that
class struggle was the driving force of history. Particular classes dominated in
each society, and over time economic development created and strengthened
new classes, which in turn took power, usually through violent revolution. The
elites of the towns and cities—the bourgeoisie—overthrew the old feudal
classes, until they, in turn, were challenged by the rising forces of the urban and
industrial working class, the proletariat. Assumption of power by this class
would for the first time in history represent a truly democratic society ruled by
the great mass of the people, free from exploitation. Marxists debated whether
such a transition could be achieved through formal democratic means and the
degree of violence that might be needed to accomplish change. Before the First
World War, Marxist thinkers assumed that revolutionary change was certain to
occur in one or more of the most economically developed nations, such as
France or Germany, and few saw relatively backward Russia as a candidate.
Most saw revolutions as spreading rapidly across the advanced world, leaving
few or no nations able or willing to attack the new socialist states.
In early twentieth-century Russia, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik faction
decided that revolutionary violence was needed to overthrow the old state
order, sweep away all its mechanisms, and replace it with a whole new state.
Such a campaign must be led and directed by a highly disciplined vanguard
party. Only in this way could a new regime take full control of the economy,
and effect the changes it believed essential. Those tactics succeeded in the
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  21

Russian Revolution of November 1917, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the

embattled democratic state that had briefly replaced Tsarist power. In theory,
the new country was neither a traditional state nor an empire, but a union of
republics founded on Soviets, on councils of workers, soldiers, and other pro-
gressive groups. But contrary to earlier hopes, the old social order did not eas-
ily fade away after the revolution, which was subject to constant international
assaults, and domestic subversion.
For the new Soviet leaders, those existential threats justified keeping the
country on a permanent footing of internal war. Lenin and his associates spoke
openly of the need to defend the new Soviet entity through acts of violence and
repression against representatives of the old ruling order, through what they
termed revolutionary terror. Already by the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, the
Soviet Union had created a brutal system of secret police and mass imprison-
ment in labor camps. The state was totalitarian, utterly centralized, and allow-
ing no forms of economic or civic organization apart from the state and its
ruling party. A brief period of economic liberalization and market reform, the
New Economic Policy, was abandoned in 1926, as Stalin consolidated his rule
over the nation. The Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet experience
sharply divided leftist and progressive movements worldwide between demo-
cratically oriented Socialist parties and Communists, who were thrilled by the
social progress and experiments they saw in the new Soviet state.

Stalin
Repression in the Soviet Union escalated under Joseph Stalin, who led the
country from 1927 through 1953, and who created a god-like cult of personal-
ity and absolute authority. In Stalin’s view, the country’s very success in pro-
gressing toward socialism stimulated further class conflict, demanding ever
greater vigilance and repression. Globally too, as capitalism faced a growing
threat to its very existence during the Crash and Depression of the 1930s, it
responded with ever-more savage and aggressive innovations, such as Fascism
and Nazism, and the Soviet state could never relax its iron discipline if it was to
survive. From 1934 through 1946, the Soviet secret police was known as the
NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Repressive state power
was directed against many internal enemies, resulting in the mass starvation of
peasants who resisted Soviet rural policies, and ever-widening persecutions and
denunciations of anyone thought to be hostile to the regime. During the most
extreme eras, such as 1937–1938, sweeping purges drew in millions for execu-
tion or imprisonment. Fueling such purges were the confessions drawn from
suspects under torture, which implicated ever-wider networks of acquaintance
in fantastic and groundless charges. Show trials, with their ritualized confes-
sions and denunciations, became a fundamental part of Stalinist rule.
From Lenin’s time, the Soviet Union developed a vast network of labor
camps, which were administered through an agency titled by the acronym
GULAG (Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey, i.e., “Chief
22  P. JENKINS

Administration of Corrective Labour Camps”). The name became famous in

the West with the publication in 1973 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s history of
the camps, which he compared to an archipelago of islands scattered through
the nation. His book was thus titled The Gulag Archipelago. The systems
included thousands of institutions large and small, but some, like the Siberian
camps of Vorkuta and Kolyma, were immense. Throughout the whole quarter
century of Stalinist rule, some 25 million Soviet people spent at least some time
in the Gulag network, and millions of others experienced internal exile or
deportation. The scale of atrocities was widely known in the West. When the
Second World War broke out in 1939, the Soviet Union had a far bloodier
reputation internationally than did Nazi Germany, although that situation
would soon change.
Internationally too, the Soviets brought all foreign Communist parties into
rigid conformity to the interests of the Soviet motherland. Through the 1930s,
Communists around the world were widely mocked for the frequent and near-­
overnight policy shifts they were forced to adopt to accommodate changing
Soviet demands. In the early 1930s, Communists were required to avoid any
cooperation with other democratic parties against the rising menace of Fascism
or Nazism, because all those parties were themselves “social fascists.” From
1935 through 1939, Communists urged all those other liberal and centrist
movements to join a common alliance against fascism and Hitler, a Popular
Front. That vision of broad left-wing unity in progressive causes proved very
attractive and drew many to join the booming Communist parties. Those par-
ties made extensive use of “progressive” front groups, wholly owned Party
subsidiaries that appealed to a range of interests and causes, allowing sympa-
thizers to be drawn into the Party orbit. That honeymoon period proved brief.
In August 1939, all Communists were suddenly required to laud a startling
new Soviet policy of friendship with the recently denounced Nazi regime.
From a non-Communist point of view, there were abundant reasons to view
both the Soviet Union and domestic Communists with real suspicion. The
Soviets were associated with grim images of repression, symbolized by Siberian
prison camps and murderous secret police. Accusations that Communist par-
ties in Western countries were, in effect, Soviet puppets or agents of Soviet
diplomacy were well substantiated. By no means only on the far right, fear and
suspicion of Communism were already widespread during the 1930s, and those
sentiments easily resurfaced following the end of the war.

The Second World War

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 transformed the atti-
tudes of the Western powers almost overnight. British and imperial leaders
were overjoyed to greet this powerful new ally, and both Stalin and the Soviet
war effort were glorified and idealized. Despite initial conservative hostility, US
attitudes became equally friendly after the US entered the war in December
1941. The Soviets were regarded as the most militant and determined part of
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  23

the Allied coalition, and the key contributor to the war effort. The Soviets
made some gestures toward accommodation, formally abolishing the
Comintern in 1943. In occupied countries, the Soviet involvement raised the
vision of imminent armed liberation. Communists won high regard for their
activities in armed anti-Nazi resistance. Where active Communist Parties were
legal, membership rolls swelled, as did the influence of party newspapers. The
US Communist Party reached a high of at least 80,000 by 1944; the British
peaked at 60,000.
Western admiration for the Soviets reached new heights with the stunning
Soviet advances through Poland into Germany in 1944–1945, which were
commanded by Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev. Two actions, in
particular, inspired awe among military observers, namely Operation Bagration
(June–August 1944) and the Vistula-Oder offensive (January–February 1945).
The vast scale of those campaigns was deeply impressive. In Bagration, over
two million Soviet soldiers destroyed a whole German Army Group, deploying
6000 tanks, 40,000 guns, and 8000 aircraft, as they advanced 450 miles in just
five weeks. In the campaign of early 1945, the Soviets advanced 300 miles in
two weeks. But however gratefully the West received these efforts at the time,
they also cast a long shadow in the colder diplomatic climate following 1945.
Through the 1950s, Western war planners would think back nervously to those
triumphant Soviet campaigns as possible blueprints for that country’s future
actions.
Soviet forces soon controlled most of Eastern Europe beyond what Churchill
would describe as the Iron Curtain, and in May 1945, they took Berlin itself.
That of itself need not have concerned the Western Allies, who had already
formulated plans for the division of Germany and Austria into occupation
zones, each controlled by one of the major allies. Even so, the Soviets made no
secret of their growing dominance over other occupied nations in the east.
Throughout the war, anti-Nazi forces and movements throughout Europe
had often been divided into multiple factions, in which the Communists were
one of the several forces. With Soviet backing, Communist factions excluded
and persecuted their rivals. One of the bloodiest such actions occurred in
Yugoslavia, where multiple resistance movements and militias had existed dur-
ing the war, often clashing with each other. In 1945, the new Communist
government headed by Josip Broz Tito undertook mass killings of rivals,
including not just former pro-Axis forces, but also many who had resisted Nazi
occupation. In France and Italy, Communist resistance forces persecuted thou-
sands whom they accused of being Nazi collaborators, and in the process, they
targeted many patriotic anti-Nazi fighters whose crime was their affiliation to
anti-Communist movements.
Western protests against Communist actions were muted in light of the
warm memories of the Soviet alliance during the war and a shared loathing of
collaborators. When US and Soviet forces met each other on the River Elbe in
April 1945, it was in an atmosphere of high celebration. Beyond general good-
will, the Western powers believed that the Soviets would be crucial allies in the
24  P. JENKINS

forthcoming assault on Japan. In 1945, the British had to decide on the fate of
many thousands of Russians who had defected to the German cause and had
fought alongside German forces. Although they were enemy combatants, their
reasons for fleeing Stalinist rule had usually been excellent, and all faced death
or imprisonment if they again fell under Stalin’s power. Nevertheless, these
Russians, including many Cossacks, were repatriated in their tens of thousands.
The British, likewise, handed pro-Axis Croatian forces over to Tito’s
Communists, who slaughtered tens of thousands. At the same time, Western
publics were unmoved by the atrocities committed against either German citi-
zens or German residents of the East European states. In massive ethnic cleans-
ing in these years, some 15 million ethnic Germans were relocated to Germany
or Austria, and at least a million died in the process. In Germany itself, the
Russians enthusiastically plundered the zone they occupied, dismantling facto-
ries for removal to their own country, with little concern for the future of the
local population.
Communist policies in these years are usually presented in terms of a ruth-
less grab for power and influence, and that element is undeniable. But matters
were actually more complex, and Stalin’s actions were often more flexible and
even conciliatory than this stereotype might suggest. He emerges as an oppor-
tunist, but one tempered by realism: he knew when he had to give ground.
When Soviet propaganda in 1945–1946 proclaimed a hope of good relations
with the West, this was not simply deceptive. At the same time, it is necessary
to understand the Stalinist ideological context, in which the Soviet Union
played a pivotal role in the cause of progress and human liberation so that
Great Russian nationalism became indistinguishable from Communism.
Extending Soviet power into Europe helped fulfill the onward march of his-
tory. That vision conditioned Soviet attitudes to the newly occupied countries
of the East, where establishing Communist regimes would benefit the masses
of ordinary people. The creation of new states—of people’s democracies—was
a fraternal act. Indeed, failure to reconstruct societies on radical socialist lines
would be a betrayal. In the aftermath of Nazism, the opponents of Communism
were viewed in the most sinister light, as de facto allies of Nazi savagery, and
those reactionary enemies were dehumanized accordingly. In that context, any
action that furthered the advance of Communism was fully justified. Obviously,
many in these occupied countries themselves understood things very
differently.

Poland
Poland was critical to the new situation, and the East-West antagonism that
now became obvious had deep historical roots. In the eighteenth century, the
once-mighty Polish kingdom was partitioned between the three great powers
of the day, namely Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and Warsaw became a Russian
city. A Polish state re-remerged in 1918, although it had to fight a bitter war
for survival against the Soviet Bolsheviks. That state in its turn was destroyed
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  25

by the German invasion of 1939, as the Soviets again intervened to seize the
eastern part of the country. In 1944, Soviet forces again conquered the whole
territory from its German occupiers. The subsequent fate of Poland was a
deeply sensitive question for the West, not least because it was the German
invasion of 1939 that had actually detonated the Second World War, and the
British had intervened specifically to secure Polish independence. Large num-
bers of Poles served under British command during the ensuing war. For the
British, national prestige was at stake.
If all the Allies accepted the existence of a post-war Polish state, it remained
unclear how far this entity would be truly independent, as opposed to a Soviet
puppet. During the war, one body of patriotic resistance forces had maintained
a government in exile in London, while other Communist-oriented leaders
operated under Soviet control in Lublin. The British naturally favored the
London contingent as the representatives of the older Polish state, while the
Soviets wished to install their own people. That division was debated at the
Allied conference held at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, between
Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. The Western leaders agreed to allow a
Communist-leaning provisional government in Poland, to the horror of non-­
Communists. Following fraudulent elections, a Communist government was
created, and over the next three years, it established a pro-Soviet and totalitar-
ian model of government. In June 1946, a (rigged) victory in a national refer-
endum confirmed what Communists claimed as a mandate.
Among other controversial decisions, the new government agreed to a far-­
reaching restructuring of Poland’s national boundaries. Large sections of pre-­
war eastern Poland were annexed to the Soviet Union and incorporated into
the republics of Ukraine and Belorussia (Belarus). For Poland, that meant the
loss of some important historic cities and population centers. In recompense,
the Poles annexed western territories that had previously been the possession
of Germany, marking a new German border along the rivers Oder and Neisse.
Both shifts involved large-scale relocation of existing populations, and the eth-
nic cleansing of older communities. Poland’s new borders were ratified at the
next conference of Allied leaders held at Potsdam in July 1945.
As often in Eastern Europe in this era, Polish Communists initially worked
with members of socialist and other parties to give the impression of a broad
coalition. Leaders of those parties were divided in their response to such over-
tures. In Poland, some socialists favored allying with other non-Communist
factions to hold back Soviet advances at all costs. Others supported a tactical
alliance with Communists to promote social reforms, and in the hope of mod-
erating Soviet ambitions. But through all these shifting alliances, Communists
maintained control over key ministries and bureaucratic agencies, especially
those controlling police or internal security. Between 1945 and 1947,
Communists expanded their power at the grassroots level, building up the
Communist party from a small fraction to a mass organization a million strong,
with strong paramilitary forces.
26  P. JENKINS

Anti-Communists struggled forcefully against the new order. During the

war, the country had developed a potent resistance that constituted a whole
alternative regime, the Polish Underground State. At its peak, the underground
Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, or AK, mobilized hundreds of thousands.
From 1945, anti-Communist resisters—the “doomed soldiers,” or “indomi-
table soldiers”—reorganized against the Soviets, with guerrilla outbreaks. The
Soviet military and NKVD responded ruthlessly, with mass arrests and deporta-
tions to the USSR. Through 1946, actual or potential anti-Communist indi-
viduals were arrested and imprisoned, and some were subject to spectacular
show trials, involving ludicrous charges of Nazi collaboration. If the direct
military threat faded, the potential for resistance remained strong.
Poland in 1946 was not fully under Communist control, but that process
was well underway, and the same was true across other nations of Eastern Europe.

The Spread of Soviet Power

In late 1944, it became obvious that the Soviets would occupy most of that
region. In a personal meeting that October, Churchill and Stalin debated the
exact share of influence that each country would have in the post-war situation.
In the secret “percentages agreement,” the British accepted near-total Soviet
hegemony in Bulgaria and Romania, and Stalin, in turn, recognized British
dominance in Greece. The balance of power in Yugoslavia would be 50–50.
The British originally favored a 50–50 deal in Hungary, but the Soviet share
increased to 80 percent.
In fact, the outcome fell far short of British hopes. Between 1944 and 1947,
the Soviets came to control all those nations except for Greece, and while
Yugoslavia pursued its distinctive path, Communist domination was absolute.
The countries followed a trajectory similar to that of Poland, with 1946 as a
critical year of struggle and transition. In each case, Communists arranged a
tactical collaboration with non-Communist parties, who were then gradually
excluded from power. Communist parties used violence to secure authority at
the grassroots level and to build Communist parties that ultimately absorbed
all their rivals. Throughout the process, the presence of Soviet armies of occu-
pation severely limited the options available to non- or anti-Communists. As
Communists expanded their power to seek monopoly status, regimes used
secret police forces and show trials modeled on Stalinist precedent.
No strategy offered any real hope of resisting the process. In Hungary, a
genuine election in 1945 resulted in a crushing defeat for Communists at the
hands of the rival Smallholders Party, but to no avail. The government merely
stepped up its assaults on political rivals through the Interior Ministry, headed
by László Rajk, and his fearsome security apparatus. As in other nations, all
forms of policing were consolidated under national and centrally directed orga-
nizations, including People’s Militia units. Through 1946, the Communist
leader Mátyás Rákosi was apparently working within a democratic system,
cooperating with other parties, but gradually weakening them through what he
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  27

described as “salami tactics,” cutting away a slice at a time. Other countries

followed the path from coalition to ruthless monopoly. In Bulgaria, a coup
established a Communist-dominated regime in 1944. A ruling Fatherland
Front included the Social Democrat party and the Agrarians, but over the next
two years the Communists carried out mass arrests and executions of rivals,
applying false charges of Nazi collaboration. By September 1946, the country
was a People’s Republic under the Bulgarian Communist Party. The new leader
was Georgi Dimitrov, whose trial by Nazi authorities in the 1930s had made
him one of the world’s best-known Communist celebrities.
Within two years of the end of the Second World War, Eastern Europe had
decisively shifted to Communist rule, and fallen into what Churchill called the
Soviet sphere. (We will describe events in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the
next chapter.) In Western debates on these tumultuous events, relatively little
attention was paid to the three Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
All three had long been ruled by Russia, but they secured their independence
after the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. In 1940, all were absorbed into the
Soviet Union, and the Western Allies saw no reason to challenge that situation
after 1945 so that the three nations remained Soviet until the collapse of the
USSR.  So successful was this annexation that the three Baltic nations were
barely mentioned in discussions of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe:
the assumption was that these were naturally and properly part of the
Soviet state.

Facing the Unthinkable
Even if Western nations had wished to halt the spread of Soviet influence across
Europe, it is far from clear what they might have done. In the last months of
the European war, Germany’s Nazi leaders had been startlingly confident that
they would form common cause with the Western Allies against the Soviets.
After all, they reasoned, the West could not possibly want to see a Communist-­
occupied Europe, and it was very much in their interests for them to use the
still potent German armed forces in this cause. Through 1945, the legendary
American military commander George S.  Patton caused consternation by
advocating just such aggressive policies against the “Asiatic” Soviets. In retro-
spect, such hopes seem ridiculous. Ultimately, the West would indeed integrate
German forces into its military plans, but only after the Third Reich had been
crushed, and the country was at least officially purged of its Nazi inheritance.
But the Allies explored ideas that were not too far removed from Nazi
wishes. In Spring 1945, the British drew up a contingency plan for driving the
Soviets out of Poland; this plan involved the use of a reorganized and reconsti-
tuted German army. The plan was aptly termed Operation Unthinkable, and it
is beyond credibility that such a scheme might have been approved, especially
after the revelation of the Nazi death camps and the Holocaust. If the opera-
tion had been undertaken, the spread of leftist ideas within the various Western
armies would have sparked mass mutinies. Western planners duly noted that
28  P. JENKINS

even their most optimistic visions still left the Soviets heavily outnumbering
any possible assailants. Unthinkable remained unthinkable.
Adding immeasurably to the awareness of war’s risks was the new nuclear
dimension (which will be discussed at length in Chap. 4). After the US attacked
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was obvious that the new weapons would trans-
form the world order. At first, “the bomb” was popularly associated with
extreme strength and power, often read in a sexual sense, and was even used in
advertising. Early American tests occurred at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall
Islands, and in 1946, French designers appropriated the word “bikini” for a
swimsuit design that at the time was considered outrageously daring. But the
more the nuclear devices were studied and reported, their truly unthinkable
nature became ever more apparent. One of the literary sensations of the era was
John Hersey’s 1946 magazine account of the Hiroshima attack (with the sub-
sequent book, Hiroshima), which became one of the most influential pieces of
twentieth-century journalism. It marked a powerful revival of apocalyptic
themes in the modern secular world and raised the prospect that the horrors
described could someday afflict New York, London, or Moscow.

The Next Battles

Any Western planning for Europe’s future had to begin with the realization
that the Soviets could not forcefully be removed from those East European
lands that were falling under ever-heavier Communist hegemony. In light of
that, their most important task must be to limit Communist ideological
advances in Western Europe, and where possible, to keep democratic forms
alive as far as possible in the east.
Two Western countries, in particular, seemed vulnerable to Communist
power. In Italy, the Communist cause had many advantages, and the country’s
Communist Party (PCI) had a distinguished history of resistance. That experi-
ence had left a powerful legacy for Party activists, who readily resorted to direct
action and extra-legal operations at the grassroots level. The PCI commanded
19 percent of the vote in 1946 and held seats in a coalition government. (By
way of comparison, in 1945, Hungary’s Communists managed only 17 percent
of the vote.) The other great Communist hope was France, where most rightist
parties were discredited by the war and the German occupation. After the
Germans were removed in 1944, the country was for some years ruled by a
Tripartite Alliance which included the Communist Party of France (PCF)
alongside Socialists (the SFIO) and the Christian Democratic-oriented
MRP. All favored sweeping reformist policies with a strong emphasis on state
power and nationalization. As in Italy, the Communists still commanded the
immense prestige deriving from their wartime role in the Resistance, as “the
party of the 75,000 executed” (parti des 75 000 fusillés).2 In 1945, the PCF

2
 Pauline Moullot, “Le Parti communiste français était-il le parti des collabos ou des ‘75000
fusillés’?” Libération, May 24, 2019, https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/05/24/
le-parti-communiste-francais-etait-il-le-parti-des-collabos-ou-des-75000-fusilles_1729388/.
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  29

won 26 percent of the national vote, rising to 28 percent the following year,
giving it the largest share of any party. PCF leader Maurice Thorez served as
Vice-Premier from 1946 to 1947. At its height, the Party attracted
800,000 members
As we will see, Communist hopes in France and Italy did not last long, as
they would soon be expelled from government in both countries. Unlike in
Eastern Europe, neither the PCF nor PCI controlled the armed strength
derived from Soviet occupation. But at least in 1946, an informed observer
listening to Churchill’s Fulton Speech might well have thought him optimistic.
From this perspective, the Iron Curtain was threatening to extend much deeper
into Western Europe, and perhaps to the English Channel.

Superpowers
Quite apart from the spread of Communism, the war transformed the balance
of military and political power in Europe and initiated a radically new and dif-
ferent global order. For centuries, Europe had included a number of large
influential states which were acknowledged as the Powers, or the Great Powers.
The actual balance might shift from time to time, and new Powers arose, but
there were normally five or six representatives. The Second World War resulted
in the swift collapse of this system, and its replacement by two global states,
each so vastly stronger than its nearer rivals as to constitute a wholly new con-
cept, the superpower. That quality was based on military might but also popu-
lation and economic production, and the capacity to operate on a global scale.
Even before the expansion of nuclear arsenals, these were greater than merely
Great Powers. Simple geography reinforced that trend. With their vast land
areas, the US or the Soviet Union could withstand multiple nuclear strikes on
its home territory in a way that was quite unthinkable for the far smaller
European nations. Both the US and USSR could test nuclear weapons on their
home territory: the British had to use sites in Australia.
It is difficult to exaggerate the global dominance of the US as the Second
World War drew to its close. By 1945, the US armed forces counted over
twelve million personnel. US economic hegemony was close to absolute, with
a thriving financial system that had sustained the war efforts of its near-­bankrupt
allies. US military production had been astonishing, allowing it to fight two
virtually separate wars, against Germany and Japan. Although the country had
sustained 400,000 military deaths, that was a tiny proportion of its population
when compared to most combatant nations. In contrast to all potential com-
petitors, its industrial strength had suffered no damage from wartime violence.
After 1945, that economy was ready to turn enthusiastically to civilian con-
sumer production, targeted toward a vast domestic market: in 1950, US popu-
lation surpassed 150 million. It was to characterize the new reality that political
scientist Nicholas Spykman coined the term “superpowers” which he popular-
ized in his book The Geography of the Peace (1944).
30  P. JENKINS

The American contrast with Europe was telling. By 1945, most of the tradi-
tional powers lay in ruins after years of invasion or occupation. Only two
European-centered states had any degree of military power or influence,
namely the Soviet Union and the British Empire, and both traditionally had
regarded Europe only as a part of its natural sphere of interest and operations.
The Soviets suffered terribly from the war, losing perhaps 27 million dead, and
a famine in 1946–1947 inflicted even more ruin. Even so, the Soviets had per-
formed a near miracle in maintaining and expanding their industrial produc-
tion to meet the challenges of war. At its wartime height, the Soviet army had
13 million personnel. By mid-1945, Soviet armed forces in Europe alone were
over seven million, and the country commanded 228 infantry divisions and 36
armored divisions (divisions varied in size, but customarily included around
10,000–12,000 soldiers). These force levels contracted after 1945, but the
very large Soviet population offered a powerful base to draw upon. In 1950,
even after that wartime devastation, the Soviet population was still 180 million,
which was about the same as the combined figures for Britain, France, Italy,
and emerging West Germany.

Fading Britain
In his 1944 analysis, Spykman counted Great Britain among the dominant
realities of the post-war world, based on its imperial span and its naval reach.
Technically, the British Empire remained the world’s most populous political
entity, with over 450 million people, and those overseas territories had contrib-
uted mightily to its survival. Canadian forces played a disproportionate role in
the British war effort: Canada ended the war with the world’s third biggest
navy and fourth largest air force. But Britain itself was profoundly weakened by
the war, especially in economic terms, and the country was mired in deep aus-
terity. The country faced a disastrous balance of payments situation, and the
rationing system actually became harsher following the end of the war. A ster-
ling crisis in 1949 was acute. The number of British service personnel plunged
from almost five million in 1945 to below a million by 1948, and to under
700,000 by 1950. Complicating the British situation was the sharp decline of
its imperial position. Most of those 450 million subjects lived in countries that
would shortly gain their independence, chiefly in the Indian subcontinent.
British naval power contracted steadily, as American sea forces expanded. The
events of the Pacific War taught Australia and New Zealand that they would
have to rely at least as much on the US as on their traditional British guardians.
Britain was simply in no position to compete with the two giants of East
and West.
Early commentators on the Cold War stressed the central British role. In
1946, George Orwell remarked that recently, “Russia began to make a ‘cold
war’ on Britain and the British Empire”—not, we note, on the US, or the West
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  31

in general.3 But simmering emergency in Greece forced Britain to confront the

new realities. The British regarded the Eastern Mediterranean as firmly within
their sphere of influence, with Egypt’s Suez Canal as a pivot of the larger global
empire, and the defeat of Italy had removed the only likely challenger to this
hegemony. It was only natural that the British occupied Greece in 1944, fol-
lowing the expulsion of its German occupiers. Optimistically as it turned out,
Churchill’s percentage agreement with Stalin had envisaged near-total British
domination of Greece. However, the British faced repeated conflicts with the
leftist resistance movements that were dominated by the Communist Party of
Greece (KKE, or Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas), while left- and right-wing
factions pursued a low-level civil war. In March 1946, the left mobilized a new
Democratic Army of Greece, which began a guerrilla insurgency, supported by
the Communist states of Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. Tito especially was
an enthusiastic advocate of armed resistance. (The Soviets were more
restrained.) At the height of the war, which lasted until 1949, Communist
forces operated in the tens of thousands. Fatalities approached a hundred thou-
sand. The British could not hope to suppress the insurgency themselves, par-
ticularly with pressing military needs in Palestine and elsewhere.
Other regional crises loomed. On several occasions in 1946, British warships
operating in the Corfu Channel had military encounters with Albanian fortifi-
cations and minefields, opening the prospect of a larger Balkan clash. Events in
nearby Turkey were almost as perilous. For over a century, British governments
had resisted Russian attempts to expand power over Turkey and to prevent the
establishment of a Tsarist Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean: that
issue almost caused a European war in the 1870s. At the end of the Second
World War, the Soviets pressed Turkey to grant access to their shipping through
the Turkish Straits that separated the Black Sea from the Mediterranean.
Tensions mounted through 1946 as the Soviets undertook naval exercises off
Turkish coasts. By the summer, the Americans felt, plausibly, that the Soviets
were seeking control over Turkey, and both the US and Britain responded with
a naval show of force. Though the situation de-escalated, it was significant that
the Americans, rather than the British, now became Turkey’s main protector.
In February 1947, the British government was forced to ask the US to
assume its role in supporting Greece and Turkey against Communist pressures,
a humiliating climbdown in light of the traditional British role in the region.
(We will see the consequences in the next chapter.) This affair did not mark the
definitive end to British pretensions to match the superpowers, and much
worse humiliations would occur in the next decade. But the debacle did signify
that the immediate future belonged to two superpowers, not three.
The ruin of the traditional Great Powers had its global impact. As we
have seen, the war had resulted in the destruction or occupation of some or
all of the European overseas empires. The Italian empire in Africa was

3
 George Orwell, “Russia Began to Make a ‘Cold War’ on Britain and the British Empire,”
Observer, March 10, 1946.
32  P. JENKINS

destroyed, while the Dutch lost control of their wealthy East Indies to the
Japanese. The Japanese also took French Indo-China. In each case, the loss
of imperial prestige was irreparable, and European powers struggled to
regain their former possessions in the face of widespread nationalist insur-
gencies. The French faced a revolutionary war in Indo-China, and insur-
gency in the Dutch East Indies culminated in the creation of a new state of
Indonesia in 1949. In the short term, the British alone maintained their
global power, but they could not long afford to exercise this role as the Last
Empire Standing. As in Europe, the fall of the older Great Powers opened
abundant opportunities and challenges for the two nations that actually
could intervene worldwide, namely the US and the Soviet Union—what the
French called les deux Grands.

Toward Cold War

For multiple reasons, tensions between those two incipient superpowers were
all but certain. However, several specific events and decisions in 1945–1946
rapidly moved the world to the confrontational situation assumed by Winston
Churchill.
Western attitudes were reshaped by the arrival of a new administration in
Washington, after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945. His successor,
Harry S. Truman, had a far less optimistic view of Soviet intentions. Reinforcing
that attitude was an incident of a kind that would later become quite common-
place, namely the defection of a Soviet official to the West. In September 1945,
cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa, bringing with him substantial
evidence of Soviet espionage activities in the West. That included attempts to
obtain nuclear secrets, as well as the operation of sleeper agents in powerful
positions in the West. The case had a special impact in undermining the general
goodwill many in the West felt toward the Soviets, and to Stalin personally. The
Gouzenko story inspired the 1948 film The Iron Curtain, a pioneer in the
soon-to-be enormous genre of Cold War thrillers.
The following months brought further signs that wartime cooperation was
crumbling. During the war, British and Soviet forces had occupied the nation
of Iran to prevent German advances there, and occupation zones were declared.
By early 1946, there was growing concern that the Soviets were refusing to
abandon their zones, which were presented as autonomous republics, in rebel-
lion against Iran’s central government. Only intense US pressure succeeded in
persuading the Soviets to withdraw in Spring 1946, and the termination of the
breakaway entities. We have already seen the growing crises in Greece and
Turkey around this time. Another threatening region was the Julian March
region contested between Italy and Yugoslavia, where Yugoslav forces
brought down two US aircraft. That August, US and British commanders held
serious discussions about likely Western strategies should a larger war develop
against all the Communist powers.
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  33

US domestic politics were also being remolded in a militant anti-­Communist

form. The bold liberal experimentation of the New Deal era (1933–1945) had
left plenty of hard-right conservatives determined to discredit and reverse those
reforms, and to expose members of the Democratic administration as red, or at
least “pink” fellow travelers. Another anti-Communist force was the very influ-
ential Roman Catholic church, which was a powerhouse in urban affairs,
in labor unions, and in Democratic Party politics (see also Chap. 10). Supporting
that Catholic anti-Communism was the many ethnic groups of European ori-
gin who constituted so powerful an element of American urban life, and who
were so familiar with the Communist danger in their home societies, in Italy,
Poland, and elsewhere. The emerging American anti-Communism was a thor-
oughly bipartisan affair. If conservative Republicans used that cause to con-
demn liberalism, Catholic and ethnic Democrats were never far behind in
seeking the elimination of Communism at home and abroad. In the country’s
midterm elections in November 1946, Republicans took control of both
houses of the US Congress, shifting the political balance decisively to the anti-­
Communist right.

George Kennan
In February 1946, American diplomats analyzed Soviet intentions in a lengthy
message sent to the US Secretary of State. This brilliant “Long Telegram”
became a crucial document of the developing Cold War, and it had a profound
effect on policy. Kennan’s analysis was impressive, all the more so for his
restraint, and his willingness to acknowledge flaws in Western systems. Nor did
he engage in the then-popular idea on the right of seeing Stalin as a second
Hitler, with a detailed scheme for world conquest. As Kennan rightly stressed,
“Gauged against Western World as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker
force.” 4
Kennan began with the fundamental issue of Soviet ideology, which was that
the “USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement’ with which in the
long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.” An “instinctive
Russian sense of insecurity” produced a “neurotic view of world affairs.” In
response to this sense of siege, the Soviets would pursue

internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet
state: intensive military-industrialization; maximum development of armed
forces; great displays to impress outsiders; continued secretiveness about internal
matters, designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponents in dark… build
up their industrial and especially military resources.5

4
 “Telegram: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” February 22,
1946, at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm.
5
 Ibid.
34  P. JENKINS

The Soviets would advance their global interests through propaganda and
soft power, particularly through sympathetic “democratic progressive” ele-
ments. Diplomatically, the USSR would seek advantage as opportunities arose,
especially along disputed borderlands—in Iran or Turkey, or the Baltic. If Spain
became a Soviet Communist state, that would open whole new fronts. Although
he was in no sense offering a full global analysis, it is interesting that Kennan
does not refer to East Asian countries where Communist prospects were bright,
in China or Korea.
Kennan’s conclusions were surprisingly restrained. Although international
crises would occur, they could be dealt with through firmness:

Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventur-
istic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious
to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can
easily withdraw—and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any
point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to
use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no
prestige-engaging showdowns.6

Kennan’s approach of firm response backed by the threat of “strong resis-

tance” promised the avoidance of all-out war and the strict confinement of
Soviet interests. In 1947, Kennan’s views reached a larger public with an anon-
ymous article published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X, in which
he stated that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet
Union must be that of a long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment
of Russian expansive tendencies.”7 The word “containment” proved for many
the key takeaway of his message. Less often quoted was Kennan’s next sen-
tence, which would be forgotten by so many US politicians, then and later: “It
is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with out-
ward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward
‘toughness.’”

Paths Not Taken?

We have already encountered the views of Henry Wallace, who favored accom-
modation with the Soviets, and it is intriguing to speculate how matters would
have developed if  the US had  followed his course, rather than Kennan’s. If
Kennan and Wallace were not engaging in any kind of formal debate, they were
discussing closely related themes.

6
 Ibid.
7
 “X” (George Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, at
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-
conduct.
 2 ORIGINS: THE WORLD IN 1946  35

But Wallace’s optimism seems ill-judged, especially in offering what a later

generation would call moral equivalence between the two sides. Recent Soviet
history was indeed marked by bloody repression on a horrific scale, and there
was every prospect that that conduct would be re-enacted in any new countries
that fell under Soviet influence. Nor was it reasonable for any outsider to con-
demn hitherto independent nations like Poland to a subservient role. Many
events over the coming years would show just how wrong Wallace was to
believe that the Soviets would be content with the sphere to which he hoped
to assign them, without making frequent tentative probes against the West to
advance their interests. Often, these moves would occur through clandestine
means. When Wallace himself mounted a third-party presidential candidacy
against Harry Truman in 1948, his grassroots campaign was thoroughly pen-
etrated by American Communists, who exploited his Progressive movement
for their own ends.
At least in the circumstances of 1946, it is difficult to imagine the US-Soviet
relationship developing in a way very different from what actually occurred or
at least not in a manner that would have been very harmful indeed for Western
interests.

Further Reading

For the Communist background, see David Priestland, The Red Flag:
Communism and the Making of the Modern World (2009), and Archie Brown,
The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009).
For Soviet policies at the end of World War Two, see Robert Gellately, Stalin’s
Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (2013); and Norman
M.  Naimark, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for
Sovereignty (2019).
The transition from the end of the Second World War is discussed in Frank
Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the
Cold War (2011); Fraser J. Harbutt, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the
Crossroads (2010); S.  M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (2010); Kevin
E. Grimm, America Enters The Cold War: The Road to Global Commitment,
1945–1950 (2018); and Diana Preston, Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill,
Roosevelt, nd Stalin Shaped the Post-War World (2019).
For the catastrophic impacts of the war, particularly in Europe, see Keith Lowe,
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (2012).
Several books focus on pivotal years, when key events were so abundant. See
Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013); Victor Sebestyen, 1946:
The Making of the Modern World (2014); Jonathan Fenby, Crucible: Thirteen
Months that Forged Our World (2019), on 1947–1948; or Elisabeth Åsbrink,
1947: Where Now Begins (2016).
36  P. JENKINS

Debates and rivalries within the incipient post-1945 “West” are the subjects of
Marc Selverstone, Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great
Britain and International Communism 1945–1950 (2009); Derek Leebaert,
Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957
(2018); and Ian Buruma, The Churchill Complex: The Rise and Fall of the
Special Relationship (2020).
John Lewis Gaddis describes a crucial policymaker in George Kennan: An
American Life (2011). See also Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the
Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (2009).
 CHAPTER 3

The Struggle for Europe

Palmiro Togliatti was the veteran head of the Italian Communist Party, the
PCI, who had long organized resistance to the country’s Fascist regime and
its German Nazi ally. When the Second World War ended, he led one of the
strongest Communist Parties in the whole of Europe, East or West, and he
came close to national power. In July 1948, a Fascist student shot him in an
assassination attempt. Togliatti barely survived, but the response to the
crime produced a near-revolution, with a general strike. Tens of thousands
of workers, many armed, occupied key strategic points throughout north-
ern Italy, seized factories, and began a sabotage campaign. Police who
attempted to intervene were rapidly disarmed by the insurgents. It was
almost as if the wartime Resistance had revived en masse, and Italy seemed
close to civil war.
The story suggests the tense situation that prevailed over much of
Europe in the late 1940s, a period of repeated East-West confrontations
that at several points threatened to develop into a general war. Beyond the
military threat, these years witnessed a historic transformation within
Europe, namely the fragmentation of older regional and cultural distinc-
tions, and their replacement by a crude division between Eastern and
Western halves of the continent. However stark and inevitable that division
came to appear, at the time it represented a shocking novelty, and the exact
borderlines might easily have been drawn other than they actually were. As
the Togliatti case suggests, it was  not obvious that Italy, for instance,
really would form part of the newly defined West. The European political
framework that existed through the 1980s might have developed quite dif-
ferently from what actually occurred.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 37

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_3
38  P. JENKINS

Making the Eastern Bloc

Between 1945 and 1949, all of Eastern Europe except Greece fell under the
power of Communist-dominated states. The process was already well advanced
by 1946, but the process then accelerated with a series of coups d’etat that
ended the pretense of collaboration with non-Communist parties. In Poland,
non-Communists were systematically excluded from office, until the
Communist takeover was complete by the time of new rigged elections in
1947. The following year, the main Communist organization absorbed the
Polish Socialist party to form the Polish United Workers’ Party, PZPR, which
remained in power until 1989. From 1948 to 1956, the party’s Secretary-­
General was Bolesław Bierut, a hardline Stalinist and an agent for the Soviet
NKVD. Under his authority, Poland agreed that Soviet Red Army forces would
be stationed on its territory in perpetuity. In 1952, Poland was officially
declared a People’s Republic.
That sequence was reproduced across the region. In Hungary, Communists
could win only 22 percent of the national vote in 1947. Even so, Communist
leader Mátyás Rákosi completed his “salami” approach when he forced rival
parties to exclude any officials or members who resisted Communist wishes. By
1949, Hungary was a People’s Republic. In 1947, Romania transitioned to
become a Socialist Republic, with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as the venerated
Communist figurehead. Some of the dictators who now took power proved
amazingly long-lasting. Yugoslavia’s Tito ruled from 1945 to 1980. Albania’s
Enver Hoxha ruled from 1945 to 1985.
Although the new states had some genuinely enthusiastic Communist sup-
porters, the whole system represented a kind of informal Soviet empire. With a
few exceptions, the map of that new East Bloc corresponded closely to the
areas occupied by the Soviets at the end of the recent war. As Stalin reputedly
said, “everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot
be otherwise.”1 The process of socialist transformation developed according to
interpretations of Marxism then prevailing in the Soviet Union, so they implied
both Sovietization and Stalinization. All the new socialist states practiced some
degree of Russification, teaching Russian extensively in schools. As they recon-
structed after the war, East European states came to bear a growing physical
resemblance to Soviet models, using Soviet official architecture. This was
exemplified by the enormous Palace of Culture and Science that dominated the
Warsaw skyline from 1955: it was originally named for Joseph Stalin, and its
style is “Stalinist Gothic.”
The concept of Eastern Europe, of an East Bloc, was problematic. The
Communist countries were very diverse culturally and linguistically. If some
countries had Slavic roots, Romania looked to Latin traditions, Hungary and
Albania had highly distinctive languages, and the emerging East Germany grew

1
 Quoted in Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, “Stalin’s Danish Mystery,” History Today, March 2020, at
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/stalin%E2%80%99s-danish-mystery.
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  39

out of its own particular history. Bulgaria was the only one of the new socialist
nations that resembled Russia in its Slavic speech and Orthodox Christian
underpinnings, and this long remained one of the most closely aligned states
within the larger bloc. Otherwise, “Eastern” Europe was a label imposed on
regions that until recently had been classified quite differently, for instance as
part of the Balkans. The powerful but ill-defined concept of Mitteleuropa cer-
tainly included Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and probably Poland. Prague
was no more “East European” than Vienna or Munich. Some countries fitted
the stereotypes of peasant societies long dominated by aristocratic elites. Others
like Czechoslovakia or East Germany did not.
Ethnic purges during and after the war contributed to the brutal simplifica-
tion. Before 1939, Eastern European states had been very diverse ethnically
with substantial minorities, including Jews, but also ethnic Germans. The Nazis
massacred Jews, and Germans suffered terribly after that nation’s defeat.
Coupled with territorial revisions, this made eastern states more ethnically
monochrome, and lacking groups that had otherwise oriented them to Western
or Central Europe. Poland, for instance, now became an overwhelmingly Slavic
state for the first time in its history.

The Western Response

The Soviet Union’s wartime honeymoon with the Western Allies had long had
its critics, and right-wing media like the Hearst and McCormick chains had
rarely relented from older Red Scare attitudes. But the consolidation of
Communist regimes and the threat of further expansion into Central and even
Western Europe caused general alarm. This was a perilous moment in the Cold
War when a lack of clear Western determination might have resulted in sweep-
ing Communist advances. One key figure was British Foreign Secretary Ernest
Bevin, a powerful and radical labor union leader and a fervent socialist. That
very socialism contributed to his fervent anti-Communism, as he had long
experience of personal interactions with Communists in the British unions, and
was shocked by the brutal mistreatment of socialist parties in Europe’s new
Communist states. Bevin ensured a strong British line against Soviet expansion.
In 1947, he sponsored a defensive alliance with France in the Treaty of Dunkirk,
which was extended the following year to include the Benelux countries in a
new Western Union, an essential precursor to North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).
In the circumstances of the time, US President Truman was a still more
crucial figure. In March 1947, he announced his Truman Doctrine, which
promised to defend Greece and Turkey from Soviet advances, including when
those took the form of domestic Communist revolt or subversion. He asserted
that it must be the policy of the US “to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Beyond
that immediate region, Truman noted that “The peoples of a number of coun-
tries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them
40  P. JENKINS

against their will,” and similar trends were in progress elsewhere.2 By implica-
tion, the promise of aid extended widely.
Later that year, the National Security Act reorganized the nation’s military
and intelligence operations, among other things creating the National Security
Council, and making the US Air Force an independent service. Another out-
come was a new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which marked a departure
from historical precedent in being the country’s first peacetime intelligence
agency not affiliated with the armed services. Drawing heavily on the experi-
ences of wartime agents in the former Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
CIA built up opposition to Communism across Europe and beyond. The
agency developed networks in political parties and labor unions, and sponsored
favorable media outlets. The nascent CIA cooperated with British intelligence
agencies, which retained a high level of expertise despite that country’s decline.
US and British agencies cooperated to support the armed resistance move-
ments which were then active in many parts of the Eastern Bloc.
In June 1947, US Secretary of State George Marshall announced an ambi-
tious plan to aid European economic recovery, a proposal that initially included
the Soviets. This became the basis of the Economic Recovery Program formally
launched in 1948, with the then-astonishing price tag of twelve billion dollars.
That was apart from the very large sums then being directed to rebuild Japan.
Beyond the general goal of reconstruction, the Marshall Plan aimed to pro-
mote modernization and to remove trade barriers between nations. Britain was
the largest recipient of aid, with a quarter of the outlay, followed by France (18
percent) and the new West Germany (11 percent).
The Marshall Plan proved hugely divisive. Soviet Vyacheslav Molotov pre-
sented it as an explicit attempt to draw European states into a US hegemonic
system, making that country the “center of worldwide reaction and anti-Soviet
activity.”3 He claimed that the US was actively moving on the road to blatant
fascism. Poland and Czechoslovakia considered accepting aid, but Soviet pres-
sure forced them to refuse. One immediate consequence of the Plan was to
confirm Europe’s new political map, with the refusing nations constituting the
new Eastern bloc. That rejection extended to Finland which was desperate to
avoid provoking Moscow, although it otherwise succeeded in maintaining its
distance from the bloc. In September 1947, delegates from Europe’s
Communist parties gathered in Warsaw to create the Cominform, or
Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, a successor to the
Comintern, which would be headquartered in Belgrade. At this meeting,
Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov declared that the world was irreconcilably
divided into two camps, imperialist and anti-imperialist: class conflict was pro-
jected onto a global stage. Taken together with the Truman Doctrine, this was
close to an official declaration of a Cold War.

 “Truman Doctrine,” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/trudoc.asp.

2

 Quoted in Gerhard Wettig, Stalin and the Cold War in Europe (Rowman & Littlefield,
3

2008), 139.
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  41

Modern historians debate at length about the divisive effects of the Marshall
Plan, and some argue that the US was deliberately trying to place the Soviets
in an impossible position that would exclude them from an emerging capitalist-­
oriented European system. In this view, it was the US move that drove the
Soviets to more radical and intransigent steps in 1948, which included the
formal takeover of Czechoslovakia and the blockade in Germany. It should
though be said that Soviet takeovers in the east were already well advanced
even before Marshall’s speech and that subsequent conflicts only formalized
the existing processes.

Drawing Lines
Generally, a map of the location of Allied armies in 1945 gave a strong sense of
where countries would fit into the new European order. But at the time, it was
by no means obvious which regions would become Communist, and which
not. In the Warsaw meeting in 1947, the parties represented countries thor-
oughly under Soviet control such as Bulgaria, but also such then-contested
societies as Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France.
The imposition of Soviet models was not surprising in countries like Bulgaria
and Romania, with their traditions of authoritarian rule, and backward econo-
mies. But Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars had been a conspicu-
ous example of economic sophistication and democratic government. Prague
in the 1930s was a progressive European city, a center for cultural experiment
and Modernism. After 1945, Soviet military domination encouraged the
growth of a local Communist party apparatus, and in 1946 the Communist
Party of Czechoslovakia, the Komunistická strana Č eskoslovenska (KSČ ), won
38 percent of the popular vote. The Party held key offices in government,
including the Interior Ministry. It controlled substantial armed force through
its armed workers’ militias, which severely limited effective police action. The
decisive transformation came in February 1948, when the Party organized a
coup d’etat that forced the removal of non-Communist ministers and officials.
Although the government was still notionally a coalition, the other parties were
dominated by crypto-Communists and Communist sympathizers. The only
exception was Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who in March 1948 was found
dead, apparently thrown from a window by government agents. The country’s
other statesman, Edvard Beneš, died shortly afterward, of natural causes.
Sovietization followed very shortly, and by the early 1950s, Czechoslovakia
was subject to repression as brutal as any in the Soviet sphere. The country’s
experience was alarming for Europeans living in non-Communist nations, as it
suggested how easily a Communist coup might occur in a country where dem-
ocratic norms seemed deeply rooted. This was an obvious issue for countries
such as France and Italy where popular Communist parties commanded wide
political support and were represented in government. The years of 1947–1948
forced a political realignment.
42  P. JENKINS

In France, the Communists were a major component of the ruling Tripartite

Alliance, but the need to cooperate with other parties posed impossible ideo-
logical dilemmas. Party leaders refused to consent to economic austerity and
could not countenance the re-establishment of French imperial power in Indo-­
China and elsewhere. Growing East-West tensions drove away some moderate
supporters. In May 1947, the Communists were excluded from government,
in a shift that usually marks the beginning of the Cold War for France. Marshall
Aid offered an added incentive to maintain a Western orientation. However,
Communists maintained intense pressure through their powerful role in the
labor unions. Crippling waves of strikes that Fall caused a split between
Communist and non-Communist unions, and Communists led damaging coal
strikes the following year. However, the authorities succeeded in maintaining
control of the situation through effective police mechanisms, which ensured
that nothing like the Czechoslovak coup could be reproduced here.
That policing element was critical to the survival of non-Communist
regimes. There were numerous incidents in this period when popular unrest
threatened national stability. Strikes, factory sit-ins, and demonstrations were
endemic throughout Western Europe in the post-war years, until the begin-
ning of boom conditions in 195I. But France was amply equipped to deal with
such threats, and the Interior Ministry had at its disposal the best internal
security apparatus in non-communist Europe. The government deployed well-­
trained paramilitary police and riot police forces to combat any possible urban
risings, especially the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS). Police and
government formed tactical alliances with organized crime groups, which
secured control of the great port of Marseille, a key entry point for Marshall
Aid supplies.

Fighting for Italy
In Italy, not only did Communists serve in government, but party leader
Togliatti was Minister of Justice. In May 1947, as in France, Communists were
removed from government. Also as in France, rising East-West tensions placed
intense pressure on non-Communist parties to refuse alliance with Communists,
and the US government made that a precondition for the country receiving
Marshall Aid.
The ideological conflict reached new heights with the national election
held in April 1948, which was so critical coming so soon after the coup in
Prague. US and British intelligence agencies worked to combat Communist
influence, promoting anti-Communist media and propaganda, and spending
heavily to support anti-PCI parties. They also enlisted organized crime forces
on a sizable scale. (The Soviets also sent substantial aid to their Communist
allies.) The conflict developed a strong religious coloring, as the Catholic
Church campaigned vigorously against the Communists, and served as the
mainstay for the conservative anti-Communist political party, the Christian
Democrats. In the event, the Christian Democrats, led by Alcide de Gasperi,
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  43

won a decisive victory, with 48 percent of the popular vote, and a strong par-
liamentary majority. Even so, the Popular Democratic Front, which included
Togliatti’s Communists and the Socialist Party, secured an impressive 31 per-
cent of the vote.
The country decisively aligned with the West, and in 1949 it became a
founding member of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or
NATO. Under Interior Minister Mario Scelba, the Christian Democrat gov-
ernment thoroughly revamped and strengthened its internal security struc-
tures, creating new paramilitary and riot police, the Celere. At the same time,
Scelba purged the senior ranks of all police units of anyone deemed dangerous
to the new political order. The Italian state would never again be as vulnerable
as it showed itself following the attempt on Togliatti’s life.
The outcome certainly did not destroy Italian Communism, which remained
strong at the grassroots level and which almost constituted a parallel state.
Over the next quarter century, the PCI continued to command around 20
percent of the electorate, and it was very strong in the labor unions. The Party
had an actual membership of around a million. But the political danger it posed
faded rapidly with the fast-rising prosperity of the 1950s, the country’s “eco-
nomic miracle.” As in most of Western Europe, this era produced striking pros-
perity and a new consumer society. France remembered the three decades of
boom after 1945 as the trente glorieuses.

Between the Giants
The Soviets struggled to maintain control of their own sphere of influence in
Eastern Europe, suffering setbacks and making serious concessions. Yugoslavia
proved the greatest challenge. During the war, Tito’s Partisans enjoyed great
success and had largely succeeded in liberating most of the country before the
involvement of Western or Soviet armed forces. Tito himself was anything but
a moderate, and his dictatorial regime slaughtered and imprisoned political
rivals according to the grimmest Stalinist models. He also had aggressive ambi-
tions on Italian territory. But Churchill’s reference to Trieste marking the
southern extremity of the Iron Curtain assumed that Yugoslavia was a faithful
ally of Moscow, which it would not long remain. In 1948, Tito’s refusal to
submit to Soviet direction in economic affairs placed him at ever greater odds
with that country. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, as Soviet pro-
paganda depicted Tito as a Nazi ally. Tito’s political independence was increas-
ingly reflected in economic liberalization, decentralization, and Western ties: in
1949, he secured US aid. In 1951, a Soviet invasion seemed imminent, and
such fears would recur over the following decades. Those threats raised night-
mare scenarios for Western planners, who had to consider whether to intervene
in a land that the Soviets regarded as within their natural sphere of influence.
But Yugoslavia survived as a model of neutralism, if not of democracy.
Few countries were able to escape the neat East-West dichotomy, but those
that did suggest alternatives to the straightforward path of confrontation. As
44  P. JENKINS

remarked earlier, Stalin was, on occasions, prepared not to exploit Soviet power
to impose a full Communist system. That was the case in Finland, which had
historically been included in the Russian Empire, and which had fought bitter
wars against the Soviet Union. In 1945, Finland was a defeated nation, and the
prospect of formal absorption into the Soviet realm was at least possible.
However, the Soviets decided to acknowledge the country’s independence in
treaties in 1947 and 1948. The price of independence was Finnish neutrality,
which the country strictly observed throughout the ensuing Cold War decades.
Western hardliners would become deeply unhappy with the compromise, but
Finland flourished as a thoroughly democratic state with a booming mixed
economy.
Other examples illustrate that the Soviets were capable of withdrawing from
lands they had occupied. On a small scale, for over a year in 1945–1946, the
Soviet army occupied the Danish island of Bornholm but voluntarily ended
that presence. The most surprising example of a concession came in Austria,
which had been incorporated into Hitler’s Reich and which was a defeated
nation in 1945. After the Soviets took Vienna in 1945, both the city and coun-
try were divided into occupation zones, respectively controlled by the US,
Britain, France, and the Soviets. That replicated the situation in Germany, but
in the Austrian case, the situation ended peacefully, and the country avoided
partition. In 1955, the Soviets agreed to a military withdrawal, marking the
end of occupation and the beginning of a newly independent nation.
The reasons for these different outcomes are complex. In the Finnish case,
the Soviets were anxious to avoid any recurrence of the savage resistance they
had encountered during earlier military interventions. In Austria, the peaceful
solution owed something to the situation in neighboring Germany, as the
Soviets wanted to offer the Germans an encouraging model for a possible
future status as a united but neutralized nation. Whatever the reasons, those
cases show that the post-1945 situation could have outcomes other than the
bitter struggles raging in Rome and Prague. On occasion, the Iron Curtain
could be flexible.

Divided Germany
Despite tensions elsewhere, Germany was the major focus of concern and the
most likely location for an eruption of direct hostilities. The occupation-­
settlement divided occupied Germany into four zones, each controlled by one
of the major wartime allies: the Soviet Union, the US, Britain, and France.
Separately, the four powers had organized control zones for the city of Berlin,
which lay entirely within the Soviet zone. Soviet and Western armed forces
confronted each other in substantial numbers, while the Western sections of
Berlin constituted an odd island within increasingly hostile Communist-­
controlled territory.
For both sides, controlling Germany offered many potential advantages. For
decades, Germany had been the strongest state in continental Europe, and it
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  45

might one day resume something like that position. This was still one of
Europe’s most populous countries, which could, in theory, offer the basis for
substantial armed forces. Many Germans had extensive experience in the mili-
tary, intelligence, or police. As the CIA developed its European networks, it
drew heavily on older German intelligence resources associated with General
Reinhard Gehlen, who was a knowledgeable and determined foe of
Communism. At the same time, most Europeans, whether Communist or oth-
erwise, felt real fear about any possible revival of Germany as an aggressive mili-
tary state. Europeans were deeply conflicted about the prospect of reusing
personnel who had voluntarily served the Third Reich. Throughout the Cold
War years, Soviet propaganda regularly charged that the West was reviving the
German aggression associated with the Nazis. The possibility of a German fin-
ger on the nuclear trigger troubled many.
In 1947 and 1948, the three Western powers combined their occupation
areas into a new entity, the Trizone, which marked an important stage in the
reconstitution of a German nation. The US directed Marshall Aid to the area
and, in June 1948, undertook a currency reform that created the Deutsche
Mark. In the same month, the Soviets responded by cutting all land ties
between Berlin and the Western-controlled portions of Germany and thereby
seeking to purge a tumor in the socialist body. They reasoned that the Western
Allies would face the grim choice of resorting to war to save the starving city,
or else letting it become entirely part of the Communist eastern zone. At a time
of unusually cold European winters, the lack of fuel would presumably bring
besieged Berlin to its knees within months. President Truman’s advisers were
deeply pessimistic.
The West responded to this blockade with an innovative and logistically dar-
ing airlift. Through an incredible organizational effort, US and British air
forces defeated this blockade through air supplies, which over a period of 15
months brought in 2.3 million tons of supplies, including food and coal. By the
Spring of 1949, Allied aircraft were bringing in up to 13,000 tons of supplies
in a single day. Soviet forces could certainly have shot down those Western
aircraft, but any such action would have been an act of war, which would pre-
sumably have led to Western strategic assaults on the Soviet homeland.
Reinforcing that message, President Truman dispatched 60 nuclear-capable
B-29 bombers to Britain, although in fact, they were not carrying actual nuclear
weapons. In May 1949, the Soviets renounced the blockade, although flights
continued for some months longer.
The airlift led to the formal division of the country and the continent. In
May 1949, a new Federal Republic of Germany was declared, the Bundesrepublik,
incorporating the US, British and French occupation zones (although all those
countries maintained sizable military forces on German soil through the end of
the Cold War). The new republic, West Germany, strove at every point to calm
fears of a return to militarism. The country was strictly a federal republic with
many safeguards to prevent a return to the centralism of the Nazi years, and
stringent laws forbade any expressions of Nazi symbolism or ideology. The
46  P. JENKINS

republic’s capital was at Bonn, rather than any larger urban center tainted by
memories of the Third Reich. Even so, any prospect of German rearmament
was deeply sensitive, and only gradually could a German army re-emerge, ini-
tially drawing on militarized police units like the Border Protection,
Bundesgrenzschutz (1952). The new Bundeswehr operated under laws limiting
its possible role, which was to be explicitly defensive in character.
Developments in the west found a close echo in the east. In October 1949,
Germany’s Soviet zone became a new state as the German Democratic Republic,
the DDR, with its own armed forces, and its capital in the Soviet zone of
Berlin, the new East Berlin. The new state was ruled by a coalition, by far the
most important component of which was the Socialist Unity Party, the SED,
the Communist organization. The nation’s leader was Walter Ulbricht, a vet-
eran of Communist activism during the Weimar Republic. He retained power
until 1971.

The Two Blocs

The proliferation of crises made the prospect of war very likely. Western Europe
alone could not contemplate defending itself against a direct military assault by
the Soviets, which could only be prevented by a full US commitment. The
European nightmare was that the US might once more revert to isolation, as it
had following the First World War. To ensure continued US involvement,
Western nations agreed to a formal alliance through the North Atlantic Treaty,
which was signed in Washington in April 1949, and which laid the foundation
for NATO. The Treaty’s Article 5 specified that “an armed attack against one
or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all” requiring
each ally to take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed
force.”4 The 12 founding members included the key wartime allies—the US,
the UK, France, and Canada—as well as Italy and other smaller European
states. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, and—reviving concern among its
former enemies—West Germany in 1955. NATO was the first step in a series
of interlocking alliances that all committed the US or Britain to defend mem-
bers against outside attack. In 1951, ANZUS linked the US with Australia and
New Zealand, and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was
formed in 1954. The following year, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)
included key Middle Eastern nations.
Escalating the scale and seriousness of any potential conflict were several
events that occurred far for Germany, but which sounded as alarm bells in that
region. In October 1949, news that the Soviets had recently tested a nuclear
bomb ended any hope that the West could permanently deter assault through
its monopoly of weapons of mass destruction. In the same month, the
Communist seizure of power in China transformed the global balance of power

4
 “The North Atlantic Treaty,” April 4, 1949, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_
texts_17120.htm.
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  47

between the two ideological systems, vastly increasing the share of the world
that lived within the Communist “camp.” That change also gravely under-
mined any hope of containment. Most terrifying of all was the sudden invasion
of South Korea by the Communist North, on June 25, 1950, which will be
discussed further in Chap. 5. At the time, this was viewed as a masterstroke
launched under direct Soviet command, and as such, it was a likely precedent
for other assaults that could well follow in Europe.
The integration of West Germany into international affairs served multiple
purposes, including serving as a check on a possible revival of militarism in that
country. Although presented as a joke, an often-quoted comment stated the
purpose of NATO quite accurately: it was intended to keep the Americans in,
the Russians out, and the Germans down. West Germany was incorporated
into growing efforts to achieve European integration, including the European
Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the European Economic Community
(EEC) in 1957. Although explicitly economic in nature, the EEC strengthened
political unity against outside threats. Those Western developments alarmed
the Soviets. In response to the West German admission to NATO, in 1955 the
Eastern Bloc states retaliated with their own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviets revived their own organization to promote trade and investment,
the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), originally formed
as a riposte to the Marshall Plan. Although the new organizations only formal-
ized existing divisions, they neatly symbolized the radical East-West schism that
reshaped every aspect of trade, commerce, travel, and media, closing most
means of contact and communication across the Iron Curtain. The two regions
became almost separate continents. Americans, and many West Europeans,
thought that “Europe” ended where Communism began.

Confrontation: The 1950s
Many points of tension between the two German entities prohibited any kind
of peaceful existence, above all the continuing existence of West Berlin as a
Western-oriented island in the heart of the DDR. For decades, Berlin contin-
ued to be a center for espionage and propaganda on an epic scale. East and
West Germany disagreed on the fundamental matter of where German borders
lay. Under Soviet direction, post-war boundary revisions left the eastern border
of the DDR at the Oder-Neisse line, thereby excluding sizable areas of the old
pre-war Germany, which were subject to Poland. The Federal Republic rejected
that model and suggested that a reunified German state would demand a return
to pre-war maps. Such a stance stirred fears that the West might use those land
claims as the basis for new aggressions. At the same time, the sizable communi-
ties of German refugees from those eastern territories—the homeland expel-
lees, or Heimatvertriebene—constituted a powerful West German voting bloc
that was reluctant to accept compromise.
Another obstacle to peace was the endemic weakness of the East German
state. The harsh nature of Communist rule encouraged many residents to flee
48  P. JENKINS

to the West, draining the new socialist republic of many of its most talented
people. In the early 1950s, both Germanies suffered harsh economic depriva-
tion, but as the decade went on, the West became hugely and visibly more
prosperous, enhancing still further the temptation to flee. The population dif-
ference between the two countries grew steadily, as East Germany stagnated.
Already in 1951, West Germany had 51 million citizens compared to 18 mil-
lion in the East. By 1968, the respective numbers were 61 million and 17 mil-
lion. It was natural to think of the Federal Republic as the true Germany.
The Soviets sporadically floated schemes for German reunification, and in
1952, a Stalin Note proposed a unified and neutral state. The West rejected this
advance with little debate, predictably given the recent track record of Soviet-­
affiliated parties in securing dominance over Eastern Europe. A second instance
in 1953 was more intriguing. In Stalin’s time, one of the most powerful Soviet
figures was Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, who was a leading contender
to succeed the dictator when he died in March 1953. Beria was at least contem-
plating a far-reaching offer to the West that would include German reunifica-
tion in exchange for massive US aid and economic cooperation to rebuild the
Soviet Union. He might even have considered some kind of independence for
the Baltic states. If his plans were seriously intended, and that is a major “if,”
that would have effectively marked the end of the Cold War three decades
before Mikhail Gorbachev.
But as often in later years, prospects for liberalization were destroyed by the
threat of unchecked political unrest and uprisings. Stalin’s death raised hopes
of liberalization in the DDR. In June, strikes and protests mobilized a million
people against the government, requiring the massive deployment of Soviet
and DDR armed forces, with tanks on the streets of East Berlin and other cen-
ters. Western propaganda radio stations denounced the Eastern Bloc regimes,
coming close to advocating open resistance. That led at least some listeners to
believe that military support would be forthcoming. Although casualties were
relatively light by the standards of other such uprisings, with perhaps a hun-
dred fatalities, the affair further discredited the East German state. It ensured
the collapse of Beria’s dreams, as Nikita Khrushchev and his colleagues dreaded
the further growth of revolution and disorder: Beria was executed in
December 1953.
The intractable German situation made it all but impossible to make prog-
ress toward peace in Europe as a whole, or to reductions in armaments. In
1955, Geneva was the setting for a critical summit conference that brought
together the leaders of the US, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. Ideally,
Khrushchev would have liked to see both military blocs removed from a neu-
tral and demilitarized Germany, but West German membership in NATO
proved an intolerable obstacle. Western powers, in turn, feared that a neutral
Germany could easily be destabilized or subverted to join the Communist bloc.
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  49

The Revolutions of 1956

The East Berlin insurrection in 1953 foreshadowed events elsewhere in the
Eastern Bloc. After Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leadership sought to reform
aspects of the old regime. In February 1956, Khrushchev made his secret
speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
“On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” He denounced the
excesses and oppression of the Stalin years, although neither Khrushchev nor
his allies were in any sense innocent of those crimes. As the secret speech was
quickly leaked to the wider world (via Israeli intelligence), it aroused hopes of
far-reaching reforms and the overthrow of the Stalinist regimes in East
European countries. Denunciations of Stalin immediately raised the prospect
of toppling his clones in the various people’s democracies. Fueling many con-
spiracy theories, Poland’s Bolesław Bierut died shortly after attending that very
20th Congress.
Poland experienced mass popular revolutions and workers’ protests. These
resulted in the defeat of the Stalinist faction, and the rise of a reformist group-
ing led by Władysław Gomułka, in what is sometimes called Poland’s October
Revolution. The Soviet response was initially uncertain, and invasion seemed
likely. But  as the threat faded, the Soviets granted concessions that allowed
Gomulka to remain in place, and which reduced the direct Soviet military pres-
ence. The outcome resulted in both relief and optimism, raising prospects that
socialism might be achieved free of Soviet dominance, and in ways that took
account of local traditions and national interests. Over time, however, Gomulka
himself would increasingly demonstrate most of the flaws of his Stalinist
predecessors.
The most acute situation developed in Hungary, where Mátyás Rákosi was
removed that June.
A student protest met a violent response from the loathed secret police, the
ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság, or “State Protection Authority”). This led to a
full-scale revolution led by students and workers that recalled some of the great
popular upsurges in European history, such as the risings of 1848, or the Paris
Commune of 1871. Resisters executed ÁVH members and freed political pris-
oners. A new government led by Imre Nagy promised extensive reforms,
including free elections. The Soviets were initially reluctant to launch an open
war, and the venerated wartime commander Georgy Zhukov, then Minister of
Defense, counseled caution. As we recall, at this very time, the Soviets did
indeed refrain from a direct attack on Poland. Attitudes changed when Imre
Nagy advanced the idea of withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact. In November,
Soviet forces invaded and suppressed the revolution. Some 6000 rebels and
ordinary civilians lost their lives, as well as several hundred Soviets and govern-
ment forces. Rebel leaders were executed, including Imre Nagy and the mili-
tary commander Pál Maléter. Many thousands of Hungarians took advantage
of the collapse of state security mechanisms to flee across the briefly open
borders.
50  P. JENKINS

Despite their often strident propaganda, the US and Britain both conspicu-
ously failed to intervene. Complicating the Western response was the ongoing
Suez affair, which as we will see in Chap. 6 posed the starkest threat to the
unity of the Western Alliance since the end of the previous war. But in shaking
the old image of monolithic Communism and in confirming the worst images
of repressive violence, the 1956 revolution proved a watershed for the
Communist world. Many hitherto powerful Communist parties in Western
countries suffered mass defections.
The Hungarian meltdown indicates the limits of possible reform in the
People’s Democracies. However much  Soviet leaders might, in theory, have
considered granting a degree of national independence, they could scarcely
have contemplated a reversal of the socialist system. Soviet fears of revived
German militarism were also sincere. In justifying their actions in Hungary, the
Soviets emphasized Nazi and far-right motivations among the resistance, which
was not in itself incredible in a country that had a dark record of anti-Semitic
violence. But the consequences were grim. Memories of 1956 made East
European states profoundly nervous about granting any degree of liberaliza-
tion, political or economic.
Confrontations continued, with Berlin the usual flashpoint. A new series of
crises began in 1958, when Khrushchev demanded that the three Western allies
remove all forces from Berlin, leaving it a free and demilitarized city. If they did
not comply, then he would transfer control of all routes in and out of the city
to the DDR. That began a series of dangerous standoffs and negotiations that
proceeded through 1961, and which we will examine in more detail in Chap.
7. Meanwhile, the number of people fleeing to the western sector had become
so sizable as to threaten the survival of the DDR itself. By 1961, perhaps 4.5
million East Germans had moved West. The crisis culminated in August 1961
with the sudden and shocking building of the Berlin Wall, the Antifaschistischer
Schutzwall, or “anti-fascist protection rampart.” The Wall, as it became known,
served its immediate function of limiting defections, but it was a propaganda
catastrophe. Far from offering an attractive or inspiring example to the world,
the Eastern Bloc was reinforcing its image as a land of poverty and dictatorship,
whose people risked death to escape. This was the primary impression of Soviet
Communism imbibed by the rising generation of baby boomers born since
1945, who had no recollection of Soviet wartime heroism, or still less the
1930s Popular Front. If many were prepared to adopt radical stances, their
views were likely to attack the entrenched establishments of both East and
West blocs.

The Wars That Never Were

By the end of the 1940s, Western and Eastern forces in Europe faced each
other across heavily fortified and deeply sensitive frontiers. As both sides sought
to imagine a coming war, they naturally turned to the recent precedent of the
Soviet campaigns against the Nazis, especially the great armored campaigns of
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  51

1944 and 1945, which we have already encountered, such legendary cam-
paigns as Operation Bagration.
The sophistication of Soviet warfare demands notice. A common stereotype,
largely offered by German commanders to explain their defeats, depicts primi-
tive Russian hordes crushing defenders by the sheer weight of numbers. In
reality, much Soviet military equipment was excellent, as were Soviet tactics.
These included sophisticated methods of Deep Battle or Deep Operations,
glubokaya operatsiya, a more advanced and developed version of the German
blitzkrieg. This involved fast-moving operations to surround and cut off enemy
formations, and to strike in depth far behind the front lines. The Soviets were
experts at deception operations, maskirovka, to confuse the enemy about their
intentions; and they made superb use of partisans behind enemy lines. Those
triumphs must be set aside quite comparable Western victories in the same
period, which included some stunning armored advances in France. But in the
post-war period, it was simply not possible for the US (or Canada) to maintain
huge armies on European soil, while the Soviets were operating close to their
home territory.
For Western planners, the implications were sobering. If the Soviets in 1944
could so utterly smash the mighty German Wehrmacht, what might very simi-
lar forces achieve in Europe just five or ten years afterward? The victors of those
earlier battles remained in place to confront the Americans. Marshal Zhukov
remained a dominant figure in the country’s military affairs through the late
1950s, and Konev commanded Soviet ground forces in Europe after 1945. It
was Konev, then Commander of Warsaw Pact forces, who suppressed the 1956
revolution in Hungary, and in 1961 he supervised the creation of the Berlin
Wall. If the Soviets could mount something approaching a new Operation
Bagration in the 1950s, then they would conceivably conquer the whole of
Germany and advance to the English Channel and the North Sea to prevent
Allied resupply. On this occasion, they would be supported by Warsaw Pact
armies, including the Poles and East Germans. By the 1960s, the Polish army
alone would be 800,000 strong on full mobilization.
In retrospect, we know that such fears were ill-founded, in the sense that the
Soviets had a realistic sense of the advantage that the West gained from its
nuclear superiority. Soviet war plans through the 1950s were chiefly defensive,
aimed at preventing or responding to a Western invasion. Even so, it was always
conceivable that political tensions elsewhere could provoke war in Europe, and
both sides planned accordingly. During the Berlin blockade, the Allies could
find around 300,000 troops (including 90,000 Americans) to resist 20 Soviet
divisions in eastern Germany, and at least a million soldiers in the rest of Eastern
Europe. In 1951, NATO estimated East Bloc strength in Europe at 175 Soviet
divisions with 62 further divisions from satellite countries. That would dwarf
the 35 NATO divisions then available. In 1953, an imagined Eastern bloc inva-
sion of Western Europe would involve between 75 and 120 divisions. Western
forces rapidly grew within the new NATO framework. In 1950, Dwight
Eisenhower became the first supreme commander of European forces
52  P. JENKINS

(SACEUR), and the following year, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers

Europe (SHAPE) became active. From 1953 to 1967, it was centered at
Fontainebleau, in France. NATO forces swelled from only a dozen divisions in
1949 to a hundred by 1954, with a comparable expansion of air fleets.

Defending Europe
Through the 1970s, NATO planners repeatedly war-gamed possible Soviet
invasions, which all involved titanic tank battles in central Germany. The Allies
would mount a fighting retreat to the Rhine, where they would await full rein-
forcements. Those plans focused attention on certain key strategic zones,
which would play as central a role in the Third World War as the Normandy
Beaches had in the Second World War. Two areas, in particular, were pivotal to
any future land war, namely the two routes that massed Soviet tanks could use
to storm Western forces. One was the North German Plain, and the other, the
Fulda Gap, Fulda-Lücke, between Frankfurt-am-Main and Kassel. For decades,
the two sides competed to perfect the best weapons for these battlefields, espe-
cially in terms of tanks. From the early 1950s, the Americans relied chiefly on
the M-48 Patton, the British on their Centurions, and the Soviets on their
T-54 and T-55. In all, over a hundred thousand T54-55s were produced, many
of which saw service with many foreign armies. Through the years too, the
West developed detailed plans to defend the Gap and evolved new generations
of artillery and ground attack aircraft to kill legions of Soviet tanks. Other
countries formed their own  defensive plans: the Netherlands developed its
IJssel-line, which envisaged holding off Soviet forces by extensive flooding.
All these scenarios, to varying degrees, assumed that the Soviets would win
a land victory, which the West must delay long enough for US reinforcements
and supplies to arrive in full strength. This placed special weight on control of
the seas, and NATO exercises often involved combined operations between
US, British, Canadian, French, and Dutch fleets and others. In 1952, NATO
initiated its Allied Command Atlantic (ACLANT) under the Supreme Allied
Commander Atlantic (SACLANT). One naval exercise in 1957, titled
Strikeback, involved over 200 warships and 650 aircraft, an event on a scale
paralleling the largest operations of the Second World War
The coming of nuclear weapons transformed what we might call the
Bagration model. Facing defeat on the conventional battlefield, the West would
deploy non-conventional weaponry, and the Soviets recognized that fact very
well. From 1953, the US was testing nuclear artillery shells to destroy enemy
armored formations, and air- or ground-launched weapons would eliminate
even well-fortified command centers. The lethal problem was that when either
side played the nuclear card, it was forcing a similar response from its rival, and
opening the way to an escalation that would involve attacks on enemy cities.
What one side viewed as an attack on a military staging area might to its enemy
appear as the destruction of a populous civilian target, demanding retaliation in
kind. Such confusion was very likely in densely populated Europe. Soon, both
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  53

Soviets and Americans would be attacking each other’s homelands. For the
West, then, holding back Soviet advances in the European theater through
conventional means was essential to give time for negotiations, and to prevent
or delay that nuclearization.

Irregulars and Partisans
Both sides intended to reduce their enemy’s strategic advantage on the battle-
field by deploying highly trained special forces on the lines of Britain’s wartime
Special Air Service, the SAS. Such forces could, for instance, carry out attacks
far behind enemy lines, even using portable nuclear weapons. The US had their
elite special operations units, and the Soviets had their Spetsnaz.
Both sides likewise recalled the wartime experience of resistance movements,
partisans, and irregular forces. If the activities of some groups were later exag-
gerated for political effects, some forces proved very useful in undermining the
enemy’s war effort and came to control whole liberated areas. Those wartime
experiences were not too far from people’s memories in 1950 when many
Europeans still had such extensive recent experience in clandestine warfare and
sabotage. Still, in the late 1940s, anti-Communist insurgencies were raging
across much of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, and within the USSR itself.
Polish resistance networks continued into the mid-1950s, and the last known
“doomed soldier” perished as late as 1963. Lithuanian partisans mounted a
prolonged struggle against Soviet occupiers from 1945 through 1953, with
other movements in Latvia, Estonia, and Romania. Anti-Soviet insurgency in
Ukraine reached a symbolic finale in 1959 when the KGB assassinated nation-
alist leader Stepan Bandera in Munich. Some of these wars were extraordinarily
bloody, and the Lithuanian struggle alone claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Realistically, the fact that these wars were conducted in areas wholly under
Soviet military control made it virtually impossible that they might have suc-
ceeded in their goal of overthrowing Communist domination. In the circum-
stances of the time, however, it was by no means far-fetched to think that those
resistance fighters might serve as valuable auxiliaries to advancing Western
forces in a larger international war. If a Third World War ever had erupted, they
would have become frontline soldiers. Western intelligence agencies, CIA and
MI6, sponsored, armed, and trained such guerrillas over several years, with
naval support from German units, and the programs existed into the mid-­1950s.
In Western Europe too, those same agencies made detailed preparations for
irregular warfare in the event of invasion. They trained and organized “stay
behind” forces whose task would be to resist Soviet occupation from behind
the lines, using weaponry stashed in secret arms dumps. On the other side,
Soviet invaders in Western Europe would likely have found support from leftist
insurgents and saboteurs, in Greece, France, and elsewhere. Italy would have
faced a potent insurgency.
Throughout the Cold War, dangerous crises developed in many parts of the
world, and on all continents. But throughout, Europe remained perennially
54  P. JENKINS

sensitive theater. Even during the Cuba missile emergency of 1962, American
policymakers were strongly conscious of new threats to Berlin, a concern that,
in retrospect, seems surprising. The long stasis in European borders—the
maintenance of the Iron Curtain—reflected the knowledge on both sides that
there, more than anywhere, tensions could easily erupt into a nuclear exchange.

Further Reading
Alessandro Brogi discusses Western attempts to prevent the spread of
Communism in Confronting America: The Cold War Between the United
States and the Communists in France and Italy (2011), and compare Elena
Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky, Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of
the Cold War (2011).
For Western interventions, see Stephen Long, The CIA and the Soviet Bloc:
Political Warfare, the Origins of the CIA and Countering Communism in
Europe (2014), and Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at
the Dawn of the Cold War (2020). Benn Steil discusses The Marshall Plan:
Dawn of the Cold War (2018).
Tony Judt offered a classic overview of long continuities in Europe’s history in
his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005), and compare Ian
Kershaw, The Global Age: Europe 1950–2017 (2019).
Soviet policy is analyzed in Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet
Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007). For British atti-
tudes, see Andrew Adonis, Ernest Bevin: Labour’s Churchill (2020).
For Eastern Europe, see Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of
Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (2012). A. Kemp-Welch traces the development
of Poland under Communism (2008), and see Patryk Babiracki, Soviet Soft
Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin’s New Empire, 1943–1957
(2019). For the Baltic lands, see John Hiden, Vahur Made, David J. Smith,
eds., The Baltic Question during the Cold War (2008). For Czechoslovakia,
see Roman Krakovsky, State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia
(2018). William Klinger and Denis Kuljiš offer a revisionist view of
Yugoslavian affairs in their Tito’s Secret Empire How the Maharaja of the
Balkans Fooled the World (London: Hurst, 2021). For anti-Communist resis-
tance, see Charles Gati, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and
the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (2006).
For the larger global crises of 1956, see Simon Hall, 1956: The World in Revolt
(2016); Evan Thomas, President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World
(2012); Alex Von Tunzelmann, Blood And Sand: Suez, Hungary, And
Eisenhower’s Campaign For Peace (2016).
German divisions, with a natural focus on Berlin, are the subject of Edith
Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How the East and West Germans Made the Iron
Curtain (2011); Steve Vogel, Betrayal in Berlin: George Blake, the Berlin
Tunnel and the Greatest Conspiracy of the Cold War (2019); Iain MacGregor,
 3  THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE  55

Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous
Place on Earth (2019); and Mark Fenemore, Fighting the Cold War in Post-
Blockade, Pre-Wall Berlin: Behind Enemy Lines (2020). See also Giles Milton,
Checkmate in Berlin The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World
(2021), and Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich
(2021).  Richard Reeves discusses the Berlin Airlift in Daring Young Men:
The Heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift (2010).
Visions of future warfare are analyzed in Jan Hoffenaar and Dieter Krüger, eds.
Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948–1968
(2012). NATO is the subject of Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance:
A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (2019). For clandestine
operations, see Annie Jacobsen, Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of
CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019).
 CHAPTER 4

Nuclear Perils

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove offered a savage yet hilarious
take on nuclear war (its full subtitle was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb). A crazed far-right US general deliberately ignites a war by
sending his bomber aircraft to attack the USSR. This in turn provokes a Soviet
Doomsday weapon that would end human life on most of the planet. Facing
such a prospect, US commanders and war planners hope to create a system of
deep bunkers in which they alone would survive, together with large numbers
of glamorous young women with whom they can breed to replenish the popu-
lation. Although Strangelove is an outrageous comedy, at so many points it
accurately caught the mood of the nuclear confrontation of the time and of the
various plans concocted by both sides. The Soviets were indeed working on
such a Doomsday weapon, and both sides operated on the assumption that key
leaders would ride out the holocaust that was destroying most of humanity.
Both sides believed in deterring war through a balance of terror, so that neither
the US nor the USSR would initiate a war that would annihilate both their
societies. Not long before the film’s release, a US strategist created an apt name
for this doctrine, namely Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

Bombs
The path to a MAD world had been remarkably short. During the Second
World War, the Allied Manhattan Project built an atomic bomb, a fission
(“splitting”) weapon, in which the atoms of isotopes of plutonium or enriched
uranium split to form lighter atoms. In the process, they emit neutrons that
sustain the process through a chain reaction, and that releases enormous
amounts of energy. In 1942, the first ever human-created self-sustaining
nuclear chain reaction was initiated, which showed the feasibility of such fission
weapons. An actual bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert in 1945, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 57

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_4
58  P. JENKINS

shortly afterward, actual weapons were used against the Japanese cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two attacks claimed some 200,000 lives, not
counting later losses to radiation over the decades.
Although the nuclear bomb is often presented as a wholly American innova-
tion, both British and Canadian scientists were heavily involved in the process,
until all foreign involvement was abruptly terminated by the US through the
McMahon Act of 1946, the Atomic Energy Act. The US monopoly in the
technology was troubling for any hopes that post-war peace might be pre-
served by cooperation between equally balanced nations, and there were short-­
lived hopes that the US might share its secrets with the Soviets. Such a hope
inspired some key scientists working on the bomb, and motivated a few to pass
information secretly to the Soviets. When the Soviets detonated their own
bomb in 1949, they used technologies taken clandestinely from the Americans
through extensive espionage networks. Their first device was a close facsimile
of the Nagasaki bomb.
The prospect of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets drove US policymak-
ers to seek larger and more effective arsenals that would overwhelm any pos-
sible opposition. US stocks of nuclear weapons expanded from 300 in 1950
to 18,000  in 1960, and 31,000  in 1965. This was vastly more than the
Soviets could produce in those years. If a war had erupted in 1955, the US
would have deployed 2400 warheads against the Soviet 200. During the
Cuban missile affair, the US potentially “out-bombed” the Soviets by some
eight to one in overall warheads, although in terms of weapons actually ready
for use, the US commanded 3500 to the Soviet 300. Most of the Soviet
weapons would be deployed on crewed bombers, which would find it diffi-
cult to reach US territory, as opposed to missiles. Only after that point did
the Soviets launch a building program that brought them to parity with the
US in the late 1970s. By 1986, the world’s combined stock of nuclear weap-
ons pecked at 70,000.
Raw numbers give no sense of the size or effectiveness of the weapons
involved, and their scale and lethality grew steeply. The two bombs used
against Japan were tiny by the standards of later weaponry. Each yielded an
explosion comparable to 20,000 tons of TNT high explosive, placing them at
the level of 20 kilotons, or 20 Kt. Over the next decade, US scientists devel-
oped fission weapons as far as was possible, reaching a height of 500 Kt with
their Ivy King test of 1952 (the British achieved 720 Kt a few years later). But
after the Soviets detonated their atomic bomb, the US pushed for weapons
with enormously larger destructive power, which used fusion rather than fis-
sion, reproducing the mechanisms that powered the heat of the sun. In such
super-bomb weapons, which were not nuclear but thermonuclear, hydrogen
atoms fused or merged to form helium, with a colossal release of energy. These
bombs were rated in the megaton range, where one megaton (Mt) corre-
sponded to an explosion of one million tons of TNT, 50 times larger than a
Hiroshima device.
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  59

Containment and Rollback
In January 1950, President Truman approved a crash program to develop such
armaments.
This formed part of a larger rethinking of US policy that followed directly
from the first Soviet nuclear test. In April 1950, a team of policymakers from
the State and Defense Departments, together with CIA, headed by Paul Nitze,
submitted to the President a report known as NSC-68. This portrayed a critical
and even apocalyptic threat to the world order, and to the survival of civiliza-
tion. The Soviets were set to expand their nuclear arsenal rapidly, reaching
something like parity with the US by the mid-1950s (as we have seen, that
prediction was wrong by two decades). This demanded a swift and aggressive
US response, involving an enormous military buildup with the expansion of
nuclear and thermonuclear arms as well as conventional resources. The US
would redefine its goals in the Cold War from containment to an active roll-
back or destruction of Communism. Although Truman was concerned by
some of the arguments, the Korean War made the document’s views seem
more plausible, and it was approved that September. NSC-68 supplied the
framework for US policy over the coming decade.
NSC-68 assumed a situation in which the US presently dominated the inter-
national balance, but that reality might change swiftly. That perception shaped
the thinking of General Curtis LeMay, whose attitudes were critical to nuclear
policy. From 1948 through 1957, he commanded the Strategic Air Command
(SAC), which he built into a formidable military power, and his ideas contin-
ued to influence that force for years afterward. LeMay made no secret of his
view that the US should take advantage of its crushing nuclear superiority to
destroy the Soviet Union before it could rise to challenge the US, and repeat-
edly, he advocated aggressive or pre-emptive attacks. In any prospective war, he
planned to use his SAC bombers and missiles to deliver huge nuclear assaults
within the opening hours and days of conflict, denying the Soviets the oppor-
tunity to regroup. The proposed new policy of rollback exactly fitted his view,
as did the emphasis on thermonuclear weaponry. Ideally, he dreamed of a sin-
gle weapon that could destroy the whole USSR.

The Age of the H-Bomb

Hydrogen bombs enormously increased the destructive potential of any pro-
spective warfare. In 1952, the US Ivy Mike test had a yield of 10.4  Mt. In
1954, the Castle series of tests in the South Pacific involved weapons at or
above 10 Mt yield: Castle Yankee (1954) yielded 13.5 Mt. The Castle Bravo
test went seriously awry. Intended for a yield of 6  Mt, the actual figure was
15  Mt, and it spread radioactive fallout over unexpectedly large areas. So
destructive were these weapons that they obliterated the islands where they
exploded, forcing the US to test over open water. In American popular culture,
60  P. JENKINS

the new devices were aptly termed “hell-bombs.” The Soviets quickly achieved
this technology, detonating their first deployable weapon in 1955.
All the powers needed to test the effectiveness of their devices, but the fact
of detonating ever larger weapons became a propaganda statement in its own
right, almost a display of national virility. All such weapons emitted radioactiv-
ity, but these goliath weapons became a pernicious source of radioactive pollut-
ants around the whole planet. They were especially disastrous when exploded
in the atmosphere, as opposed to on the ground. Both the US and Soviets
detonated many weapons in 1956–1957, but then began an unofficial morato-
rium which ended dramatically in 1961. That October, the Soviets detonated
their Tsar Bomba, which was originally intended for an inconceivable yield of
100 Mt, but which was actually scaled down to 50 Mt. That initiated a new
wave of testing, mostly of hugely destructive and very dirty weapons. Shortly
afterward, the Soviets followed with a 24 Mt device, and several 20 Mt weap-
ons followed in 1962. Each was a thousand times larger than the devices
dropped on Japan.

The Language of Apocalypse

Hydrogen bombs offered powerful temptations to the superpowers. When
Dwight Eisenhower became President of the US in 1953, he ordered a re-­
examination of defense policy, the New Look, which emphasized the threat of
massive retaliation as a means of deterring aggression. This exactly fitted the
SAC vision of General LeMay. In that view, reliance on hydrogen bombs would
preserve peace, as no enemy would be sufficiently insane to risk the conse-
quences of a counter-attack. That would allow the reduction of conventional
forces, saving some expenditure. At the end of the decade, Soviet leader
Khrushchev favored just such a shift from conventional forces to thermonu-
clear arms and missiles.
Such unimaginable destructive power demanded a whole new vocabulary.
Besides the language of megatons, military planners imagined the millions of
deaths that might result from attacks, or megadeaths. That term was popular-
ized in the 1960 book On Thermonuclear War by the strategist Herman Kahn,
who (unfairly) served as the model for the ruthless Nazi scientist “Dr.
Strangelove,” the title figure in the film. Planners assumed that some targets
would be hit by two or more nuclear attacks, far more than was actually neces-
sary to destroy them, and creating a situation of overkill.
Another much-used concept was “brinkmanship.” Throughout the Cold
War, superpower relations were often compared to a global poker game, which
depended centrally on each side pretending that its intentions were more
aggressive than they were, in order to deter or intimidate rivals. Bluff mattered,
provided it was credible. President Truman used such a tactic skillfully when he
deployed nuclear bombers in the Berlin Airlift, and he made similar apparent
preparations for a strike during the Korean War. Such steps sent a potent warn-
ing to the Soviets, whether or not the US intended any such attack, and
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  61

Eisenhower made like use of such symbolic actions. On the other side,
Khrushchev was an adept bluffer, who ably concealed the weaknesses of his
own nuclear arsenal. The danger in such cases was that an enemy might misin-
terpret a tactical gesture as if it represented a real first step in an attack, and
respond accordingly. The consequences of such a misreading became incon-
ceivably higher when states were armed with hydrogen bombs. Time and again,
the superpowers pressed situations to dangerous confrontations, but at the last
moment pulling back from the brink of all-out war.

Delivery
The means of delivering weapons to their targets improved at a revolutionary
rate. Quite apart from ethical concerns, the new bombs posed grave hazards to
the role and even existence of existing armed services. Inter-service feuds raged
in the US in the late 1940s, as the Air Force demanded investment in long-­
range bombers, while the Navy stressed the importance of carrier-borne nuclear
air strikes (technically, the air service was the US Army Air Corps until
September 1947). In 1947, the government leaned toward the air force side by
advancing the B-36 bomber program while canceling a proposed super-aircraft
carrier, the United States. The resulting political furor was so intense as to be
termed the Revolt of the Admirals.
After the Korean War and the ensuing military buildup, the US in effect
elected to support the positions of both the Navy and the Air Force. While
manned bombers initially formed the basis of the SAC, the Navy secured its
new generation of sophisticated aircraft carriers, with their nuclear resources.
That made the Navy incontestably the most powerful force of its kind in the
world. At any given point between 1954 and 1970, the Navy had 20 aircraft
carriers, 20 or 30 cruisers, and 250 destroyers, besides a hundred submarines.
Many US warships had access to nuclear weapons. That arsenal gave the US
enormous power to project its influence globally. From 1950, the US reorga-
nized the official names of its various units around the world. The Seventh
Fleet was and remains a dominant military reality in the Pacific Ocean, and the
Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The Second Fleet patrolled the Atlantic and
Caribbean and was at the forefront of the Cuban clash of 1962.
The principle of deterrence demanded that neither side believed that it
could knock out its enemy’s defenses through a sudden surprise attack, in what
was described as a nuclear Pearl Harbor. The quest in these years was for deliv-
ery systems that were effective but survivable, that could withstand such an
early assault. Initially, US nuclear strategy relied on long-range bombers like
the B-36, but long-range attacks were dangerously exposed to interception by
anti-aircraft missiles, as well as by enemy fighters. The US developed aircraft
that could fly much faster and higher than such older models, and which relied
on jets rather than propellers. The first of these all-jet bombers was the B-47
Stratojet which became the centerpiece of the SAC through the 1950s, until it
62  P. JENKINS

was replaced by the B-52 Stratofortress. A significant share of the SAC’s force
would always be in the air, ready to retaliate for any surprise Soviet assault.
The Soviets developed their own bombers, initially by reverse engineering
the American B-29 as the Tupolev Tu-4. However, the lack of forward bases
from which to strike the US homeland demanded a new long-range jet bomber,
which emerged in 1954 as the Myasishchev M-4 Molot (“Hammer”) which the
West knew as the Bison. At least in appearance, this was an extremely sophisti-
cated design that alarmed the Americans. Despite the bomber’s multiple fail-
ings, especially in its limited range, the Soviets successfully gave the impression
that they had built a sizable air fleet, creating an America panic over a “bomber
gap.” More valuable in practice was the Tu-16 Badger, the mainstay of Soviet
bomber forces from 1954 through the end of the Soviet Union: Badger air-
fields usually stood at the top of US target lists in the event of war. Also valu-
able was the very large and propeller-driven Tu-95, the Bear, first introduced
in 1956 and still in service today.
In response to fears of such Soviet air attacks, the US concentrated its mili-
tary resources in the country’s heartland, which bombers could reach far more
slowly than the imperiled coasts. The main American strategic air forces were
concentrated far inland, at centers like Offutt (Nebraska) and Dyess (Texas).
The North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was based in Colorado.
Of course, the Soviets could easily deliver nuclear attacks against US allies in
Europe or the Pacific and could strike US bases and forces overseas.

Missiles
Both sides invested in missile technology and long-range rocketry. The
Germans had set the precedent for this with their wartime V-2 rockets, with a
range of 200 miles, allowing them to target London. Both the Americans and
Soviets benefited from these advances as they captured German scientists at the
end of the war. The Americans initially concentrated on medium-range missiles
that could be used against battlefield targets, principally in Europe, and in
1958 they deployed the new Jupiter missile. Soon, the focus shifted to longer-­
range weapons intended to strike the enemy homeland. Under the leadership
of the brilliant rocket engineer Sergei Korolov, the Soviets made rapid prog-
ress, and in 1957, they tested the multi-stage R-7 Semyorka, with an initial
range of 3700 miles, which in later models grew to 5500 miles. This was the
world’s first real intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). By the early 1960s,
the Soviets had deployed their ICBMs, but these proved expensive and difficult
to conceal from Western attack.
Disturbed by Soviet advances, the US deployed their own ICBMs. By 1959,
the SAC had placed the nuclear-armed Atlas missile on combat-ready alert,
prepared to launch within 15 minutes of command. The Atlas itself proved to
have many failings, and it was gradually replaced by the greatly superior Titans.
The Titan I dominated the missile arsenal from 1959 to 1962, when it in turn
was supplanted by the much more powerful Titan II, which could deploy a
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  63

nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead. The Titan II remained in service

through most of the Cold War years, being retired only in 1987. At any given
time, around 60 of these missiles were deployed. The other main missile was
the Minuteman, which entered service in 1962, and 800 were deployed by
1965. Originally intended to retaliate against Soviet cities, its main function
shifted to the precise targeting of Soviet military targets, especially their own
missile sites. The US housed its own ICBMs in deep silos, which were mainly
concentrated far inland, in states such as Kansas, Colorado, and South Dakota.
Despite their critical military role, the new ICBMs received intense public
attention for their role in the space programs that each superpower made such
a critical element of its international image. The Soviet R-7A was the rocket
that launched the Sputnik satellite that created such a global sensation in 1957.
The US used its Jupiters and Titans. The lunar program relied on the Saturn
rockets, which were originally designed to establish a US military presence in
orbital space and beyond.

Beneath the Seas
The coming of ICBMs did much to eradicate the geographical obstacles that
had to some measure protected both homelands. Compared to bombers,
ICBMs were much harder to detect and prevent, although it was still theoreti-
cally possible that a pre-emptive attack could strike the missile fields sufficiently
hard to weaken defenses. That fear led the Americans to develop a third deliv-
ery system, namely by missiles launched from submarines, the exact location of
which would remain unknown to enemies. Greatly enhancing the power of
such weapons was the coming of nuclear propulsion technologies in the
mid-­ 1950s, a trend forcefully advocated and guided by Admiral Hyman
Rickover, known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Nuclear engines ensured
that such vessels could remain under water for lengthy periods, with no need
to surface, and they could launch their missiles from underwater. The US
launched its first nuclear submarine in 1954. In 1957, the US armed diesel-­
power submarines with missiles, but this was followed by the nuclear subma-
rines of the George Washington class. Each was equipped with 16 Polaris
submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). In 1960, the George Washington
successfully launched a Polaris SLBM, and the new submarines began regular
patrols. SLBMs came to represent a critical core of US nuclear weaponry. At
every stage, the Soviets closely echoed US developments, launching their first
missiles from submarines only weeks after the Americans. By 1963, the Soviets
too had the capacity to launch SLBMs with live warheads.
In 1960, the US coordinated the various systems into its Single Integrated
Operational Plan (SIOP). By this point, the US was relying on three distinct
systems to deliver nuclear weapons, namely through bombers, submarines, and
land-based ICBMs. The three together constituted the strategic triad, which
remained the basic structure of US strategic defense until the end of the Cold
War. When the US and Soviets engaged in arms limitation talks in the early
64  P. JENKINS

1970s—SALT 1—the US accepted a limitation of 1054 ICBM silos and 656

SLBM launch tubes (that limitation said nothing about the number of war-
heads attached to each device).

The Limits of Defense

Both sides developed defenses against the array of new weaponry, but those
defenses themselves raised strategic dilemmas. American cities were surrounded
by batteries of radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, and later by Nike missiles. By
1962, 240 Nike Ajax launch sites were operational within the US, and the Ajax
was subsequently replaced by the nuclear-armed Hercules. The Safeguard mis-
sile defense system was intended to protect US ICBM fields. It was also essen-
tial to detect incoming nuclear attacks. When in the 1950s the main danger to
the West arose from manned bombers, their most likely routes lay over Canada
and through the UK-Iceland-Greenland gap. Large radar systems were created
across Labrador and Newfoundland, in effect integrating Canada wholly into a
single North American defensive system. Between 1958 and 1961, the US
constructed an extensive radar network to detect a launch of Soviet ICBMs,
the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). In anticipation of an
attack across the Arctic, the BMEWS facilities were spread across Alaska, north-
ern Canada, and Greenland. Meanwhile, the Arctic Ocean became a potential
battlefront, as US nuclear submarines prepared to challenge and destroy Soviet
submarines sailing from their northern bases.
The existence of defensive systems, and their Soviet counterparts, created
what we might call a chain reaction. As ICBMs deployed weaponry to defeat
or deceive anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems so defenders in turn upgraded
their own systems to meet those innovations. Ironically, the more successful
those defensive systems were, the more harmful they might be to the nuclear
balance of terror and to international peace. If one power believed that it could
successfully defend against attack, then mutual destruction was no longer
assured, so that it might be tempted to launch a surprise attack on its enemy.
To avoid such a danger, and prevent a new escalation of the arms race, both
sides agreed in 1972 to prohibit the use or deployment of ABM systems, with
some strictly limited exceptions. However sensible such a step might have been
in some ways, it made it clear that the whole strategy of both sides relied on the
annihilation of cities and populations, and nothing should be allowed to pre-
vent that. MAD-ness ruled unchecked.

Mapping the End of the World

In hindsight, we know that deterrence really would work and that no actual
nuclear exchange would occur, even during the years of most extreme tension
between 1954 and 1963. But contemporaries were under no illusions about
what the consequences would mean. We now have access to several planning
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  65

documents that estimated the likely course and effects of a war that “went
nuclear.”
One early US war plan was Operation Dropshot, developed in 1949 at a
time when the country’s nuclear arsenals were quite limited. This imagined a
war in the near future, in 1957. Three hundred nuclear weapons would be used
as part of a much larger assault using conventional bombs, directed against
Soviet industrial centers and, inevitably, the populated cities in which they
stood. A hundred of the nuclear weapons would be concentrated on crippling
Soviet air power on the ground. Also in 1949, the SAC’s first Emergency War
Plan envisaged 133 atomic bombs on 70 Soviet cities within 30 days, which
would be the whole duration of the war. This meant “killing a nation.” But
further discussion suggested that the Soviets would be resilient enough to sur-
vive even such assaults, so that the US should triple the number of cities to be
targeted. By 1956, the Atomic Weapons Requirement Study described 2000
potential Designated Ground Zero targets, including 179 in the Moscow area
alone. Civilian populations were explicitly included on the target list.
The 1949 plans seem modest when compared with those of a decade later.
One harrowing text was prepared for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff during the
tension surrounding Berlin in June 1961, which imagined nuclear war against
the Communist bloc. At the time, the Soviet Union had a population of 217
million. The planners of SIOP-62 estimated that if the US attacked with its full
forces, with 3200 warheads targeting a thousand sites, then the USSR would
lose half its population, or 108 million fatalities. A more limited assault with
bombers, the Alert Force, would use some 1700 nuclear weapons, with the
likely deaths of 80 million.
The sheer numbers of warheads to be used would be vast, too large in fact
to find enough targets to justify their use. This was a recurrent problem with
the SAC plans of LeMay’s era, which began with the number of available war-
heads and tried to find enough targets for them. In the 1961 plan, besides
attacks on obvious military targets—airfields, missile sites, air defense facilities,
and other installations—US forces would strike quite modest Soviet cities with
populations of 50,000 or larger. Beyond the USSR, SIOP envisaged attacks on
Soviet allies, with little distinction according to political subtleties, or the
Communist loyalties of particular populations. Poland would lose perhaps 2.6
million dead. An attack on China would kill an additional hundred million, a
far smaller proportion of the population than the Soviets because of the lower
levels of urban concentration in China. Even so, US planner warned that a pre-­
emptive assault could not be guaranteed to eliminate the Soviet potential to
attack the US, so that second and third waves of mutual strikes would be
expected. In October 1962, US preparations for a nuclear strike against the
Soviets would have involved weapons with a combined power of seven thou-
sand megatons.
All these plans can be faulted in many ways, moral and practical, but in ret-
rospect, it is striking how little attention they paid to environmental conse-
quences. At the time, planners did indeed consider the long-term effects of
66  P. JENKINS

radioactive fallout. But nuclear destruction on anything like the imagined scale
would have released incalculably vast amounts of smoke and pollutants into the
air, darkening skies worldwide and transforming the climate, possibly so badly
as to destroy food production. In the 1980s, projections of such outcomes
foresaw a “nuclear winter” that could threaten the continued survival of
humanity, or of life itself.

Landscapes of Survival
The pressing danger of actual war resulted in heavy investment in building
military sites, many of which survive today as material remains of the war that
never was. In the US, most major cities preserve the remnants of the missile
systems that were once deployed to protect population centers against Soviet
attack. Particularly imposing were the defensive installations in which leaders
or elites could survive a nuclear attack, at least for the crucial time necessary to
organize a response. Rival powers massively invested in alternative centers of
command, control, and communication which would replace destroyed formal
centers of government. The result was the creation of a whole alternative geog-
raphy, as potential seats of power developed in highly defended and often secret
locations.
That meant titanic civil engineering projects, tunneling deep within moun-
tains. In 1951, the US began building its vast Raven Rock complex in remote
rural Pennsylvania. This miniature city would serve as an alternative to the
Pentagon and was meant to survive after Washington had been destroyed.
Civilians would take refuge at Virginia’s Mount Weather Emergency Operations
Center. Greenbrier in West Virginia would accommodate a thousand, includ-
ing all 500-plus members of Congress. Construction projects became ever
larger and more ambitious with the threat of thermonuclear weapons. In 1961,
construction began on a fortified headquarters for NORAD at Cheyenne
Mountain in Colorado, where the bunker was intended to survive a nearby
explosion of a hydrogen bomb. The concept of survivable bunkers, so mocked
in Dr. Strangelove, had some basis in reality.
Other countries developed their own bunker systems, very powerful in their
way, although few came near the mightiest US fortifications. As the certain
target of nuclear attack, Britain built a network of bunkers and refuges far from
the center of a London that was clearly doomed. One early center would be
“Burlington,” at Corsham, Central Government War Headquarters, a whole
underground city. A secret train system would allow 4000 government person-
nel to be evacuated to continue the war. Throughout the 1950s, the govern-
ment created a network of Regional Seats of Governments (RSGs) in secluded
areas, from which civil and military authority could still be exercised after the
cities had perished. The construction of deep British bunkers, Underground
Operational Centers, accelerated in 1959–1960 with the growing likelihood
that the Berlin collision would escalate to war. Kelvedon Hatch (Essex) gives a
powerful sense of the underground society that might have survived. In 1959,
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  67

the Canadian government headed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker com-

missioned what became known as the Diefenbunker, a four-story underground
structure to which leading officials from Ottawa would flee to form an alter-
nate seat of government. Besides the elite centers, many lesser local military
centers and surveillance facilities were constructed to withstand nuclear assault.
Some of the most elaborate systems emerged in Germany, which in the
event of a war would rapidly suffer appalling damage above ground. After
Bonn was destroyed, the government would weather the nuclear storm nearby
at Bad Neuenahr, where the deep Government Bunker (Regierungsbunker)
began in 1960. The East Germans placed their hopes in the Harnekop
Atombunker, the main shelter for military authorities. During the renewed war
scares of the 1980s, the Americans created an awe-inspiring fortified bunker in
the Gossberg, in the Hunsrück mountain range. This would serve as the center
for NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) warfare and provide a base for direct-
ing missile launches. Although such structures were highly secret at the time,
some have subsequently become significant tourist attractions, giving a vision
of Doomsday.

Whose Bombs?
In the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, the mass media suggested that
nuclear weapons were the product of extremely advanced technology, which
feasibly could be confined to just one nation, the US. That impression helps
explain the shock when the Soviets acquired their weapon. Spies did indeed
play their role in that Soviet achievement, but other countries too showed how
relatively easily an advanced technological society could develop its own
devices. As nuclear pioneer J. Robert Oppenheimer warned in 1945, “They are
not too hard to make. They will be universal if people wish to make them
universal.”1
Such development was all the more essential in a world where nuclear status
was a prerequisite for any claim to Great Power status. Despite being cut off
from US resources, the British detonated their own fission bomb in 1952, with
a fusion weapon in 1957. France followed suit, detonating its thermonuclear
weapon by 1968. By the mid-1960s, the British deployed almost 450 war-
heads, the French 32. The British developed their own delivery systems, nota-
bly the nuclear armed “V-bombers,” like the Vulcan.
The British never fully reconciled the problem of their ultimate dependence
on the US. In 1960, the British agreed to use the new US air launched ballistic
missile, the Skybolt, and accordingly canceled a number of its own missile
programs. That left the country in severe difficulties when in 1962 the
Americans in their turn canceled Skybolt. In desperate need of a substitute,
British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met US President John F. Kennedy

1
 “Oppenheimer’s Farewell Speech,” November 2, 1945, https://www.atomicheritage.org/
key-documents/oppenheimers-farewell-speech.
68  P. JENKINS

to plead for an alternative. The Americans agreed to supply Britain with Polaris
missiles, requiring the British to develop their own missile-capable submarines.
From 1968, the submarine force replaced manned bombers as the mainstay of
the country’s nuclear deterrent. The French likewise sought independence
from the US, and from NATO. After Charles de Gaulle became President in
1958, he encouraged the creation of the  independent strike force, Force de
Frappe (later the Deterrent Force, Force de Dissuasion). This originally relied
on Mirage bombers, but by the 1970s, the country had a full strategic triad,
incorporating missile silos and nuclear-capable submarines.
The fact that those two countries had joined the nuclear club in itself did not
destabilize the international order, as it was wildly unlikely that either would
use them except as part of a larger Western effort against the Soviets. Nor did
that assumption change when France formally withdrew its forces from NATO
in 1966, as an assertion of geopolitical independence. But other nations had
their ambitions, and these threatened to prove more destabilizing. As we will
see, in the early 1960s, growing tensions with the USSR drove China to assume
ever more independent and even hostile positions, and nuclear weapons were
vital to deter possible aggression from either the Americans or the Soviets.
China exploded its first nuclear device in 1964, its hydrogen bomb in 1967.
Other countries followed. No later than 1966, Israel acquired an opera-
tional nuclear weapon and by the end of the century had created a fully surviv-
able system of delivery mechanisms. By the turn of the century, India, Pakistan,
South Africa, and North Korea made the historic move to nuclear status, with
several other aspirants close behind. That proliferation greatly enhanced the
likelihood that a regional conflict would “go nuclear” and conceivably drag in
one or other of the Superpowers. Concern about the nuclear spread led to
vigorous efforts for non-proliferation from 1965 onward. In 1968, the Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was opened for signa-
ture, and this came into force in 1970. However, India, Pakistan, and Israel
have never signed the agreement.
Apart from worries about rogue nuclear states, governments were pro-
foundly aware of the risk of nuclear exchanges developing through accident or
malice. On several occasions, technical mishaps or loss of electrical supplies
persuaded one or other superpower that its enemy had begun a nuclear attack,
although on every occasion, each avoided the temptation to retaliate. One of
the very closest calls occurred in May 1967 when a solar flare led Western
forces to assume that the Soviets were jamming their radars as a precursor to
attack. Some nuclear accidents (what the US called Broken Arrow episodes)
were potentially disastrous. In 1961, a US B-52 dropped two hydrogen bombs
on North Carolina, and these came very close to detonation. In 1966, a midair
crash involving another B-52 released four similar bombs over Spain, causing
some contamination. Another truly perilous event occurred at Thule, in
Greenland, in 1968, when yet another bomber crashed and spilled four bombs.
That disaster raised an ugly question. If the Thule monitoring station had been
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  69

destroyed by accidental detonation, it was highly likely that the US would have
decided that it had fallen victim to Soviet assault, and would have retaliated
accordingly.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Quite apart from their nuclear efforts, both East and West developed other
kinds of weapons of mass destruction. Before the Second World War, all the
major powers had experimented with biological warfare techniques, although
only the Japanese made any systematic use of them, chiefly in China. Japanese
research was undertaken by the secretive Unit 731, which undertook appalling
experiments on prisoners and civilians. After the war, both the US and Soviets
gained access to information from Unit 731, which they deployed much as
they did the work of German rocket scientists.
After 1945, the US, British, and Soviets continued testing and experimenta-
tion. The British were especially interested in these techniques as a possible way
of counteracting their early weakness in nuclear technology. In 1952, the
British Operation Cauldron tested such potentially military agents as bubonic
plague, brucellosis, and tularemia. All the major powers experimented with
anthrax and other diseases. US research was concentrated at their facility at
Fort Detrick, Maryland, which became the center for multiple research proj-
ects using toxins and experimental weapons. Beyond any strategic uses, the US
hoped to develop weapons to assassinate foreign leaders or to achieve some
kind of brainwashing or mind control. In the 1980s, Fort Detrick attracted
global attention as the centerpiece of a Soviet disinformation campaign that
attributed the disease of AIDS to US biological warfare experiments, a highly
successful propaganda claim that circulated for decades.
On several occasions, the US program modeled the impact of dangerous
bioweapons through the experimental use of harmless simulant bacilli against
population centers. One episode in 1950 involved an aerial distribution over
San Francisco, and further mock attacks followed against Washington in 1965,
and on the New York subway in 1966. From 1962, Project 112 involved the
use of biological or chemical weapons that could cause temporary incapacita-
tion. However controversial these Western efforts might have been, they were
dwarfed by the very substantial Soviet programs, which moved far beyond the
stage of laboratory experiments. That included the terrifying manufacture of
weaponized smallpox, and the development of diseases intended to target ani-
mal herds. The scale of Soviet involvement in these activities received some
publicity in 1979, following an accidental release of anthrax spores from a mili-
tary research facility at Sverdlovsk. Up to 100 people died.
All the main powers made extensive preparations for chemical warfare, ini-
tially for battlefield use. The weapon of choice was the deadly sarin nerve gas,
which could be delivered by surface-to-surface missiles like the US Honest
John. The US experimented with incapacitating agents, including some sub-
stances that went on to an afterlife as popular recreational drugs. On the Soviet
70  P. JENKINS

side, Russia in 1997 declared a surviving Soviet-era arsenal of 40,000 tons of

chemical weapons, including blister agents like mustard gas and nerve agents
like sarin.
Fortunately, the full capacities of these various weapons were never tested in
actual warfare, but the biological agents in particular were intended to kill vast
numbers, on a scale comparable to the early atomic bombs. They truly were
meant to achieve mass destruction.

A World Without the Bomb?

As we will see, anti-nuclear movements and ideas gained real strength in
Western nations from the late 1950s. Their visibility does raise the question of
whether abolition could successfully have been achieved, offering a radical
alternative to the history of tension and confrontation that actually prevailed
over the following decades. Yet however attractive the disarmament message
might appear, it did pose many challenges, practical no less than moral. In
practice, it was never possible for one side to disarm unilaterally, or else it
would be totally in the power of its nuclear-armed rival (that issue did not apply
to smaller players like Britain or France). But general or bilateral disarmament
was problematic. If both superpowers ever did agree to abolish their nuclear
weapons—and every other nuclear-armed nation agreed—it would be very dif-
ficult to prevent clandestine production. Even today, with extensive resources
for space surveillance, the nuclear efforts of particular nations are often hard to
interpret, and that was much more true in the 1960s. The Soviets, meanwhile,
were always deeply reluctant to permit the kind if random intrusive inspections
that would have been crucial to such a disarmament regime. If nuclear weapons
had somehow been prohibited, then assuredly the great military powers would
have shifted their attention to perfecting and improving these scarcely less hor-
rible biological arsenals.
More fundamental was the question of how the world might develop if it
hypothetically became nuclear-free. A world without nuclear weapons would
leave the Eastern bloc with an unanswerable advantage in conventional military
might, most obviously in Europe. That could not have been challenged even if
all the West European nations reorganized their societies on the basis of full-­
time military mobilization. The sheer numerical strength of Chinese forces
would likewise be a daunting challenge in Asia. The US could have countered
such a military threat if it had maintained a permanent mobilization on the
level of 1944, but realistically, that was not possible in the long term. Preventing
a global nuclear war would not have averted the risk of a very destructive Third
World War.
 4  NUCLEAR PERILS  71

Further Reading

The emergence and development of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons are

the subject of a very substantial literature. See Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun:
The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995); Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at
Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009); David
E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race
and Its Dangerous Legacy (2009); Jim Baggott, The First War Of Physics: The
Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939–1949 (2010); Ray Monk, Robert
Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (2013); Christopher Gainor, The
Bomb and America’s Missile Age (2018). See also Eric Schlosser, Command
and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of
Safety (2013); Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear
Secrecy in the United States (2021).
For the possible and planned uses of nuclear weapons, see Steven J. Zaloga, The
Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear
Forces 1945–2000 (2014) and Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals,
and the Secret History of Nuclear War (2020). US leaders and policymakers
debated nuclear strategy at great length, and in the process touched on criti-
cal questions of ethnics, and of national identity. See Ned O’Gorman, Spirits
of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American
Security Strategy (2011); or Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American
Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured
Destruction (2015).
The responses of individual leaders and planners—and the dilemmas they
faced—are the subject of Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard
Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (2009); Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday
Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017); and Ron Rubin, The
Cold World They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert
Wohlstetter (2017).
The politics of missile deployment are described in Gates Brown, Eisenhower’s
Nuclear Calculus in Europe: The Politics of IRBM Deployment in NATO
Nations (2018). For the US’ nuclear navy, see Larry Berman, Zumwalt (2012).
For the British experience with nuclear weapons, and the country’s policy
debates, see Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst
1945–2010 (2010); W. J. Nuttall, Britain and the Bomb: Technology, Culture
and the Cold War (2019); Simon J. Moody, Imagining Nuclear War in the
British Army, 1945–1989 (2020). John Clearwater traces the story of
Canadian Nuclear Weapons (1998), and see Sean M. Maloney, Learning to
Love the Bomb: Canada’s Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War (2007).
Nuclear defenses are the subject of Nick McCamley, Cold War Secret Nuclear
Bunkers (2007); and Garrett M.  Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the
U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die (2017).
72  P. JENKINS

See also Ian Klinke, Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey into Cold War
Germany (2018).
One aspect of US biological and chemical warfare research is the subject of
Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for
Mind Control (2019).
For the impact of military research on scientists and the scientific community,
see Paul Rubinson, Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State,
and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America (2016); and Audra J.  Wolfe,
Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2020).
Parallel Soviet debates are the subject of Hiroshi Ichikawa, Soviet Science and
Engineering in the Shadow of the Cold War (2019). See also Alex Abella,
Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American
Empire (2008); and Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored
History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (2015).
For some of the obvious ethical issues associated with weapons research, see
James L. Nolan, Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of
the Nuclear Age (2020).
For the manufacture of nuclear materials, see Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear
Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium
Disasters (2013).
 CHAPTER 5

Asian Theaters

On April 12, 1951, a savage air battle developed in the skies above North
Korea. The US had dispatched a fleet of 48 B-29 bombers, protected by 100
fighters. They were attacked by 30 fast and maneuverable MiG-15 jet fighters,
piloted by Soviet or Soviet-trained pilots. The US lost three of the powerful
and expensive B-29s, with several more badly damaged, forcing a halt of several
months in the bombing campaign against the Communist north. The US
reduced its daytime attacks and turned to night raids. US flyers remembered
this grave setback as “Black Thursday.”
The combat illustrates many aspects of the Cold War, including the crucial
significance of conventional weapons in a world otherwise focused on nuclear
arms. It also reminds us of the direct fighting that broke out on occasion
between US- and Soviet-backed forces and not necessarily through proxies.
Above all, it indicates the critical significance of Asian theaters of conflict in the
global confrontation. By 1951, while the Korean War was still raging,
Communist or Communist-led insurgencies were flaring in Malaya, Indo-­
China, and the Philippines, and that was quite apart from the violent consoli-
dation of Communist power in progress in China itself. It required little
imagination to believe that, in the words of the later anthem of China’s Cultural
Revolution, “The East is Red.” If Europe offered the most likely trigger for
global war, then Asian conflicts posed their special dangers. It was in Korea and
Vietnam that Americans engaged in the bitterest armed conflict with
Communist foes. The complexity of those Asian situations grew as the
Communist bloc fractured, revealing stark divisions between Soviet and
Chinese interests.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 73

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_5
74  P. JENKINS

Japan: Year Zero and After

As in Europe, the Second World War destroyed or fatally weakened existing
political structures across East and Southeast Asia. That created an opportunity
to construct new political realities on the foundations of occupations and occu-
pation zones.
Japan had long been the main regional concern for US policymakers, but
that situation now changed totally. Japan itself was ruined by the war, requiring
years of US-supervised reconstruction and investment. The country remained
under direct US occupation until 1952. But unlike Germany, Japan could not
be expected to rearm to defend itself alone, as the American-imposed system
demanded the rejection of military force. The Self Defense Forces—what we
would otherwise call the Japanese armed forces—were slow to develop. The
defense of Japan became ever more critical from the 1950s, as the country’s
spectacular economic growth made it an ever more critical prize as the center-
piece of the emerging Pacific Rim system. As in Germany, the need to resist
Communism led the Americans to tolerate the political re-emergence of politi-
cians associated with the far-right and militarist wartime regime, including
individuals accused of grave war crimes. One such wartime survivor, Nobusuke
Kishi, served as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960.
The post-Occupation settlement placed the main burden for defending
Japan on the Americans, who would be granted extensive base facilities. These
became critical to the US forward position in the Pacific region, and the pro-
jection of military power. US military containment of China depended on the
very powerful Seventh Fleet, based at Yokosuka in Japan, while Yokota became
a massive airbase. The Naval Air Station at Atsugi was pivotal to many conflicts
as the Cold War developed, a base for military operations in Korea and Vietnam
and also for the surveillance flights of the high-flying U-2 spy planes.
Nervous about offending Japanese pacifist sentiment, the Americans were cau-
tious about overtly announcing the presence of their nuclear arms on Japanese
soil. Even so, it was an open secret that the Americans maintained a strong
nuclear presence in Okinawa, with a vast stockpile of warheads.
US concern about Communist threats had other implications for Japan’s
post-war reconstruction. The Americans had planned to purge those closely
connected with wartime militarism and war crimes, and thousands of rightists
were indeed purged. But the growing Communist danger placed strict limits
on such vigilance, as the focus shifted to subversives from the left. The occupa-
tion increasingly constrained Communist involvement in public life and espe-
cially labor, and repression in industry culminated with the Red Purge of 1950.
That had lasting effects on Japanese industry and its labor relations.
Yet the left was by no means destroyed, and it capitalized on anti-nuclear
and anti-American sentiment. In 1960, proposed revisions to the post-war
Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (Anpo) provoked a sweeping
national protest movement, in which Communists cooperated with Socialist
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  75

and far-left groups. Demonstrations regularly attracted hundreds of thousands

of protesters. The Communist-led student movement Zengakuren was partic-
ularly active, setting the scene for further militancy through the coming decade.
The Anpo crisis found a traumatic visual symbol in the televised assassination
of a Socialist Party leader by a far-right activist, on live television. If Japan’s
commitment to the American-led coalition was never seriously in doubt, its
open politics allowed for fierce and sometimes violent debate.
The war’s consequences extended far beyond Japan. Japan had conquered
British, Dutch, and French possessions, and all those regions were in upheaval
during the post-1945 decade, as empires dissolved and new nations emerged.
The opportunities for pro-Soviet and Communist movements seemed almost
limitless.

Liberation and Loss
Asian Communism achieved its greatest victory in China. The vast country
had been in political chaos since the fall of its ancient Empire in 1911, and
Communist forces emerged as a significant faction in the 1920s, under the
leadership of Mao Zedong. Although they maintained a guerrilla struggle,
they could make little headway against the Nationalist government led by
military commander Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi), who ruled the country
from 1926. With major US aid, Chiang led China against Japanese invasion
and occupation. After 1945, civil war resumed between the Nationalists—the
Guomindang or KMT—and the Communists. In October 1949, Communist
forces secured control of China, proclaiming a new People’s Republic (PRC),
which the US would know as Red China. That triumph extended Communist
rule over the world’s most populous nation, with its 400 million citizens. The
new state closely followed the precedents of Lenin and Stalin in eradicating
traces of the old pre-revolutionary order and hurrying to establish party con-
trol over all aspects of life. Within a few years after the Liberation, purges of
real and alleged class enemies had claimed several million lives.
American concern about the new situation was vastly enhanced by the long-­
standing US hopes that China would become a modern state on Christian and
American lines. This would ideally be a counter-example to exploitative
European imperialism. US churches, Protestant and Catholic, were appalled at
the destruction of their missions in China. Chiang Kai-Shek often exploited his
own credentials as a Christian (Methodist) leader. The question of “Who lost
China?” became an explosive issue in US politics, further galvanizing the quest
for surreptitious Communist agents in the administration.
Chiang’s Nationalist government, with its armed forces, fled to Taiwan,
which in these years was often known internationally by its Portuguese colonial
name of Formosa, the “beautiful island.” The KMT initially controlled Hainan
and some smaller islands, although PRC forces took Hainan in 1950. The
76  P. JENKINS

KMT established their new regime with extreme brutality and had already
undertaken an appalling massacre of local Taiwanese populations in 1947.
After 1949, they began the bloody era that was remembered as the White
Terror. Initially, the US saw little hope of defending that rump regime, but in
the 1950s, it acknowledged Chiang’s government as the authentic government
of the whole of China. In 1954, the US signed a mutual defense treaty with
this tiny Republic of China, or ROC, which held a permanent seat in the
United Nations Security Council until 1971. From the PRC perspective, it
meant that predatory foreign regimes were supporting a rebel province in
secession from the homeland.

Korea
Communist victory in China opened the door for further expansion into much
of East and Southeast Asia. A kind of “domino theory” was well entrenched in
American views of the region long before the outbreak of the Vietnam conflict.
The most urgent situation developed in Korea, which had since 1910 been
incorporated into the Japanese Empire. In 1945, the peninsula was divided
into two occupation zones separate by the 38th parallel. In 1948, South Korea
declared its statehood as the Republic of Korea (ROK) under the robustly anti-­
Communist Syngman Rhee. As in Taiwan, Rhee’s regime was ruthless and
violent, and bloodily suppressed leftist risings. The Soviet-occupied North
became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK, under the
Stalinist Kim Il-Sung, who ruled until 1994. The 38th Parallel became a peril-
ous new frontier in the Cold War. From mid-1949, Kim had been seeking
Stalin’s permission to invade the South. After some hesitation, Stalin granted
that in April 1950, with the condition that Mao would supply forces if needed.
On June 25, the DPRK invaded the South, arousing panic far beyond the pen-
insula itself.
In response, President Truman persuaded the United Nations to condemn
the invasion and to provide military assistance to the ROK. The Soviets could
have vetoed the resolution, but since 1950, they had boycotted proceedings in
protest at the refusal to give the PRC the Chinese seat on the Security Council.
The ensuing military effort was thus technically a United Nations campaign,
although there was never any doubt about the central role of US forces. United
Nations combat strength peaked at around a million, which included 600,000
ROK forces and 320,000 Americans. (In all, 1.8 million Americans served in
the theater.) British and Commonwealth forces contributed significantly to the
Allied effort, as did contingents from 20 other nations, including Turkey and
Ethiopia. The diverse character of the war effort was invaluable for propaganda
purposes, as it suggested a global effort against aggression ultimately directed
by Stalin, rather than an equally balanced struggle between the superpowers.
That international context profoundly affected the conduct of the war, as the
US had of necessity to take account of Allied views, which would often be more
reluctant to risk open conflict with the great Communist powers.
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  77

The North Korean invasion won rapid successes, occupying most of the
South, and confining US and Allied forces to a besieged bastion around the
southeastern city of Pusan, which could be supplied by sea. In August, that
Pusan Perimeter was in a sense, the military front line of the Cold War. The
balance of the war changed fundamentally in September when General
MacArthur, whose military career was nothing like as unfailingly brilliant as his
publicists proclaimed, devised a masterly counter-attack. Between September
15 and 19, a UN force of 75,000 landed in the port city of Inchon, far behind
Communist lines. This Operation Chromite was a very high-risk venture, but
it succeeded thoroughly. UN forces liberated Seoul on September 25 and
crossed the 38th Parallel into the North. The UN captured the Northern capi-
tal of Pyongyang in October 1950. It was reasonable to think that the war was
won and in a decisive defeat for Communism.
MacArthur then made a grave blunder, pushing his advance throughout the
North, and approaching the country’s borders with China, at the Yalu River.
Consciously or otherwise, his move was seen as threatening China itself. Since
the start of the war, the Soviet and Chinese governments had discussed deploy-
ing Chinese forces in support of the North Koreans, but the new situation
demanded a Chinese response. In late October, a massive Chinese force crossed
the Yalu River, defeating ROK units, and soon encountering the Americans.
This began an expansive new phase in the war, and by March 1951 the front
line once again extended well into the south.
MacArthur proposed a drastic widening of the conflict. That would include
bombing across the Chinese border, and probably using nuclear weapons
against military staging areas. He planned to use ROC Nationalist forces for a
direct invasion of China. Whatever  its military virtues, the plan was deeply
dangerous, in drawing the US into direct conflict not just with China, but with
the Soviet Union. It was perilous in constitutional terms, as MacArthur was, in
effect, trying to direct US foreign policy in a matter of the utmost sensitivity.
The general’s role in winning the Pacific War against Japan had made him
immensely popular, arousing fears that the civilian government was losing con-
trol of its military: he was looking alarmingly like an “American Caesar.”
Truman relieved MacArthur, from his command and ending the immediate
prospect of expansive escalation. By June 1951, the battle lines had stabilized
at a frontier close to the 38th parallel. Meanwhile, the US maintained a punish-
ing air campaign against the North, which in the whole war involved dropping
635,000 tons of bombs, including 32,500 tons of napalm.
The expanded war brought US and Allied forces into direct combat with
units from the Soviets as well as China. The Soviets had substantial ground
forces on the Yalu border and offered extensive support to Communist allies in
the peninsular itself. By 1952, some 25,000 Soviet personnel were involved in
the conflict.
The Soviets were heavily engaged in the air war that now developed. Since
the closing phases of the Second World War, military airpower had moved
overwhelmingly to using jet engines, as the speed and power of aircraft had
78  P. JENKINS

grown steadily. A typical wartime fighter like the Spitfire operated at 350 MPH,
compared to the 650 MPH of the swept-wing Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG)-15
that entered service in 1949. America’s first jet fighter, the P-80 Shooting Star
(1945) approached 600 MPH. Initially, many observers meant that such high
speeds made impossible the kind of dogfights between rival fliers that had been
such a notable feature of the two world wars, but that assumption proved
incorrect. In November 1950, an American P-80 shot down two MiG-15s in
the first example of a dogfight between jet aircraft. But the Americans faced
real challenges. Flying under North Korean or Chinese colors, Soviet pilots
wreaked havoc in UN air forces until the US developed an effective response in
the form of its F-86 Sabres. Sabres and MiG-15s were often engaged in battles
in what became known as MiG Alley, in the northern part of North Korea and
its Chinese border. Ultimately, the US won a decisive victory in the air, with a
“kill ratio” of ten to one—that is, ten enemy aircraft were destroyed for every
one of its own lost.
Korea initiated a long-term race for superiority between US and Soviet
equipment, as each new generation of fighters acquired iconic significance as a
symbol for the power and technological skill for its own side. That reputation
translated into impressive sales to each side’s respective allies and sympathizers.
Forty countries flew the MiG-15, including not just the whole East Bloc and
China, but also emerging African and Asian countries. Thirty countries oper-
ated the F-86 Sabre. Including aircraft built under license, at least 18,000
MiG-15s were built, as against 10,000 Sabres. Scarcely less successful were
their respective successors: the MiG-21, which entered service in 1959 and
which flew in the colors of 60 nations; and America’s F-4 Phantom. That com-
petition continued for decades.

Hearts and Minds
Beyond the military aspects, the two sides fought an intense propaganda war.
Prisoners of war were a deeply sensitive issue. The United Nations took tens of
thousands of North Korean and Chinese prisoners, but the camps in which
they were housed proved violent and unruly, as Communists maintained their
disciplined organizations. Camp uprisings were bloody, especially those at
Geoje in 1952. This proved a microcosm of the bitter violence between the
two Korean sides throughout the war, which was often manifested in massacres
and atrocities.
Communist forces levied heavy pressure on Allied prisoners to make them
issue statements denouncing their own cause. That pressure included conven-
tional means of torture, but Allied forces were shocked to observe the appar-
ently voluntary conversion of American and other soldiers to Communist
thought-ways. Adapting a Chinese phrase for re-education, Western observers
described the process of involuntary conversion or programming as “brain-­
washing,” which achieved sensational status through Western media and fic-
tional productions. The best known was The Manchurian Candidate, Richard
Condon’s 1959 novel, which became a film in 1962. The story involves a
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  79

group of American POWs who are brainwashed to serve a deep-rooted

Communist conspiracy to take over the US.  The furor over brainwashing
began a Western quest to find their own methods of achieving similar program-
ming or brainwashing. That quest for an authentically deployable Manchurian
Candidate had a long aftermath through the use of character-altering drugs by
the CIA, as well as other Western agencies.
The maltreatment of prisoners further aggravated Western stereotypes of
Communists, which acquired a harsh racial edge. If the Soviets appeared ruth-
less and brutal, views of the Chinese and North Koreans drew on the vicious
Orientalist stereotypes that had recently been directed against the Japanese. In
the new view, Asian Communists were sinister masterminds, but also subhu-
man ape-like monsters inflicting horrible violence on white bodies. From an
American perspective, the Soviets and Chinese easily segued into the roles
familiar from World War II propaganda, with the Russians as German Nazis,
and the Chinese as the Japanese.
The Communists, likewise, found rich propaganda resources in Korea in the
alleged US use of biological warfare, involving plague, cholera, and smallpox.
The North Koreans supported these charges by purported confessions from
Allied prisoners. That allegation was widely presented around the world by
Communist and fellow-traveling groups, and several international hearings
proclaimed US guilt. An International Scientific Commission for the Facts
Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea (ISC) included some presti-
gious scientists, and in 1952, the ISC declared that the allegations were true.
It also suggested that the US had drawn on experiments from the notorious
wartime Japanese Unit 731, which was in fact true, although the charges of
biological attacks in Korea were false. The whole affair stands as a spectacular
instance of Soviet disinformation.
Despite continued attempts to break through enemy lines, the war persisted
through 1953. Although the UN effort had saved the ROK, the Americans
were weary of the commitment, and that contributed to the election of
President Dwight Eisenhower in November 1952. His platform included the
decisive-sounding but non-specific declaration that “I will go to Korea.” Peace
negotiations were protracted, chiefly because of the issue of repatriating POWs,
but Eisenhower let it be known that he would not accept a simple stalemate,
even if he had to use nuclear weapons. An armistice was signed in July 1953,
which fell short of a full peace agreement. The armistice was signed at
Panmunjom, which continued to be the venue for mutual denunciations and
propaganda statements that seldom came close to authentic negotiations.
Northern and Southern states remained bitter foes for decades, as the North
often tried to provoke a resumption of open warfare.
Counting a large number recorded simply as missing, the war had cost up to
a million military deaths, including 160,000 ROK and 40,000 Americans. The
North Koreans lost half a million, and the Chinese lost 200,000. Those figures
do not include 2–3 million Korean civilian deaths, out of a pre-war population
of 30 million for the whole peninsula.
80  P. JENKINS

Mao’s China
The Korean experience made both sides keenly aware of the potential for future
conflict in the region. For the Chinese, the threat of a possible Western assault
on the homeland put an urgent premium on rapid development and modern-
ization. It encouraged the very hardline attitudes of Mao Zedong, who wished
to see a united Communist world front acting aggressively against the West.
That position contributed to his rejection of Soviet de-stalinization policies
after 1956, with its attendant moves to peaceful coexistence, and widened the
growing schism between the two great Communist powers. By the early 1960s,
China was openly denouncing Premier Khrushchev as a counter-revolutionary.
The loss of faith in the USSR allowed Mao to position himself as the leading
edge of the global revolution and the true heir to Stalin. The country furiously
pursued its independent nuclear program. Mao’s urgent commitment to
growth and development led to disaster in the late 1950s with an ill-considered
dash to industrialization at the expense of food production. The Great Leap
Forward (1958–1962) crippled the country and caused tens of millions of
deaths from famine. The catastrophe left Mao deeply vulnerable within the
Party hierarchy.
As the MacArthur affair of 1951 had suggested, US links with the ROC on
Taiwan gave them a potential springboard for future military action. But
Taiwan was vulnerable to Communist attack, and barely a hundred miles sep-
arated the island from the PRC mainland. Communist forces repeatedly tried
to seize smaller islands in the Taiwan Strait, and invasion was often feared.
The two sides engaged in artillery duels for the Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu
Islands. Two confrontations, in particular, were singularly dangerous. One
clash in 1954–1955 led to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff recommending the use
of nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland, although President
Eisenhower resisted. The Americans were especially conscious of the political
consequences of another nuclear attack on East Asian targets, which would
send a disastrous message about the racial implications of the weapon. Under
the threat of heavy intervention, and lacking a Soviet willingness to retaliate
in nuclear kind, the PRC was forced to negotiate. During a second Taiwan
Straits struggle in 1958, the US deployed substantial air, ground, and sea
forces to Taiwan, and equipped the ROC with sophisticated fighters, greatly
enhancing their combat abilities. Using advanced and Sidewinder air-to-air
missiles, the ROC won significant victories in air combat, and again, the PRC
backed down from its artillery attacks. Perhaps a thousand personnel perished
on both sides. Recent research has shown that once again in this crisis, the US
came close to deploying nuclear weapons against the PRC.
As in Eastern Europe, the US pursued a forward policy through the support
of partisan and guerrilla forces on Chinese soil. The main theater of action was
in Tibet, which was historically controlled by China but which  had slipped
away during the years of anarchy. The PRC reoccupied and annexed the terri-
tory in 1950–1951. The CIA supported uprisings and armed guerrilla
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  81

movements, as a means of ensuring that Chinese forces were enmired in a

domestic quagmire. A large-scale popular rising broke out in 1959, causing
thousands of deaths. The event provoked the flight of the Dalai Lama—Tibet’s
spiritual leader and national figurehead—to India.

Asian Confrontations
The Communist triumph in China offered a powerful stimulus to revolution-
ary movements throughout the region, which duly alarmed the US. Communists
led or influenced the anti-colonial revolutions that emerged in the post-war
years. The US ruled the Philippines until 1946 and retained a strong influence
in the country thereafter. During the Second World War, left-wing peasant
guerrillas organized to fight the Japanese occupation, forming the Hukbalahap
(Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or the Nation’s Army Against the Japanese).
Some “Huks” continued their activities against the post-war Philippine gov-
ernment. In 1950, they formed a People’s Liberation Army, a name that paid
direct tribute to Mao’s forces. The US strongly supported the government,
which substantially defeated the rebels by 1954. Apart from securing the
Philippines in the US cause, the revolt powerfully influenced the US response
to the challenge it would shortly face in Indo-China. US successes against the
Huks convinced Americans that they stood an excellent chance of defeating
Communist insurgencies elsewhere in the region. In 1952, the US Army
formed its elite Special Forces, which would lead many such campaigns.
The US also gained hope from the outcome of the struggle in the resource-­
rich British colony of Malaya. In 1948, Communist forces began a guerrilla
insurrection under its leader, Chin Peng, and drawing chiefly on the ethnic
Chinese population. The resulting struggle lasted until 1960 and was techni-
cally referred to as an “emergency” so that local firms would not lose their
insurance coverage, which they would in the event of an actual war. But war or
emergency, severe fighting lasted until the British won their counter-insurgency
campaign. They successfully used tactics that would later become famous in
Vietnam, including search and destroy sweeps against guerrillas, and “hearts
and minds” campaigns to secure local loyalties. Also, the British grant of inde-
pendence in 1957 undermined nationalist demands.
The other great source of Western concern, and Communist hopes, was
Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies. The country was formed in a sweep-
ing nationalist revolution against Dutch authorities in the 1940s, and it was
one of the most populous in Asia, with 88 million citizens in 1960, half the size
of the US itself. It was already the world’s largest Muslim nation and was des-
tined to be a regional powerhouse. As often happened in these years, the coun-
try’s charismatic leader in its struggle for independence remained to lead the
new nation and became dictatorial. From 1945, Indonesia’s leader was Sukarno
(known only by a single name). After experimenting with democracy, in 1959
he established a dictatorship and swung to the radical left. He allied with the
Communist Party of Indonesia, or PKI, which at the time was the world’s
82  P. JENKINS

largest Communist party in a non-Communist nation. As an aspiring leader of

the anti-imperialist world, he began a military campaign against the new neigh-
boring state of Malaysia, which was formed under British supervision in 1963.
British and Australian forces resisted the Indonesians forcefully in a series of
jungle battles known as the Confrontation.
The Americans feared the potential rise of a new Mao, and the CIA encour-
aged opposition within the country’s military. An abortive coup in September
1965 aroused fears of a Communist takeover. This led to a far-reaching reac-
tion by the military, together with rightist and Islamic groups, with American
support and coordination. In 1965–1966, the new regime supervised the anni-
hilation of the PKI, resulting in at least half a million deaths. Extending into
every town and village, the slaughter wiped out not just Communists but sym-
pathizers and fellow travelers, and many innocent bystanders. It was deeply
dangerous even to possess an identity card that did not show some religious
affiliation. In geopolitical terms, the outcome was an enormous victory for the
West, but the cost was horrific.

Indo-China
Indo-China offered the most enduring setting for East-West rivalry. In 1945, a
gravely weakened France resumed control of its imperial realm in the territo-
ries, but it faced determined resistance from the Communist-led Viet Minh
movement. This had been founded to resist Japanese occupation in 1941, and
throughout the war, it received support from both the US and the
ROC. Although not explicitly Communist, the organization was de facto con-
trolled by the Communist Party of Vietnam, and its key leaders were the
Communists Ho Chi Minh, and the military commander Vo Nguyen Giap.
After some negotiation with the French, full-scale war began in 1946.
At first, the Viet Minh fought a widespread guerrilla war against the French,
but in 1949 this expanded into a larger conflict involving conventional weap-
ons and tactics. The Soviets and Chinese supplied aid to the Viet Minh, and the
Americans gave support and equipment to the French. Local conditions placed
severe limits on the usefulness of American military largesse. Vietnam offered a
poor setting for tanks and armored warfare, and the cover offered by the jungle
setting made air attacks and supply difficult. By 1950, the French were contem-
plating the prospect of defeat, but they recovered to win some victories, press-
ing Viet Minh forces into narrow bastions and crushing them. General Giap
however proved a strong opponent, using tactics highly appropriate for the
terrain, including skilled artillery use, and deploying heavy anti-aircraft batter-
ies. The Viet Minh followed Mao Zedong in drawing on mass popular support,
especially among the peasantry.
By early 1954, the Viet Minh controlled most of the territory of what would
later become North Vietnam and the northern portions of the later South.
French military hopes were then concentrated on a fortified base at Dien Bien
Phu, deep in Communist-controlled territory, which would rely on air supply.
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  83

The Viet Minh severed supply routes and besieged the base, making conditions
impossible for the defenders. The desperate French appealed for US aid, and
the US devised drastic schemes to rescue the garrison, variously involving B-29
bombing raids from the Philippines or raids from the Seventh Fleet, and the
use of nuclear weapons was considered. This Operation Vulture was however
rejected by President Eisenhower, partly because of the British refusal to sup-
port intervention. The French garrison faced a humiliating surrender in May
1954. Other fighting continued for some months, but the war was effectively
ended, at a cost of perhaps half a million dead or missing on both sides, in addi-
tion to several hundred thousand civilians. Even before formal US interven-
tion, this First Indo-China War had already claimed close to perhaps
800,000 lives.
The Viet Minh had reasonable expectations that they would take control of
the whole region. The international conference held at Geneva recognized the
17th parallel as a temporary and provisional demarcation line between the
Communist North and the non-Communist South. Over the following
months, the conference moved toward approving the unification of the two
parts following elections, but the US and the Soviets disagreed about the exact
mechanisms. Meanwhile, the anti-Communist South was consolidating as a
state, initially under the leadership of the Emperor, Bao Dai, and then under
his Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1955, Diem became president of a
new Republic of Vietnam, which confronted the Northern Democratic
Republic of Vietnam, or DRV. That division violated the spirit of the Geneva
accords and left the North Vietnamese with good legal grounds for their anger.
Beyond the obvious reasons for opposing Communist rule, anti-Communist
elites were often Catholic in addition to being strongly Westernized, and the
religious element added to the conflict and the militancy. Following the depar-
ture of the French, the US became a critical supporter of South Vietnam.

Creating a New War

On the Communist side, many southern Viet Minh relocated to the North,
where they trained and mobilized for a new war. Those who remained in the
South were reactivated in 1955. Communist armed resistance in South Vietnam
began in 1959 when two US advisers were killed. By 1960, Communist insur-
gency in the South was organized under a new National Liberation Front, Viet
Cong, with its military forces, the Liberation Army of South Vietnam. Between
1960 and 1963, Communist resistance in the South grew massively, supported
by tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers. Meanwhile, North
Vietnamese forces invaded Laos to establish a supply route that became known
as the Ho Chi Minh trail. From 1960, Laos fell into a civil war between forces
loyal to the royal government and the Communist Pathet Lao, who were heav-
ily supported by North Vietnam.
From the US perspective, the growing violence in South Vietnam was part
of a coordinated Communist effort, ultimately directed from Moscow and
84  P. JENKINS

Beijing, through their North Vietnamese allies. The North Vietnamese them-
selves frequently stressed the independence of Southern forces and the Viet
Cong, in order to avoid charges that they were violating the Geneva Accords.
In fact, North Vietnamese directed those activities throughout, and the direct
role of the North Vietnam Army (NVA) grew steadily after direct US interven-
tion weakened the Southern guerrilla. As in Korea, the Soviets and Chinese
offered massive aid to the DRV. That included Chinese military personnel to
support air defense. Beyond the obvious incentive to exploit a weak point in
the anti-Communist world, the two Communist powers were competing for
influence at a time when relations between them were becoming openly hos-
tile. Mao himself pushed hard for aggressive action in the region.
Yet North Vietnam was never a mere puppet of either China or the Soviets,
and the country’s rigid Communist ideology was always combined with a
potent strand of nationalism and national independence. That did not make
the country any less Communist, or anything like the neutralist and purely
nationalist cause of which some Western observers dreamed, with all the poten-
tial that might offer for drawing all Vietnam’s factions into a genuine national
coalition. But the country was fighting a local war on what it regarded as its
own territory.
The question of intention had far-reaching policy effects, notably in shaping
US understanding of the issue at stake in the war. If, in fact, the pressure in
South Vietnam was part of a systematic Communist strategy, then Western
defeat there would immediately be followed by new efforts against other coun-
tries: perhaps Japan or India would be the next dominoes to fall. But if North
Vietnam was indeed an independent actor, then Communist ambitions would
stop at control of the whole country, and perhaps Laos and Cambodia. At the
same time, the global conspiracy approach misled the US into assuming that
placing pressure on Moscow would automatically limit Communist advances in
South Vietnam. That view became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The harder the
pressure the US placed on North Vietnam, the more that country would be
forced to depend on its Soviet and Chinese mentors and guardians.

America’s Vietnam War

The scale and seriousness of the threat alarmed the incoming presidential
administration of John F. Kennedy, whose earlier Congressional career had
been grounded in forthright anti-Communism. In 1960, his election campaign
had stressed his willingness to confront Communist even more resolutely, and
more efficiently, than his predecessors. His brief administration witnessed acute
tension with the Soviets, which we will discuss in Chap. 7. In Vietnam, Kennedy
decided to show implacable US determination, moving the war into a critical
new phase. At the same time, the Cuban missile crisis warned all Cold War
participants about the dangers of crossing the nuclear threshold.
The US role in the war began a steep escalation. The number of advisers in
the country grew from a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963 and 23,000 by
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  85

1964. Politically, the South Vietnamese regime was descending into chaos, in
the face not just of the Communist insurgency, but of religious tensions
between Catholics and Buddhists. The South Vietnamese military (the Army
of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN) showed itself unwilling or unable to
meet the challenges, demanding an ever greater role for direct US military
involvement. Kennedy placed special hopes in Special Forces units of the kind
originally designed to resist Soviet advances in Europe, but which seemed to
offer good potential for the ongoing guerrilla conflict in Vietnam. In November
1963, the Diem regime was removed in a military coup in which Diem himself
was killed. The exact role of the US in the affair is still debated, although the
CIA probably did not foresee Diem’s death. Regardless of the circumstances,
the coup left the new government still more dependent on US aid and
assistance.
President Kennedy’s assassination a few weeks later changed little in prac-
tice, despite some suggestions that in his last days he was growing nervous with
the involvement. Politically, he could not afford to be known as the president
who lost Indo-China. The incoming president, Lyndon B Johnson, was no less
determined to defend South Vietnam. That August, two US warships in the
Gulf of Tonkin reported attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, although
these reports were misleading. Nevertheless, the Johnson administration per-
suaded Congress to support the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allowed the
US “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces
of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”1 Only two US senators
voted against what became a political blank check for US escalation in what
Americans call the Vietnam War and which the Vietnamese themselves would
recall as the Resistance War Against America. Vietnam became the central front
in the Cold War, which became the setting for very hot, and overt, conflict.
Direct US involvement reached its height between 1965 and 1969. One
symbolic moment occurred in March 1965, with the arrival of 3500 Marines at
Da Nang, beginning the US ground war. The number of US troops in the
country reached 400,000 in 1966, half a million by 1967, and still remained at
330,000 in 1970, even after withdrawal had begun. The US invested hugely in
the war effort, which cost US$140  billion from 1961 through 1975—
approaching a trillion in modern dollar terms. US strategy relied on total con-
trol of the air, and the ability to move troops rapidly into combat zones. The
US built vast facilities such as the Da Nang base, which at its height was the
hub of more intense air traffic than any other airport or base in the world. The
port at Cam Ranh Bay became a critical center for the US supply and logistics
system. US military fatalities give some idea of the escalation in US
involvement. Fewer than 2000 perished in 1965 and 6000  in 1966. The
figures were 11,000 in 1967, 17,000 in 1968, and 12,000 in 1969 (all figures
rounded).

1
 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=
3&psid=4088.
86  P. JENKINS

Johnson was bitterly disappointed by the refusal of European nations to

offer even token support: British refusal was especially galling, but the coun-
try’s economic situation made any such adventures all but impossible. In
January 1968, indeed, the British government announced the end of any mili-
tary operations east of Suez, including South or Southeast Asia, in what histo-
rians have called the symbolic end of the British Empire. The US found some
foreign support. A total of 300,000 South Korean soldiers served during the
war, as well as over 50,000 from Australia and New Zealand, and contingents
from the Philippines and Thailand. But unlike in Korea, there was never any
doubt that this was an American war, with all the consequences for Western
unity and harmony.
Although popular stereotypes of the conflict portray a guerrilla war, with
small bands ambushing regular US forces, much of the fighting took a very
conventional character with armor and artillery, albeit in a jungle setting. The
key Communist combatants were NVA rather than Viet Cong. This was sug-
gested by pitched battles like Ia Drang (1965), which cost the lives of 240
Americans and over a thousand North Vietnamese. But irregular units mat-
tered immensely in maintaining control of villages and urban areas and rein-
forcing mass popular support in the south. That presented rich opportunities
for intelligence gathering, as well as sabotage operations. The US struggled to
root out the potent Communist infrastructure at local and village level as an
essential step in reducing guerrilla attacks. From 1965, these operations were
formalized as the Phoenix Program, building closely on the precedents estab-
lished in the Philippines. Undertaken by the CIA, in conjunction with the
South Vietnamese and Australians, the Phoenix Program targeted local
Communist operatives, ultimately killing 26,000 and neutralizing a further
50,000 people. Phoenix sought to build American intelligence networks while
eradicating those of the enemy. The program was much criticized for its use of
torture and assassination.

Air Wars
Communist forces in the South were constantly supplied by the Ho Chi Minh
trail and from bases in North Vietnam. This posed critical dangers for the US,
which was initially reluctant to launch direct attacks on a nation that was
directly allied to the USSR and China. In February 1965, President Johnson
initiated direct raids on the North in Operation Rolling Thunder, beginning a
three-year campaign in which the US dropped 643,000 tons of bombs. North
Vietnamese defenses rapidly improved with the growth of anti-aircraft batteries
and surface-to-air missiles and Soviet-made interceptor fighters. By 1967, a
sustained air war was raging over North Vietnam, in which the US would in all
lose over 900 aircraft. Throughout the war, the US faced the recurrent dilemma
of just how far it could feasibly extend air attacks to defeat the enemy war effort
without igniting a major power conflict. Attacks on Haiphong and other har-
bors through which supplies were imported might accidentally strike Soviet or
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  87

Chinese ships or personnel, raising the risk of direct confrontation. They were
right to be nervous In the Fall of 1965, the Soviet General Staff recommended
responding to Johnson’s bombing by a military demonstration against West
Berlin. (Civilian authorities dismissed the idea in horror.)
Regardless of its military effectiveness, the bombing campaign was a won-
derful gift to anti-war activism, not least in providing memorable visual images
of bombs and bombers. Such themes had a special impact in countries that had
themselves such dreadful memories of air attacks against cities in the Second
World War, both in Europe and Japan. The air campaign produced a crop of
American prisoners of war, whose fate became central to negotiations. But even
if North Vietnam itself was targeted, that still did not stem the flow of supplies
along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which were located in the independent nations of
Cambodia and Laos. Not until 1970 did US forces move directly against
Cambodia, with a smaller venture against Laos the following year.
In sharp contrast to the Korean War, the US faced intense anti-war activism
over its involvement in Vietnam. Anti-war movements flourished without the
harsh restraints they might have known in earlier years and gained mass appeal
at a time when the war was fought by military conscripts. Protesters targeted
the draft system, and many men burned draft cards. Public protests and dem-
onstrations regularly attracted tens of thousands in mid-decade, swelling into
the hundreds of thousands by 1969. As we will see, the movement inspired
mass anti-war and anti-American sentiment around the world.

The Meanings of Vietnam

The Vietnam experience proved immensely damaging for the US both at home
and abroad. But the war also created new schisms in global Communism, and
it reshaped Cold War alignments. As we have seen, Mao Zedong had for some
years been in bitter controversy with reformists whom he regarded as bureau-
cratic counter-revolutionaries who followed Soviet examples. Mao’s zeal to
protect authentic popular revolution was greatly fueled by the prospect that the
Vietnam War might spill over into China itself. In 1966, he launched a mass
movement of students and young workers to challenge and overthrow all
bureaucratic structures within the government and Party, the Cultural
Revolution. Some two million perished in the ensuing domestic struggles,
more than in the Vietnam War itself. This hyper-radical eruption, with its near
deification of Mao himself, kept the country in chaos for the next decade and
poisoned relations with the Soviets. By 1969, the two countries engaged in a
brief armed conflict, and the Soviets were contemplating a pre-emptive nuclear
strike on China and on the country’s incipient nuclear program.
The Vietnam experience transformed attitudes on the left, with its apparent
demonstration of a people’s victory against a hated superpower. If the role
played by guerrillas or irregular forces in Communist successes was actually
limited, the vision of spontaneous popular resistance—of People’s
88  P. JENKINS

War—proved very appealing in inspiring activists worldwide, from Europe to

the Middle East to Latin America. Cuba’s revolutionary hero Che Guevara
urged weakening the West by a series of revolutionary wars, or as he wrote in
1967, “Create two, three…many Vietnams, that is the watchword.”2 The
Vietnam War spurred new forms of leftist and anti-Western militancy which
might wander far from the mainstream orthodoxies of Communist Parties. If
Vietnam represented a triumph for “international Communism,” it was not
obvious what that term might describe.

Further Reading

For the long-term context of the various Cold War crises in Asia, see Michael
H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from
the Philippines to Vietnam (2012); and Victor D. Cha, Powerplay: The Origins
of the American Alliance System in Asia (2016); Colleen Woods, Freedom
Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of
Decolonization (2020).
The emergence of China’s Communist state is described in Frank Dikötter, The
Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957 (2013)
and see also Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History,
1962–1976 (2016). See also Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down:
A history History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Translated and edited
by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (2021). For the US response to the Chinese
revolution, see Kevin Peraino, A Force so Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth
of Modern China, 1949 (2017). Julia Lovell discusses Maoism: A Global
History (2019), and Lorenz M. Lüthi traces The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War
in the Communist World (2008). For global aspects of that schism, see
Jeremy S. Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the
Third World (2015). For the US role in Tibet, see Bruce Riedel, JFK’s
Forgotten Crisis (2015).
Bruce Cumings is the author of The Korean War (2010), and also see
Charles J. Hanley, Ghost Flames (2020). H. W. Brands describes the 1951
crisis in that conflict in The General v. the President: MacArthur and
Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War (2016). Samuel F. Wells Jr. examines
the war’s wider impact in Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the
Cold War (2020).
For Eisenhower and the successive Asian crises, see Jim Newton, Eisenhower:
The White House Years (2011); and William I.  Hitchcock, The Age of
Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (2018).

2
 Quoted in “Guevara: ‘Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,’” The Militant October 14, 1996,
at https://www.themilitant.com/1996/6036/6036_33.html.
 5  ASIAN THEATERS  89

For the religious theme in US attitudes to Asia, see for instance Seth Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and
U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (2004).
The Indo-China War is the subject of Ted Morgan, Valley of Death: The Tragedy
at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War (2010); Fredrik
Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s
Vietnam (2012); and Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War,
1954–1965 (2013). For the American phase of the Vietnam War, see Lien-­
Hang T.  Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for
Peace in Vietnam (2012); Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy,
1945–1975 (2018); and Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale
and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (2018).
 CHAPTER 6

Decolonization and Third World Struggles

Edward Lansdale was a long-serving US military officer who played a pivotal

role in multiple confrontations with Communism. A veteran of the wartime
OSS, he helped the Philippine government defeat the Communist insurgency
in that nation, always stressing the need to understand the world-view of an
enemy drawn largely from the peasantry. He had thoroughly absorbed the
insights of Mao Zedong about People’s War. Lansdale duly emphasized the
vital role of psychological warfare, or PSYOPS, and propaganda. He served as
a principal adviser to the new anti-Communist government in South Vietnam,
preparing the country to fight irregular warfare. In 1958, Lansdale became a
thinly disguised character in the explosive political novel The Ugly American,
by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, a damning and widely read portrait
of early US efforts and errors in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, Lansdale coor-
dinated efforts to depose Fidel Castro’s incipient Communist regime in Cuba,
before returning to Vietnam, where he presided over the Phoenix Program.
Lansdale exemplifies many aspects of the Cold War story, but so much of
his career did not involve war in any traditional sense. It was covert and clan-
destine, and as such often lends itself to controversy or misunderstanding. He
features regularly (and inaccurately) in conspiracy theories as a mastermind of
the supposed CIA plot that assassinated President Kennedy. Nor did
Lansdale’s wars necessarily involve actual fighting by US soldiers: ideally, the
US advised local forces. Most telling is the setting for his deeds, which
occurred not on the original military front lines in Europe, but in Asia and
Latin America. The Third World—what in the 1980s would come to be
called the Global South—became the setting for some of the bloodiest con-
frontations of the Cold War.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 91

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_6
92  P. JENKINS

In his 1958 novel Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene observed, “If a
country is surrounded, as Russia is, it will try to punch a hole through from
inside.” On multiple occasions, the Soviets did indeed succeed in overcoming
that encirclement, to acquire a potent global role.1

Europe’s Decline
In 1945, European powers still ruled most of Africa and Asia, but that domi-
nance had largely evaporated by 1965. Of itself, that tectonic change had very
little to do with the Cold War, or with rivalries between the new superpowers.
Initially, there were hopes that the emerging nations might somehow  escape
from that global polarization and achieve real non-alignment. In 1952, French
demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term “Third World” for those nations,
which would be neither Communist nor capitalist. In 1955, a conference held
at Bandung in Indonesia brought together the new and very populous states in
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, raising hopes of a global power bloc. But in
the circumstances of the 1950s, visions of neutralism were difficult to maintain,
as each superpower sought to extend its power and influence to counter-act that
of its rival. The governments of India, China, and Indonesia all aspired to lead
such an emerging world, but China was firmly committed to the Soviet alliance,
and Communist influence would grow in Indonesia over the next decade.
India, too, was very friendly to the Soviets. In that instance, the relationship
was in no sense subservient: India was stable and democratic and was able to
accept friendly overtures without compromising its integrity. India gravitated
to the Soviet Union without forfeiting either its neutral stance, or its close
relationship with other Western powers, especially Britain, and that in turn
allowed the country to serve as an easy diplomatic conduit between rival pow-
ers. Khrushchev strongly cultivated India, declaring support for its positions in
its rivalry with Pakistan. The Soviets actually gave India more aid and support
than they did to China. In 1961, India was allowed the full rights and technol-
ogy needed to build MiG-21 fighters, a privilege that the Soviets had refused
to Mao. The Soviet-Indian relationship became even closer as the Sino-Soviet
schism became overt. This friendship was important during India’s frequent
clashes with Pakistan, which aligned with the US, and also with China. Tensions
reached a climax in 1971 when Pakistan tried to suppress the independence
movement in its eastern province, which became Bangladesh. Indian military
victory over Pakistan was a vital proxy success for Moscow, which discomfited
both the Chinese and the Americans.
But other emerging countries were far weaker and less stable than India,
opening a rich potential field for superpower manipulation and competition. In
1946, George Kennan had drawn attention to Soviet actions to remove or
discredit Western forces, creating a vacuum into which they themselves
could expand.

1
 Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (London: Heinemann, 1958), 188.
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  93

On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken power and
influence of Western Powers [on] colonial backward, or dependent peoples. On
this level, no holds will be barred. Mistakes and weaknesses of western colonial
administration will be mercilessly exposed and exploited. Liberal opinion in
Western countries will be mobilized to weaken colonial policies. Resentment
among dependent peoples will be stimulated. And while latter are being encour-
aged to seek independence of Western Powers, Soviet dominated puppet political
machines will be undergoing preparation to take over domestic power in respec-
tive colonial areas when independence is achieved.2

That offered a good sketch of Soviet ambitions in many regions over the
next quarter century. Of course, the US would be just as adept in the arts of
subversion and the control of Third World puppets. So were Britain and France.
Struggles and revolutions within the emerging world often raised the ques-
tion of ideological conflict. Sometimes, that content was unambiguous. The
revolutionary movement in Malaya was openly directed by the Communist
Party and fought by the Party’s military wing. In other situations, Communists
might play a far more limited role, making the nature of the conflict more con-
troversial. Such circumstances offered the opportunity for right-wing forces to
portray their enemies as Communist-directed and Communist-inspired, with
the goal of discrediting them. That question would long agonize interpreta-
tions of revolutionary movements around the Global South. It served to dis-
credit new anti-colonial regimes when they could be successfully stigmatized as
tools of Moscow.

The Middle East

The Middle East became an enduring theater for East-West rivalry. The post-­
war global economy was built on cheap and abundant sources of oil, which
placed a special premium on the security of that region. Since before the First
World War, the major powers had understood the need to control those
resources, or at least to prevent them from falling into hostile hands. By 1945,
the US and Britain dominated most of the region, with the French struggling
to recover their influence. Generally, Western powers operated in alliance with
sympathetic local regimes, usually conservative monarchies, and received
extremely favorable terms for their investments.
An early attempt to shift the balance to supplier nations occurred in Iran,
where in 1951 the ruling monarch, the Shah, was persuaded to appoint
Mohammad Mosaddegh as his Prime Minister. Mosaddegh took the then-­
unthinkable step of nationalizing the country’s oil industry, which was con-
trolled by Anglo-Iranian oil, the later British Petroleum, or BP.  The British
initially failed to win US support to overthrow Mosaddegh, but attitudes
changed with the inauguration of President Eisenhower in 1953. Eisenhower’s

2
 “Telegram: The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State,” February 22,
1946, at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm.
94  P. JENKINS

Secretary of State was the hawkish John Foster Dulles, whose brother Allen
Dulles headed the CIA. Eisenhower himself was committed to covert opera-
tions as part of his wider “New Look” in defense policy.
This new establishment was very open to charges that Mosaddegh was no
mere patriot, rather a secret ally of the USSR, who was strongly supported by
Iran’s Communist Party, the Tudeh. His government included one open
Tudeh member. British and US intelligence agencies combined to destabilize
Mosaddegh, organizing mass protests, and mobilizing Islamic leaders and the
military. As Mosaddegh struggled to hold his position, he confirmed every sug-
gestion that he was a ruthless dictator in waiting. The Shah successfully dis-
missed Mosaddegh, destroying his reform efforts: Mosaddegh faced lengthy
imprisonment. The Shah meanwhile built a new authoritarian regime strongly
committed to the West. In 1955, Iran was incorporated into the British-led
Baghdad Pact or Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) which integrated
Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan into an anti-Soviet front. The departure of Iraq
from CENTO in 1959 left the grouping as an alliance of the leading non-Arab
Muslim powers.
The coup against Mosaddegh left a long record of grievance in Iran itself. It
also established a potent theme in leftist propaganda worldwide, suggesting
that any attempt to resist Western dominance—whether formal or informal—
would result in a regime being misleadingly depicted as Communist, and over-
thrown by Western plotting. Allegations of CIA plots found a villainous human
face in the form of Allen Dulles.

Arab Nationalism
During the 1950s, the rise of Arab nationalism provided the Soviets some criti-
cal bastions in the region. From the Western perspective, that was so critical
because it offered the possibility of the Soviets subverting or invading oil-rich
nations, especially in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf. Although neither super-
power launched major military interventions in the region, both sides were
deeply involved in clandestine activities, in influencing opinion, supporting dis-
sidents, and on occasion sponsoring military coups. Ultimately, the West main-
tained its position in the Arabian Peninsula itself, but the Soviets secured
impressive victories.
Religion offered an essential context here. Across the region, Islam was the
predominant faith, and in most nations, in its Sunni form. Muslim clergy
tended to be highly conservative, anti-Communist, and traditional-minded.
But progressive and anti-imperial forces were rising, including Communists in
some nations, alongside nationalist and pan-Arab movements. In the
mid-­1950s, both Britain and France were deeply concerned about the rising
power of Arab nationalism, which at that stage was quite distinct from religious
or Islamic themes. From 1954, the French were engaged in a prolonged war
against nationalists in Algeria, while the British were alarmed at the influence
of Egypt’s radical nationalists, led by the country’s new leader Gamal Abdul
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  95

Nasser. Egypt was so important because it was the most populous Arab state,
with enormous cultural influence. Nasser supported the guerrillas in Algeria,
and in 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal, the traditional main artery of the
British empire. Britain and France attempted to destroy Nasser’s regime, fol-
lowing a policy that they had often employed in earlier eras. But the venture
proved disastrous and helped bring Arab politics into the Cold War era.
In 1956, Britain and France arranged what seemed like a perfect arrange-
ment, by which Israel would engage Egypt in war, allowing the two European
powers to intervene militarily to establish peace. That would restore control of
the Suez Canal, and discredit Arab nationalism. The scheme proved a historic
fiasco, as the Soviets threatened a nuclear attack on Britain and France. But the
Americans were no more sympathetic to attempts to restore European imperi-
alism. President Eisenhower condemned the action and threatened to use ruin-
ous financial pressure against the allies. The European powers withdrew, in a
humiliation that marked the end of the British Empire as an independent global
power. Henceforward, British dependence on US military and financial might
was laid bare.

Syria and Iraq
The failure of the Suez venture gave an enormous propaganda boost to Nasser
and to  secular nationalism across the Arab Middle East. Other rising move-
ments included the Arab Ba’ath (Renaissance) Party, which established roots in
the former French and British possessions of Syria and Iraq. Although these
groups were not Communist, and sometimes engaged in bitter rivalries with
Communist parties, they were socialist and favored strongly secularist
approaches. As such, they won the support of religious minorities who had
everything to fear from conservative Islam: Christians supplied some of the
most potent manifestos of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism and were promi-
nent in founding the Ba’ath Party. Further driving militancy was the confronta-
tion between the Arab states and Israel, which nationalists regarded as an arm
of Western imperialism. The Soviet bloc had initially supported the state of
Israel against its British overlords, but by the late 1950s, Soviet interests in the
region were decisively aligned with Arab powers, and with secular Arab
nationalism.
Syria was an early Soviet ally. In 1949, the country experienced a military
coup, the first of many in the region. After a disastrous war with Israel in 1956,
the country became increasingly aligned with the Soviet Union and favored
socialist and nationalist policies. This provoked President Eisenhower to pro-
claim a new Doctrine, which allowed the use of US forces in countries threat-
ened by international Communism, with an obvious focus on Middle Eastern
circumstances. In 1957, Syria’s pro-Soviet drift sparked international rivalry
when Jordan and Lebanon discussed intervention, and Turkey massed troops
along the Syrian borders. The Soviets responded by threatening Turkey with
nuclear attack. Under US pressure, Turkey stood down its forces, ending the
96  P. JENKINS

immediate standoff, and by common consent, giving Moscow a diplomatic vic-

tory. But fears of Soviet influence had brought US troops elsewhere in the
region. In 1958, the (Christian) President of Lebanon was opposed to Soviet
influence and favored the Baghdad Pact, sparking a civil war with the country’s
Muslim population. He appealed to the US, who dispatched Marines to Beirut
as part of Operation Blue Bat. Within a few months, the nation’s situation
stabilized, and it remained Western-oriented.
But Syria continued to challenge Western dominance. Syria and Egypt
shared a common resentment of the Baghdad Pact, which violated cherished
dreams of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. In 1958, the two countries
merged to found the United Arab Republic, briefly fulfilling a pan-Arab dream.
In 1963, a Syrian coup led by Ba’athists gave power to a regime that was
increasingly radical, nationalist, secular, and Soviet-aligned, and a 1966 coup
moved the Ba’ath still further in Marxist directions. From 1970, Syria was
ruled by Hafez al-Assad, whose family rules to this day.
Still more central to Western concerns was Iraq, which unlike Syria was a key
oil producer. The British had placed their regional hopes on the two dynasti-
cally linked monarchies of Jordan and Iraq, but in 1958 Iraq’s king was
removed by a military coup organized by Nasserite army officers. The coun-
try’s new leader was Abd al-Karim Qasim, who turned increasingly to the
country’s Communist Party to secure himself against rival factions. Qasim was
the target of many plots and assassination conspiracies by the CIA and other
groups. (The later Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein made his reputation as a
Ba’athist militant in these struggles.) In this instance, the Ba’athists strongly
opposed the Communists, and in 1963, Qasim fell victim to a Ba’athist coup.
That was followed by a sweeping massacre of Communist members and cadres.
The Soviets meanwhile tried to destabilize the new regime. Following years of
confused infighting, the Ba’ath Party retook power in 1968 and became
steadily more pro-Soviet. In 1972, the new leader, Saddam Hussein, signed a
friendship treaty with the USSR, and the two countries remained close through
the remaining years of the Cold War.

The Growth of Soviet Influence

Elsewhere too, Nasserist and nationalist forces confronted the West and the
conservative states they sponsored. Between 1962 and 1968, Nasser inter-
vened heavily, and disastrously, in a civil war in North Yemen, and supported
guerrilla opposition to the British occupation of South Yemen. That latter
effort succeeded, creating a new and avowedly Communist People’s Democratic
Republic of Yemen. Nationalist and Communist forces made important
advances in the Dhofar region of Oman, a strategically crucial region of the
Arab Gulf. From 1970 through 1976, the British undertook a major (if little
publicized) counter-insurgency campaign, which thoroughly crushed the
rebellion.
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  97

Nasser aligned himself closely with the USSR, receiving the prized award
“Hero of the Soviet Union” when Khrushchev visited Egypt in 1964. The
Soviets armed and supported Egypt against Israel and stood to gain regardless
of the military outcome. If Israel was defeated, that would be a huge setback
for the West, but even if the Arab states were defeated (as they were in 1956,
1967, and 1973), the more they would have to rely on Soviet aid and assis-
tance. In 1967, Soviet misinformation about an allegedly upcoming Israeli
attack on Syria provoked a new military escalation. Egypt and Syria prepared to
attack Israel, with the reluctant support of Jordan. The outcome demanded a
whole new vocabulary of disaster. In the Six-Day War that June, Israel compre-
hensively smashed its adversaries, eliminating most of their air power within
hours. Thereafter, Egypt’s East Bloc orientation became even closer, with
Soviet aircraft and missiles directly active against Israeli forces in an undeclared
war of attrition that persisted into 1971. Fearing excessive Soviet influence and
even control, Egypt’s new president Anwar Sadat ordered Soviet military per-
sonnel to leave the country in 1972.
In 1969, a familiar pattern reasserted itself when a Nasser-inspired army
officer named Muammar Qaddafi overthrew the conservative monarch of an
oil-rich state, namely Libya. By the 1970s, the Soviets could count on an influ-
ential network of key allies in the region, including Saddam Hussein, Hafez al
Assad, and Qaddafi, besides the radical regimes in Algeria and South Yemen.
Also valuable were the Palestinian guerrilla movements formed to resist the
state of Israel, which were organized in the Palestinian Liberation Organization,
or the PLO.  Over and above the political influence, these allies provided a
greedy market for Soviet sales of weapons and particularly aircraft, which by the
1970s ran into the tens of billions of dollars. Major clients included Iraq, Syria,
Yemen, Libya, and Algeria.
From a modern perspective, one obvious point about these struggles is the
role of religion, and how little coverage Islam received at the time. In light of
modern-day conflicts, it is striking to recall a time when the US and Britain
found their most dependable allies in conservative Islam. The West allied con-
sistently with Islamic clergy and movements in Iran and Indonesia, where they
offered by far the best-organized counterweights to Communism. The
Americans favored some very militant and politicized Islamist groups, such as
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA strongly sup-
ported the activities of Said Ramadan, son of the movement’s founder, who
expanded Brotherhood influence over mosques and Islamic institutions in
Europe and elsewhere. Another key Brotherhood figure was Sayyid Qutb,
notorious today as an ideological inspiration for radical Islamists like al-Qaeda.
But in the Cold War years, he was clearly the enemy of the West’s enemies. In
the 1950s, he was involved in attempts to assassinate Nasser, whose regime
hanged him in 1966. At that point, East-West alignments absolutely trumped
any possible religious divisions.
98  P. JENKINS

African Crises
From the mid-1950s, Africa became the center of the decolonization move-
ment, and the US found itself intervening in regions in which the country had
hitherto had  little interest. In 1957, the British grant of independence to
Ghana began a new wave of imperial withdrawal, which among other things
created the new state of Nigeria in 1960. In the same year, British Prime
Minister Harold MacMillan spoke of the “wind of change” sweeping the con-
tinent, and in most areas, the transitions were initially peaceful.
In 1960, the Belgians relinquished control of their vast and badly misgov-
erned colony of the Congo, where European rulers had done virtually nothing
to prepare a native leadership to succeed them. Popular insurrections led to
civil wars, with extensive violence against civilians. Belgian and other Western
mining interests sponsored the secession of the resource-rich province of
Katanga, under the leadership of Moise Tshombe. Desperate to end the seces-
sion, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba requested aid from the
Soviet Union, which (had it been forthcoming) would have represented a dra-
matic extension of Soviet influence in the region. Khrushchev responded
enthusiastically to Lumumba’s overtures. For the Belgians and the US,
Lumumba was a Soviet tool, and the CIA developed plots to assassinate him,
perhaps by poison. In September 1960, with US support, General Joseph
Mobutu undertook a coup d’etat, leading to Lumumba’s arrest. He was
handed over to the Katangans, who executed him in January 1961, making
him into a martyr for the worldwide left and for African nationalism. Also in
1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold perished in an air crash in
Congo, in circumstances that remain murky. Contemporary Western sources
suggested a KGB assassination, but more recent findings point the finger at
Western financial interests and intelligence agencies.
For some years, the Congo remained highly unstable, and pro-Lumumba
forces remained active as the Simbas (Lions). A rebellion in 1964–1965 gave
the Simbas control of much of the country until they were suppressed with US
and Belgian assistance and heavy CIA involvement. As we will see, the then-­
Communist Cubans intervened on the Simba side. For a few years, there was
every prospect that Central Africa rather than Southeast Asia would be the vital
emerging battlefront between East and West.
The question of determining Communist involvement in an internal revolu-
tion became critical in the wealthy nation of South Africa, which since 1948
had been under the aggressively White supremacist rule of the Nationalist
Party. The government introduced a repressive and discriminatory system of
race-based rule, called apartheid, or separateness. The reasons for resenting
such a system were obvious, and black African resistance coalesced in an African
National Congress (ANC). The South African Communist Party supported
opposition to the regime and in the 1950s exercised a strong influence on the
ANC.  Leading ANC members were themselves Communists, including the
later legendary Nelson Mandela. To that extent, the South African government
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  99

was correct in stating that its enemies were Communists, or Communist-­

sponsored, although such a statement was unjust in removing the opposition’s
political legitimacy. The government pursued its ruthless suppression of the
opposition through the sweeping powers granted by the 1950 Suppression of
Communism Act, a title that had a natural appeal to US authorities.
In 1960, rapid decolonization excited nationalist hopes across the conti-
nent. In South Africa, a mass protest in Sharpeville led to a massacre of demon-
strators, followed by a severe wave of repression and mass imprisonment. The
CIA assisted the arrest and detention of Mandela, whom they regarded as a
sinister Communist agent, a local facsimile of Castro and Lumumba. The ANC
went underground and cooperated with Soviet allies. It formed a military
branch Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, or Spear of the Nation), led by the unabashed
Communist Joe Slovo, and MK fighters received training in the Eastern Bloc
and China. DDR-trained commanders dominated MK camps outside South
Africa. For decades to come, the question of the degree of Soviet influence over
the black African resistance proved very divisive in Western nations.
As the South African regime became increasingly isolated and stigmatized,
it gave the Soviets a rich opportunity to capitalize on the anger and resentment
of black Africa. They were assisted by the 1965 declaration of independence by
the white minority regime in neighboring Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). Both
the Soviets and the Chinese made intense efforts to extend their influence in
nations directly confronting the White-ruled southern African bloc, such as
Zambia. The Chinese cultivated newly independent African nations where
nationalism merged with strong anti-capitalist ideals, especially Tanzania, with
its African Socialism. Beyond those diplomatic efforts, the Soviets and other
nations supported the growth of guerrilla movements against the Rhodesian
regime, which by the 1970s had become highly effective. Communist nations,
prominently including anti-Soviet Yugoslavia, supported guerrilla resistance
against the Portuguese rule in its colonies of Mozambique and Angola.
In much of Africa, France served as a major obstacle to Communist ambi-
tions. At the height of its imperial power, France had controlled a very large
realm spread over West and Central Africa. Although most of these countries
achieved independence by the mid-1960s, the French continued to exercise
real political and cultural influence, incorporating them into Françafrique,
which almost served as an informal empire. It perfectly exemplified the concept
of neo-colonialism, a word coined in 1965 by the Ghanaian leader Kwame
Nkrumah.
Supervising the French role in Africa was Jacques Foccart, one of the most
powerful figures in France after Charles De Gaulle himself. Foccart became a
kind of viceroy for the new African order. He worked closely with key African
leaders, such as Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who ruled Cote d’Ivoire from 1960
through 1993, and who shared French concerns about the possible spread of
Soviet and Communist power. From the late 1950s through the end of the
century, the French intervened repeatedly across these African territories, using
covert operations and proxy mercenary forces, but sometimes with direct
100  P. JENKINS

military action, particularly when local liberation governments threatened to

become too powerful. Among other crises, French forces intervened directly in
Gabon in 1964 and Congo/Zaire in 1978, and in 1969, they suppressed an
insurgency in Chad—and returned to the same country in 1979–1980. In
1979, France toppled the government of what was then the Central African
Empire. France undertook these operations in accord with how it perceived its
national self-interest, but the result amply served to defend Western causes
more generally.

Latin America
The concept of the Third World included Latin America as well as Africa and
Asia, and discussions of global poverty and deprivation commonly integrated
the three regions. Latin American thinkers spoke of the Tricontinental. Latin
America differed from the other continents in that only a few of its territories
were under formal imperial control in 1945, and there were many independent
nations. In many respects, though, Latin America shared crucial elements with
the decolonizing world. Most countries were scarred by gaping inequality and
extreme poverty, and often, elites that looked to Europe or the US were sharply
divided from poorer classes, many of whom were different ethnically as well as
culturally. Many Latin American economies were founded on classic models of
exploitation, producing food or raw materials for US corporations, rarely at fair
rates. If not actual colonialism, this was neo-colonialism or neo-imperialism.
Much of the continent had long traditions of military rule and dictatorship.
There were obvious opportunities for political parties to improve social con-
ditions, at a minimum by undertaking land reform and removing elite privi-
leges. Between 1946 and 1955, Argentina claimed to offer a political Third
Way between Communism and capitalism, as the government of Juan and Eva
Perón improved social conditions and nationalized foreign (mainly British)
assets. Although the regime was dictatorial and economically disastrous, such a
blend of authoritarian populist nationalism was very attractive. But any sweep-
ing reform faced the obstacle that the US would regard it as leftist or
Communist-tinged, opening a Soviet foothold in a region that Americans
viewed with sternly proprietary eyes. Both US corporate interests and local
elites were enthusiastic in applying that Communist taint to their rivals, with
varying degrees of accuracy. Besides the moderate reformers, there genuinely
were active revolutionaries, and some were Communist and were working with
Eastern bloc agencies. As in other parts of the world, the task of identifying
Communist advances was never straightforward.
Guatemala produced an early illustration of the abuse of Cold War labels.
The country was a classic example of extreme inequality, economically domi-
nated by foreign agricultural interests and above all by the US United Fruit. If
this was not the first country to be labeled a “banana republic,” the term had
much justice here. In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz was elected President with a sizable
majority. He duly began a series of constitutional reforms, expanding labor
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  101

rights and democratic rights, and beginning extensive land reform. This last
attracted the ire of American interests, which denounced the government’s
potential Communist ties. Arbenz himself was attracted to Marxist ideas and
had a wide left-leaning network, while Communists did serve in his administra-
tion. If he had lived in contemporary Europe, he would likely have been labeled
a conventional democratic socialist, rather than a Communist. Having said
that, his decision to accept arms supplies from Communist Czechoslovakia
seemed to confirm the worst US fears. As the red label stuck, the CIA began
measures to overthrow him, in Operation PBSUCCESS.  This included the
now-standard package of psychological warfare, with deceptive radio propa-
ganda, coupled with symbolic attacks by air and sea. The US also sponsored an
invasion by local forces. Fearing the prospect of US invasion, the Guatemalan
military removed Arbenz, beginning a lengthy and bloody era of military
dictatorship.
Despite Guatemala’s tiny size, the coup here exercised wide influence. It
gave the US government a blueprint that would often be applied elsewhere.
Revolutionaries meanwhile learned the lesson about the limitations of consti-
tutional reform and the likelihood that any true reform would promptly invite
US intervention. The only solution in that case would be to move rapidly to
disarm or destroy potential sources of resistance. One of the many foreign resi-
dents radicalized by the event was the young Argentine Ernesto “Che”
Guevara, who attempted to organize resistance on behalf of Arbenz, and what
he called “the last Latin American revolutionary democracy.”3

Cuba
Memories of Guatemala shaped the revolutionary movement in Cuba.
Dominated by US finance and business, Cuba for many years had been ruled
by successive military regimes. From 1952, the president was Fulgencio Batista,
whose dictatorship worked closely with US corporate interests. Havana was a
glittering center for US leisure and entertainment, although the resulting pros-
perity did not extend far outside the city. At the same time, the country had
well-established radical and revolutionary traditions, including a small
Communist Party. In 1953, a small band of radicals led by Fidel Castro began
an armed movement, which at first achieved little success. Even so, its first
actions, on July 26, gave its name to the wider revolutionary movement. In
1956, Castro returned with Guevara and a group of followers who began a
guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra region. The movement became a serious
competitor to the government forces and came to control large sections of the
countryside. Suffering mass defections from its military, the Batista regime
became untenable. In January 1959, the revolutionaries entered Havana and
established a new government.

3
 Quoted in Douglas Kellner, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 32.
102  P. JENKINS

The US faced a dilemma. Apart from the country’s economic interests,

Cuba was a large island physically close to the US mainland. At the same time,
the country wished to avoid a repetition of the awful international publicity
arising from the Arbenz coup. The Communist role was debatable. In reality,
both Fidel Castro and his brother Raul were convinced Marxist-Leninists, as
was Guevara, but Fidel concealed his actual positions. Formally, the revolution
was undertaken not in the name of Communism, but rather of the July 26
Movement. That made it possible to imagine a new regime that would be leftist
in tone, but not affiliated to the Soviets. That hope quickly faded. The country
adopted extensive socialist reforms that included land reform and the exclusion
of foreign ownership. Acknowledged Communists received key positions in
the administration and the military. Cuba agreed on a wide-ranging trade deal
with the Soviet Union, which meant importing Soviet rather than US oil. As
criticism of the new government grew, any non-supportive organizations or
media were suppressed. Castro expanded the country’s armed forces, which he
supplemented with a new and well-armed People’s Militia. In September 1960,
the government created a ubiquitous and intrusive network of neighborhood
watch committees, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, tasked with
enforcing loyalty and political orthodoxy.
Within less than a year of the seizure of power, Cuba was a close facsimile of
an East Bloc Communist state. In December 1961, Castro removed any shade
of doubt about his political stance, declaring, “I am a Marxist-Leninist and
shall be one until the end of my life … Marxism or scientific socialism has
become the revolutionary movement of the working class.”4 Fulfilling the
long-standing US nightmare, a Soviet-oriented and Soviet-allied state—a Red
forward base—had been established in the Caribbean.

Many Cubas?
Cuba offered an intoxicating example of a grassroots revolution, in which
Communism was represented not by East European bureaucrats, but by
romantic young revolutionaries. In 1960, Alberto Korda photographed
Guevara in a way that made the subject look not just determined and coura-
geous but almost Christ-like. That photograph of the Guerrillero Heroico
(“Heroic Guerrilla Fighter”) was popularized as a poster, which became a
ubiquitous symbol in demonstrations around the world, and on college cam-
puses in Europe and North America. The Cuban regime was evangelistic in
spreading its message, offering support for revolutionaries across Latin America.
Racial factors added to the international appeal of the Cuban model. As the
revolution became more openly leftist, traditional elites fled the country, largely
to the US, where they became a vigorous voice for intervention against Castro.
That emigration had a sizable demographic effect on the new society, as so

4
 “Fidel Castro Speaks on Marxism-Leninism December 2, 1961,” http://www.walterlippmann.
com/fc-12-02-1961.html.
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  103

many of those who left were white, while the poor who remained were dispro-
portionately of African or Native heritage. Cuban or Soviet propaganda stressed
the non-white character of this anti-imperialist upsurge (although key leaders
like Castro and Guevara were indubitably white and Hispanic). Revolutionary
Cuba made much of its solidarity ties to insurgencies across Africa. In 1965,
Guevara traveled to the Congo in an attempt to organize Simba rebels into a
disciplined Marxist force, and the Cubans sent limited armed forces, all black
by racial origin. The Cubans established a military presence in the former
French colony of Congo-Brazzaville, which in 1969 became a Marxist-Leninist
People’s Republic, which endured until 1992. The Cubans offered support
and direct aid to other leftist insurgencies, including the FRELIMO forces
struggling against Portuguese rule in Mozambique. Black Cuban fighters
strengthened anti-Portuguese resistance in Guinea-Bissau. In 1967, Che
turned his efforts to Bolivia, where he was killed following a failed attempt to
foment a guerrilla war.

The Age of Coups d’Etat

The US was anxious to prevent “another Cuba.” The experience in Guatemala
shows that the US had often been prepared to subvert countries that might be
seen as sliding leftward, but American administrations became much more will-
ing to intervene against leftist or reformist leaders in the Western Hemisphere,
even at the risk of international opprobrium.
One target was Brazil’s João Goulart, who in 1963 became president on a
left-wing platform that included improving relations with the Eastern Bloc,
and potentially allowing Communists to serve in government positions. The
US cooperated with the Brazilian military in arranging a coup d’etat the fol-
lowing year, establishing a harsh regime that endured until 1985. Brazil, at the
time, was by far the most populous nation in the Western hemisphere after the
US itself. Through the 1970s, Brazil actively favored reactionary and military
regimes and causes in Latin America, serving almost as a right-wing counter-
part to Cuban internationalism.
The Brazilian coup offered a blueprint for military leaders in other Western
Hemisphere nations. The ensuing wave of takeovers was markedly worse than
its historical predecessors in that the new regimes deployed brutal techniques
of policing and internal security to seek out and destroy potential subversives,
often under US guidance. The new Brazilian regime became notorious for its
newly titled “death squads,” which carried out targeted extrajudicial killings.
Repression, torture, and illegal killings became the standard operating proce-
dure of military regimes across several nations over the following two decades,
most notoriously in Chile and Argentina.
The US was especially concerned about any possible Cuban “contagion” in
nearby countries in the Caribbean region. In 1964, the CIA was instrumental
in the defeat of another leftist and pro-Cuban leader in Cheddi Jagan, the
leader of British Guiana (later Guyana). Although this did not involve military
104  P. JENKINS

action, the militantly anti-Communist US agency the American Institute for

Free Labor Development (AIFLD) financed labor unrest that destabilized
Jagan and ensured his defeat at the polls. AIFLD was often accused of close
CIA ties and certainly worked in close coordination with the US government.
The US supported and funded Jagan’s opponent. The US also tolerated egre-
giously dictatorial and violent regimes in Haiti, Cuba’s immediate neighbor to
the east. From 1957, Haiti was ruled by the ruthless Duvalier family, which
with US acquiescence remained in power until 1986.
Responding to potential Cuban threats meant relaxing older restraints that
had limited direct US involvement. Prior to the 1930s, the US had regularly
sent military forces into Latin American nations—usually Marines—a policy
that was halted by President Franklin Roosevelt, under his Good Neighbor
policy. In 1965, strife in the Dominican Republic resulted in a civil war between
two factions, one of which was reformist and left-leaning, and which its ene-
mies denounced as Communist. Fearing a second Cuban revolution, President
Johnson ordered a US invasion, of the sort that had not occurred in the region
for a generation.
The evils of such interventions were self-evident, but one of the worst con-
sequences was the near impossibility of countries pursuing their own directions
without being interpreted as part of that larger East-West confrontation. By
the early 1960s, the global nature of the superpower conflict gave smaller
nations no place to hide.

Further Reading

I have already cited two wide-ranging books on the global aspects of the Cold
War, namely Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World
Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005), and Lorenz M. Lüthi,
Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (2020). See especially Paul Thomas
Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (2018).
The end of empire and the process of decolonization are the subject of Martin
Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends
of Empire (2018). For different national approaches, see Calder Walton,
Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire
(2012); Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the
Modern World: 1945–65 (2013); Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain,
France and Their Roads From Empire (2014); and R. T. Howard, Power and
Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America, 1945–2016 (2016).
See also Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (2019) and
Steven L. B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s,
Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (2017).
Struggles for influence in the Global South are explored in Robert B. Rakove,
Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (2013); and see Russell
Crandall, America’s Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare from 1776 to the War on
 6  DECOLONIZATION AND THIRD WORLD STRUGGLES  105

Terror (2014). For a critical player in these struggles, see John D. Wilsey,
God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles (2021).
African conflicts are addressed in Sue Onslow ed., Cold War in Southern Africa:
White Power, Black Liberation (2009); Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa:
Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965 (2013); and Philip Roessler and Harry
Verhoeven, Why Comrades Go to War: Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of
Africa’s Deadliest Conflict (2017).
For the Cold War background in the Middle East, see David Nichols, Eisenhower
1956: The President’s Year of Crisis: Suez and the Brink of War (2011); James
Barr, Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the United States and Great
Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East (2018); Randall Fowler,
More than a Doctrine: The Eisenhower Era in the Middle East (2018). The
Lebanese crisis is the subject of Bruce O. Riedel, Beirut 1958: How America’s
Wars in the Middle East Began (2020).
For South Asia, see Manu Bhagavan, ed., India and the Cold War (2019).
For Latin America, see Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (2010); Jerry
Dávila, Dictatorship in South America (2013); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco
Vidal Luna, Brazil, 1964–1985: The Military Regimes of Latin America in the
Cold War (2017); and Thomas C.  Field, Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà,
eds., Latin America and the Global Cold War (2020). For the enormous
impact of the Cuban revolution, see Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary
World (2017).
 CHAPTER 7

Khrushchev and Kennedy

On October 27, 1962, the world lived through one of the most frightening
moments in the whole Cold War. The US had declared a naval quarantine or
blockade of Cuba, so that Soviet ships entering the exclusion zone would be
stopped and searched. US forces were ready to launch an invasion of Cuba,
which would almost certainly have escalated to involve nuclear weapons. War
in Cuba would shortly have led to direct attacks in the respective homelands,
using thousands of nuclear weapons. On this Black Saturday, the Soviet subma-
rine B-59 was operating near the quarantine line, and it had been out of con-
tact with its home country for some days. When a US warship dropped small
Practice Depth Charges as a warning sign, the submarine’s captain interpreted
this as an actual attack, which showed that war must have broken out.
Accordingly, he proposed to deploy his principal weapon, a nuclear-tipped tor-
pedo, against the escort carrier, the USS Randolph. But the three senior offi-
cers had to agree on such an action, and one—Vasili Arkhipov—resisted, so the
weapon was not used. If the Soviets had initiated such a nuclear attack against
the US Navy, the consequences would have been catastrophic, so that Arkhipov
has been described with some seriousness as the man who saved the world.
However clichéd the phrase may sound, for 13 days, from October 16 to
28, the fate of human civilization really did stand in the balance.

Kennedy
In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President of the US on a platform that
involved confronting Communism more efficiently than his predecessor. He
particularly highlighted a supposed (and fictitious) missile gap, which had
given the Soviets an advantage in ICBMs. When he took office in January
1961, he faced a roster of perilous situations: in Laos and Vietnam, Cuba, and
in Berlin, while aggressive figures like Nasser and Sukarno were dangerous

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 107

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_7
108  P. JENKINS

wildcards. In response to the accumulating threats, Kennedy favored a flexible

policy toward nuclear weapons, offering a graded response short of simple
massive retaliation. He also wanted to develop forces that could fight limited
wars, especially against insurgencies and guerrilla risings.
In his inaugural address in January 1961, he demonstrated special concern
for the Third World. He stressed the need to ensure that emerging nations did
not slide “one form of colonial control … merely to be replaced by a far more
iron tyranny.” He offered aid to “those people in the huts and villages of half
the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” coupling extensive
reforms with protection against Communist expansion. The US would join
with other Western hemisphere nations” to oppose aggression or subversion
anywhere in the Americas.” He famously declared that “we shall pay any price,
bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to
assure the survival and the success of liberty.”1
Such a robust manifesto reflected Kennedy’s own stance and that of his
advisers, but it also suggests the state of US opinion at the time. Anti-­
Communism of a hard right coloring exercised very wide appeal, as did con-
spiratorial theories about highly placed Communists supposedly entrenched in
the US government. Such views were popularized by the John Birch Society,
founded in 1958, while the paramilitary Minutemen pledged to resist a
Communist takeover in the US itself. Far-right views received wide publicity
from a network of ultra-conservative and religious radio stations. One of the
movement’s figureheads was General Edwin Walker, who resigned in 1961
after carrying out extreme right wing propaganda among the soldiers under his
command in Germany. The domestic right wing expanded the label of
Communism to a wide range of liberal causes, especially support for the Civil
Rights movement. This posed a serious ideological threat to Kennedy, who
favored a liberal domestic agenda and desegregation. Liberal fears of the far
right, and even of a right-wing military coup, were the basis of the very success-
ful 1962 novel Seven Days in May by Charles W. Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel:
a film followed in 1964. Quite apart from such visions, it was certain that the
hard right would pose a potent electoral challenge to Kennedy’s re-election. In
this atmosphere, it was imperative for Kennedy to act urgently against Cuba.
Although the situation had not arisen on his watch, but was rather inherited
from Eisenhower, he would be judged by his ability to resolve it.

The Bay of Pigs

As the Communist character of the Castro regime became apparent during
1960, the CIA developed plots to remove it. Proposals for covert action
included the development of intelligence-gathering systems, the infiltration of
CIA agents, and the sponsorship of paramilitary proxy forces. These would be

1
 “Transcript of President John F.  Kennedy’s Inaugural Address (1961),” https://www.our-
documents.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=91&page=transcript.
 7  KHRUSHCHEV AND KENNEDY  109

combined with intense propaganda activities, especially by radio. Anti-Castro

activism found a rich response in the surging community of Cuban exiles in
Florida, and paramilitary training camps emerged in Florida and Louisiana.
The US developed ambitious and often fantastic schemes to discredit Castro by
sabotaging his speeches, possibly by dosing him with a hallucinogenic drug
supplied in tainted cigars or using chemicals to cause his beard to fall out.
These various schemes were already in progress when Kennedy took office,
and he approved one of the most daring schemes, which involved a direct mili-
tary invasion of Cuba. The exiles formed the military unit, Brigade 2506,
which was trained and armed by the CIA. As originally conceived in 1960, an
invasion would involve a substantial armed force which, crucially, would receive
both air and naval support from the US. The actual invasion that occurred in
April 1961 fell far short of the original specifications, and the only air support
involved a preparatory attack on Cuban airfields by CIA-supplied bombers.
The anti-Castro forces that landed at Playa Girón, in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, was
just 1400 strong, quite inadequate to confront Cuban regular troops. Although
they hoped to spark a popular rising, the invaders faced stiff resistance from
substantial forces led by Castro himself. Even at this stage, the anti-Castro
cause could have been rescued by prompt and intense US air support, which
Kennedy refused to supply. Within three days of their landing, the invaders
were forced to surrender.
The assault came to be called the Bay of Pigs, a term that reinforced its
absurdity and its near-fairy tale quality, and it proved an unmitigated disaster
for the US administration. The US had clearly sponsored an attack on an inde-
pendent state and was nevertheless defeated. Far from overthrowing the pro-­
Soviet regime, the attack reinforced its power and popularity and gave total
credibility to the regime’s charges that it faced a clear and present danger from
US imperialism. That in turn justified sweeping internal security policies and
repression. So disastrous was the outcome as to raise questions about the com-
petence of its CIA planners. One interpretation argues that the planners had a
realistic sense of the invaders’ prospects, but went ahead in the belief that
Kennedy would be forced to intervene on their behalf. If so, that would not be
the last time in these years that the administration found itself in conflict with
its intelligence agencies, whether in Cuba, Vietnam, or elsewhere.
The administration continued to target Castro, and in November 1961
approved a detailed scheme for subversion, Operation MONGOOSE, headed
by Edward Lansdale. This would build on the themes developed the previous
year, including propaganda, and the development of paramilitary forces for a
new and far better organized invasion or military infiltration. US teams sabo-
taged targets within Cuba. One plan proposed in 1962 involved US agents
carrying out terrorist attacks against US or anti-Castro targets, in a way that
would place blame on the Cuban government and thus justify a US invasion.
A notorious aspect of the planning involved removing Castro by means of
assassination, through a program titled ZR/RIFLE. The CIA subcontracted its
activities by hiring well-known organized crime and Mafia figures. At least
110  P. JENKINS

eight serious plots were in progress at various times between 1961 and 1963,
mostly involving toxins, and Cuban sources suggest literally hundreds of lesser
efforts. After President Johnson assumed office in 1963, he was shocked to
discover the scale of these clandestine plots, and especially the organized crime
links, which involved the US in running “A damned Murder Incorporated in
the Caribbean.”2 Beyond any moral qualms, the greatest criticism of the plots
was that all failed. Despite all the immense scientific and military resources of
the US, Fidel Castro retired peacefully from his leadership role and died peace-
fully in 2016, long out-living all his American foes.

From Havana to Berlin

The Bay of Pigs had implications far beyond the Caribbean. Coming so shortly
after Kennedy’s inauguration, the failure sent a damning message about his
inexperience, or incompetence, which naturally encouraged the Soviets to test
the limits of their ambition. Kennedy’s counterpart was Nikita Khrushchev,
who had every reason for confidence. Twenty years older than Kennedy,
Khrushchev had survived the lethal infighting of Stalin’s late years, coming to
power with the vital assistance of Marshal Zhukov. Furthermore, he had
recently scored a number of significant victories against the West, including the
Suez and Syrian crises, and the embarrassment of President Eisenhower in the
U-2 affair (for which see Chap. 9). Soviet triumphs in space signaled the coun-
try’s technological sophistication. The first human in space was Yuri Gagarin,
whose flight on April 12, 1961, was still dominating the headlines five days
later when the Bay of Pigs invasion commenced. The symbolic contrast between
East and West was pointed.
In 1961, Khrushchev felt that he had the exact measure of his rival, who
would (he thought) bluster and complain, but ultimately give in to pressure.
The obvious pressure point was Berlin, where tensions had been high over the
previous three years. In June 1961, Khrushchev renewed his proposal for a
Soviet peace treaty with the DDR, which would have the effect of ending the
four-power occupation of the city, and in effect, turning it over to Communist
control. The DDR would control all access routes to the city. The proposal
included a deadline at the end of the year. The Western Allies rejected the plan,
and General de Gaulle urged Kennedy to resist any compromise, even at the
cost of war. When Kennedy addressed the nation that July, he announced siz-
able increases in military spending and troop strength, with a serious expansion
of the military draft, and further growth in air and naval power.
Fears of violence became acute on August 13, when the DDR suddenly
marked the boundaries within the city with an extensive and well-policed wall.
They followed this by attempts to restrict the movements of Allied occupying
forces. Repeatedly, the two sides came close to open conflict, and the US

2
 Max Holland, “The Assassination Tapes,” Atlantic June 2004 https://www.theatlantic.com/
magazine/archive/2004/06/the-assassination-tapes/302964/.
 7  KHRUSHCHEV AND KENNEDY  111

contemplated demolishing the new Wall and related emplacements. The com-
manding general, Lucius Clay, was a leading advocate of a robust resistance to
Communist demands: indeed, he had given the initial order to begin the Berlin
Airlift in 1948. On October 27–28, US and Soviet tanks confronted each other
on either side of the dividing line, with each equipped with live ammunition.
(Coincidentally, that was exactly one year before the still more critical confron-
tation in the Caribbean.) Cautious diplomacy allowed both sides to withdraw,
as the crisis relented. The occupation was saved, but the failure to prevent or
remove the Wall reinforced the impression of Kennedy’s weakness.

The Missiles Arrive

In July 1962, a meeting between Castro and Khrushchev led to a highly secret
Soviet decision to place missiles, bombers, and nuclear weapons in Cuba. This
Operation Anadyr involved the dispatch of over 50,000 Soviet personnel to the
island, in what would have to be conditions of total secrecy. Besides five com-
plete medium-range and intermediate-range missile regiments, the move
involved a motorized rifle division and two anti-aircraft divisions. Four diesel
submarines, including the B-59, were deployed to the port of Mariel.
At its simplest level the decision was a direct response to the Cuban need for
protection against a US invasion, and such fears were realistic. But the plan also
reflected Soviet alarm about the 100-plus Jupiter missiles that the US deployed
to Italy and Turkey in 1961. Turkey was always a sensitive area in Soviet con-
siderations, having been the center of superpower encounters in 1946 and
1957. The Soviets would place medium-range (SS4) and intermediate-range
(R14) missiles in Cuba, as well as bomber aircraft. Using such medium-range
missiles from Cuba would counter the major US advantage in long-range mis-
siles and ICBMs. To that extent, Khrushchev’s decision was retaliation, or at
least an attempt to seek balance.
But the new weaponry had wider strategic implications. The shocking
nature of that decision needs some explanation, as the mass deployment of
ICBMs in coming years would mean that no part of the world was secure from
swift destruction. In the context of 1962, however, the Soviets were limited in
their capacity to strike the whole of the US mainland, making it probable that
much or most of the country would survive a nuclear attack: the Soviets them-
selves could have no such expectation. Crucially, the Soviets could not expect
to eliminate US nuclear forces, which would stand ready to retaliate massively.
The new missiles exposed the whole US to possible attack, with minimal warn-
ing. The situation would be intolerable for the US, who would be forced to
come to terms. If the Soviets were to agree to remove them, then that could be
part of an exchange in which the West would pay a fearfully high price—per-
haps Berlin itself? For the Soviets, the move was either a strategic masterstroke
or suicidally rash.
The new policy was not wholly a surprise to the Americans, who earlier in
the year had feared the creation of Soviet bases on Cuba. As a March briefing
112  P. JENKINS

paper warned, “if they exercise this option, we would likely be unable to remove
them without initiating World War III.”3 The military construction in Cuba
could not have gone unnoticed by local residents, so that reports soon made
their way to US intelligence. Through the Summer, conservative politicians
campaigning for the upcoming midterm elections were speaking openly of the
likely Soviet military move in Cuba, which the administration duly denied.
After a period of speculation and mounting intelligence, on October 14, a U-2
reconnaissance aircraft offered definite photographic evidence of the missile
installations. These showed that the missiles were actually in the process of
being readied for use.

Thirteen Days
Responding to this situation raised critical difficulties for US policymakers, and
the new realities were presented at a special Executive Committee of the
National Security Council (EXCOMM) convened by the president on October
16. Initially, the group debated the impact of the Soviet move, and Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara expressing the moderate view that the new mis-
siles would make little difference to the overall military balance. But military
solutions were strongly to the fore, primarily through air strikes, but alterna-
tively through invasion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with several key
advisers, favored an immediate assault, to destroy both the Soviet installations
and the Cuban regime. One strong advocate of an immediate attack was Air
Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, who proposed the use of 1500 aircraft,
besides hundreds of missiles. Given the presence of Soviet personnel, such a
move posed an obvious danger of open war, and the likelihood of a Soviet
response in Berlin was often mentioned. What the Americans did not know was
that Soviet military commanders on the ground in Cuba had been given
authority to deploy tactical nuclear warheads when these became operational,
without needing approval from Moscow.
For several days, EXCOMM debated the options, as the airstrike solution
remained popular. Kennedy came to favor a policy that was determined, but
which fell short of direct attack. The US would blockade Cuba, searching any
Soviet or East Bloc vessels seeking to enter the region, and denying entry to
any supplies intended to support the missile deployment. He insisted on the
removal of the facilities already present. The concept of blockade was itself
problematic, as technically that constituted an act of war. To avoid this sensitive
issue, the US preferred the term quarantine, framed within the structure of the
Organization of American States, with the goal of excluding offensive weapons
from the hemisphere. Although this represented a compromise among his
advisers, it was still a hardline position, which offered a strong likelihood of

3
 Gideon Grudo, “Newly Released Docs Show Heavy USAF Contribution Needed for 1962
Cuba Invasion,” Air Force Magazine, Oct. 31, 2017 https://www.airforcemag.com/
newly-released-docs-show-heavy-usaf-contribution-needed-for-1962-cuba-invasion/.
 7  KHRUSHCHEV AND KENNEDY  113

open conflict. In particular, it made it difficult for the Soviets to stand down
from their position without suffering grave humiliation.
The president announced the policy in a stark television address on Monday,
October 22. Emphasizing the pan-American dimensions of the threat—and
not merely US concerns—he declared that “It shall be the policy of this nation
to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the
Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the US, requiring a
full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Besides support in the
Americas, the US sought support from the familiar roster of Western Allies,
which would find themselves on the front line in any conflict. The results were
mixed, with Canada and Britain urging a solution within a United Nations
framework. British Prime Minister Macmillan even proposed that the US could
disable its Thor Missiles in Britain as part of a deal, which Kennedy rejected.
The US continued its preparations for invasion. A plan already formulated
that August imagined an invasion force of 100,000 soldiers and marines, which
would overwhelm the island within some 15 days. The planned October inva-
sion was part of Operation ORTSAC—CASTRO reversed. The initial attack
would have involved the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, together with two
Marine divisions. It would have been combined with a heavy pre-emptive
attack from the air. Both sides used harsh and provocative language, as the
Soviets rejected US “aggression” and “piracy,” and the Chinese offered full
support to the Communist cause. Meanwhile, the first encounters between US
and East Bloc shipping began in the Caribbean. Tensions reached a new height
on October 25, and the following day, President Kennedy himself believed that
invasion would be necessary. US intelligence warned that the Soviet missile
bases would be operational within days. On October 26, the US raised its sta-
tus of military preparedness to DEFCON 2, the only time that this has
occurred. SAC bombers were placed on alert, ready to strike targets at notice
as short as 15 minutes, as ballistic missiles were readied. That readiness status
extended to several hundred fighters and tactical aircraft.
Castro pleaded with the Soviets to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike
against the US, and ordered anti-aircraft weaponry to target US flights. He did
this knowing that Cuba would be annihilated in a war, but he felt that this
would be a worthwhile sacrifice in the larger historical cause, an ultimate act of
revolutionary martyrdom. Guevara likewise appeared unconcerned by the
threat of nuclear war, on the grounds that the US would assuredly lose. Even
if they had been correct about the nuclear balance of forces, the Cuban leader-
ship was startlingly callous about the vast level of destruction that such a con-
flict would cause to all participants.
Against this background, the difficulty of direct communication between
the two capitals seems almost incredible, as no facilities existed for direct com-
munication between the two leaders. As the Soviets issued multiple statements,
it became apparent that these were inconsistent and rushed, to the point of
making simple errors in editing. That indicated confusion and divisions among
the Soviet leadership, and growing panic by Khrushchev himself. As in the US,
114  P. JENKINS

different factions were taking very different stances, leaning toward peace or
military action. The most direct and effective negotiations occurred on a highly
secret basis in conversations between Robert F.  Kennedy, the President’s
brother, and the Soviet Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Dobrynin. These
negotiations reached broad areas of agreement, and on October 26, Khrushchev
offered a reasonable proposal for settlement. The US would pledge not to
invade Cuba, and the Soviets would declare that their ships did not contain
armaments, so that both sides would stand down. However, as the US was
considering its response, further Soviet messages took more aggressive stances
and demanded the removal of US missiles from Turkey and Italy as the price of
peace. US officials decided to respond to the first communication, ignoring
latter statements, and agreement seemed likely.
Even so, conditions remained fraught, and some events that occurred dur-
ing this time were so provocative that it seems as if some military forces were
actually seeking conflict. On October 26, the US fired an Atlas ICBM from
Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, across the Pacific. Although the test
was previously scheduled, carrying on with the firing at this time seemed wildly
irresponsible. On the 27th, a Soviet missile shot down a US U-2 flight over
Cuba, killing the pilot, while other reconnaissance aircraft were fired on. The
Americans faced enormous pressure to retaliate immediately, but they chose to
warn the Soviets that any future attacks would be met with the swift destruc-
tion of all their missile sites in Cuba. Other incidents on Black Saturday showed
the extraordinarily high level of tension. When another U-2 flew over the east-
ern Soviet Union, that in turn led to a confrontation between US and Soviet
fighters.
On October 28, Kennedy dispatched a message to Khrushchev that secured
agreement, and peace. The Soviets would remove their weaponry from Cuba,
and the US pledged not to invade the island. So much was well known at the
time, but the US made a secret commitment to remove its own Jupiter missiles
from Turkey and, possibly, southern Italy. At the time, the US position was that
Kennedy had stood firm against Soviet pressure and intimidation, and made no
serious concessions in exchange. That was untrue, and both sides duly removed
their missiles.
Historians have debated at length how serious the war danger was. The fact
that the US responded so relatively calmly to the shooting down of the U-2
suggests that restraint could and did prevail. At the same time, conflicts were
accumulating fast, and it was quite possible that individual officers or forces
might deliberately seek to provoke war. Adding to the risk was the fact that so
many ships and aircraft were armed with nuclear weapons, so that the nuclear
threshold would easily be crossed. Even without evil intent, it would have been
all but impossible to soothe the tensions that would have arisen if, for instance,
the B-59 had sunk the Randolph, and moreover with nuclear weapons. The
President would have faced irresistible pressure for retaliation.
 7  KHRUSHCHEV AND KENNEDY  115

Leaving Armageddon
The immediate consequence of the peaceful resolution was worldwide relief. In
the immediate aftermath, a still shocked Khrushchev approached Kennedy
with a far-reaching list of proposal for negotiation. That would include at mini-
mum a non-aggression agreement between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and
discussions that could lead to the disbanding of those alliances, and reduction
or elimination of nuclear weapons. The superpowers should resolve the German
issue promptly, and the US should recognize the PRC.
In the event, none of those bold ideas came close to immediate implementa-
tion, but the Americans too were open to new initiatives. In June 1963,
Kennedy gave a historic address at American University in Washington, “A
Strategy of Peace,” which was devoted to promoting peace and disarmament:
indeed, Kennedy used the word “peace” 49 times in an address lasting barely
27 minutes. Unusually in Western rhetoric of the era, Kennedy treated Soviet
concerns very seriously, acknowledging the hideous devastation visited on their
country during the Second World War. The speech became widely available
worldwide, including in the Soviet Union itself. Khrushchev praised it warmly.4
The new mood produced some significant results. As one measure to limit a
repetition of recent events, in June 1963, the US and Soviets agreed to estab-
lish a Direct Communications Line, a teleprinter “hot line” for use in future
crises. The obvious question was why such a system had not been created five
or ten years earlier. Increased concern about nuclear weapons spurred action to
control or regulate them. In August 1963, the Soviets, the US, and British
signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty—technically a Treaty Banning Nuclear
Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water. Soviet
concerns about intrusive verification procedures prevented a more comprehen-
sive prohibition of all testing.
But for all the quite genuine good will, it was far too early to speak of an end
to the Cold War. Even in his American University address, Kennedy had reas-
serted the firm Western line on issues on which Khrushchev had urged com-
promise, notably Germany and Berlin. The president did so again just weeks
after that earlier address when he undertook a sensationally successful visit to
Europe, culminating with a speech to a vast crowd in West Berlin. Although
the superpowers were pledged to avoid nuclear war, that did not necessarily
mean any diminution in ideological fervor, and Kennedy’s speech proclaimed
uncompromising faith in democratic values. West Berlin, he said, symbolized
freedom from tyranny. He said,

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was Civis Romanus sum [“I am a
Roman citizen”]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin

4
 “Commencement Address at American University Washington DC June 10, 1963,” https://
www.jfklibrar y.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-
university-19630610.
116  P. JENKINS

ein Berliner!”… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and
therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!”5

The US would not contemplate anything like the series of accommodations

that Khrushchev had proposed.
This caution about seeking dramatic solutions owes much to the real con-
cern that hardliners on both sides felt about the October settlement of the
Cuba crisis. Because the exact nature of the agreement was secret, it left Soviet
observers with the impression that Khrushchev had shown weakness, and that
Kennedy had roundly defeated him. That contributed to his gradual under-
mining over the next two years, a process reinforced by the country’s deepen-
ing economic difficulties. Since 1953, Khrushchev had hoped to boost the
Soviet economy by the massive agricultural development of “virgin lands,”
which among other things would solve the country’s recurrent problems with
food supply. The scheme had some early successes, reaching a high point in
1956, but by the early 1960s it was in collapse, highlighting all the character-
istic flaws of the Soviet economy and its centralized planning regime. In 1964,
Khrushchev was removed as Soviet leader.

The Kennedy Assassination

Like Khrushchev, Kennedy earned the fury of those who had been thwarted in
their zeal for open warfare, and the pledge not to invade Cuba seemed unfor-
givable. A flyer distributed in Dallas on the day of his assassination that
November portrayed the President as “Wanted For Treason,” on the basis of
multiple crimes, which included the betrayal of such American friends as
Katanga and Cuba as well as the “blunder of the Test Ban Treaty.”6 The assas-
sination itself contributed to stirring those tensions and grievances still further,
given the background and associations of the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald was a former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959
before returning in 1962, with a Russian wife. In the US, he became an out-
spoken supporter of Castro’s Cuba. It is still much debated whether he was
adopting those left-wing views as a kind of false flag or dissimulation or whether
they were in fact genuine. Many theorists have suggested that Oswald was in
fact working for far-right and anti-Castro interests, with the CIA a frequent
target for accusation.
But the Communist connections were disturbing. In the months before the
shooting, Oswald had  contacts with various Communists and Communist
agencies, including a visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. If indeed the

5
 “Remarks of President John F. Kennedy at the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin, June 26, 1963,”
https://www.jfklibrar y.org/ar chives/other-r esour ces/john-f-kennedy-speeches/
berlin-w-germany-rudolph-wilde-platz-19630626.
6
 “Wanted For Treason” flyer, uploaded to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/com-
mons/9/90/Wanted_for_treason.jpg.
 7  KHRUSHCHEV AND KENNEDY  117

Soviets or Cubans really had sponsored the assassination, then the conse-
quences for global peace would be catastrophic. The subsequent commission
of investigation of the killing chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren went to
great lengths to discredit all claims of conspiracy or international participation
and emphasized the strictly individual character of the act. Even if Oswald per-
sonally held Communist or pro-Castro views, that did not imply any actual
East Bloc involvement in the assassination.

Goldwater and Reagan
The American hard right found a champion in Barry Goldwater, who secured
the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1964, and who famously
refused to condemn the extreme movements then making frantic charges about
pervasive Soviet subversion in the US. As he famously declared, “extremism in
the pursuit of liberty is no vice.”7 Following the recent war scare, many moder-
ate Americans found Goldwater’s aggressive views terrifying, and he lost in one
of the worst electoral disasters in the nation’s history. Ironically, another factor
in his defeat was that he was felt to be far more likely than Johnson to commit
US combat forces to Vietnam. But his campaign laid a firm foundation for later
conservative campaigning, especially in foreign policy.
In retrospect, one surprising aspect of his movement was the apocalyptic
sense that the West faced a real danger of defeat in the Cold War and that
Communism stood an excellent chance of triumphing. This nightmare was
ably expressed in a famous speech delivered by a leading Goldwater supporter,
California governor Ronald Reagan, who now established himself as a conser-
vative star. He viewed Communism not just as a rival ideology, but as a world
view that was simply evil, on a moral par with Nazism: “We are faced with the
most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the
stars.” As he declared, in near-apocalyptic terms, “We’ll preserve for our chil-
dren this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the
last step into a thousand years of darkness.”8

The End of the Beginning

The Cuba crisis had a profound impact on Soviet leaders, who had faced the
reality of a war that would destroy much of the planet and, moreover, one in
which they stood at a severe disadvantage. Realistically, this left the Soviets
with a number of options. Most simply, they could race to outmatch the US
in terms of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and this they did over the
next two decades. Between 1962 and 1975 the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew

7
 “Goldwater’s 1964 Acceptance Speech,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/poli-
tics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm.
8
 Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing (aka The Speech),” October 27, 1964, https://www.
americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm.
118  P. JENKINS

from 2000 warheads to 19,000 and in the late 1970s, the USSR finally
achieved parity in warheads with the US. That expansion was however a lim-
ited blessing: if a country could destroy its rival five times over, then it really
made little difference spending huge sums on resources to raise that factor to
ten or twelve.
But if nuclear confrontation was too risky, that moved the locus of rivalry to
other forms of competition that would weaken the enemy gradually. In the
developed world, the goal would be to separate the US from its allies, by
decoupling the NATO nations and achieving a degree of neutralization. In the
Third World, the Tricontinental, the Soviets would fund and arm proxy forces,
whether regular armies, like that of North Vietnam, or guerrillas and terrorists.
Even without the risk of total war, much could still be achieved. The West in
its turn pursued the emerging conflicts, with the consequences we have already
witnessed, of coups and dirty wars. If the Cuban missiles affair proved that full-­
scale war was far too high a risk, it certainly did not imply peace or safety for
much of the world’s population.
The Cuban affair marked a critical turning point in the Cold War. As Winston
Churchill remarked in another context, if it was not the end of the conflict, nor
even the beginning of the end, then it should be counted as the end of the
beginning. Such a transition allows to turn our attention from the seemingly
endless cascade of crises to take stock of the impact of the worldwide confron-
tation on the competing powers themselves. What did it mean to live in a Cold
War world, in a near-wartime?

Further Reading

I have mentioned the very substantial collections of essays to be found in

Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the
Cold War (three volumes, 2010), and Richard H.  Immerman and Petra
Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013). Both collec-
tions have multiple essays on the Kennedy-Khrushchev era. In The Cambridge
History of the Cold War, these are found in the second volume, under the
broad heading of “Crises and Detente.”
The volume of material on this phase of the Cold War is particularly large.
Valuable examples include William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and
His Era (2003); Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s
Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (2006); Michael
Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the
Brink of Nuclear War (2008); and Martin J.  Sherwin Gambling with
Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Knopf 2020).
 7  KHRUSHCHEV AND KENNEDY  119

For an excellent recent account of the Cuban events, see Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear
Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2021). Sheldon M. Stern
studied The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory (2012). Jim Wilson
examined the British aspects in Britain on the Brink: The Cold War’s Most
Dangerous Weekend, 27–28 October 1962 (2012). See also Håkan Karlsson
and Tomás Diez Acosta, The Missile Crisis from a Cuban Perspective:
Historical, Archaeological and Anthropological Reflections (2019).
For the other great flashpoint of the era, see Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961:
Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth
(2011).  Theodore Voorhees traces connections between the Berlin and
Cuban confrontations in The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and
Khrushchev Play the Double Game (2020).
The thawing of relations after the Cuban crisis is covered in Thurston Clarke,
JFK’s Last Hundred Days: An Intimate Portrait of a Great President (2013).
 PART II

Living in the Cold War

 CHAPTER 8

National Security and Repression

George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a masterful analysis of the mechanisms of repres-

sion. It describes a future Britain under a totalitarian regime with its ruthless
secret police, where ordinary people live under the constant threat of denun-
ciation by friends and family. Beyond controlling speech, the authorities punish
people for deviant thoughts and thoughtcrime. The government absolutely
controls all sources of news and information, freely adjusting its construction
of reality as needed, and constantly rewriting history to its own purposes. All
these abuses are justified in the name of an eternally ongoing war. Although the
book uses both Soviet and Nazi parallels, the author drew on his own experi-
ences in Britain’s wartime propaganda agency, and the world depicted is strictly
contemporary: 1984 is a scarcely veiled 1948. As the Cold War developed over
the coming decades, events and trends in many nations could legitimately be
called “Orwellian.” Abuses were commonly justified by the need to preserve
national security under the constant threat of war and repression.
Any account of repression in this era has to take account of both sides, with-
out falling into the trap of false equivalency. The West certainly had its crimes
and atrocities, made notorious by such phenomena as McCarthyism, but in
most instances, the consequences in the US or Western Europe were on a radi-
cally different scale from what occurred in the Eastern Bloc. The anger of the
Soviet state or its allies resulted in killings on a large scale, unlike anything that
occurred in the Western homelands. When using terms like “purge” in a
Western context, we should always remember the fundamental differences of
scale and violence that separated the two great blocs in these years.
But those distinctions are nothing like so absolute when we take into account
racial and imperial dimensions in Western societies. In imperial or Third World
territories, the differences between Communist and democratic tactics were
often slight, and some of the right-wing regimes in the Global South were
appalling. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that White Western

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 123

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_8
124  P. JENKINS

governments and publics were prepared to accept abuses and violence that
were inflicted on non-White Global South peoples in a way that would be abso-
lutely unacceptable if perpetrated against fellow Euro-Americans. That was
even more true when denying full democratic rights. Understanding the abuses
of state power—and the underlying prejudices that made them possible—is
essential to appreciating the issues at stake in the larger Cold War.

The Great Terror and After

For the Soviet Union, the nature of internal security and repression after 1945
followed directly from the country’s experiences since 1917. The main agent
of repression was the secret police, which was originally founded in 1918 as the
Cheka, under the Polish Communist, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The name changed
occasionally, but the underlying institution remained, with its tradition: secret
police often referred to themselves as Chekists. From 1934 through 1946, that
force was the NKVD, and in 1954 it became the KGB (Committee for State
Security). Referring to a “police” greatly understates its scope and operations,
which included significant armed units, special prisons, and prison camps, and
border protection functions: the NKVD even controlled the Soviet atomic
bomb program. It carried out overseas operations, although other agencies
also had such functions, including Military Intelligence, GRU. The NKVD and
its successors served as a state within the larger state, and leaders played a very
powerful role within the Soviet leadership.
Regardless of their formal titles, those agencies exercised very tight control
over speech and action and operated vast networks of agents, spies, and inform-
ers. As in Orwell’s world, no ordinary person could ever believe that their clos-
est friends might be trustworthy confidants. Any citizen with a grudge could
denounce a neighbor or enemy with the realistic hope that the individual would
suffer terrible consequences. Acts of denunciation were praised and expected.
Even elite figures too lived in the constant fear that incorrect or inconvenient
beliefs or words might doom them to dismissal or to far worse consequences.
Although the Soviets had long since broken or subjugated any formal rivals to
power in their own territory, the threat of revived purges was always at hand.
Even the months leading up to his death in 1953, Stalin was setting the scene
for a new grand purge that would target Jews among its leading victims.

Eastern Europe
From 1946, the Soviet model was faithfully reproduced in the new Communist
states of Eastern Europe. All the new states were highly repressive in character,
partly following Soviet tradition, but reflecting their own particular situations.
Communist elites were well aware that they represented only a minority of the
population and that their power rested on the Soviet occupation. Across the
region, dedicated or experienced Communists had faced lengthy periods of
persecution, either in the independent states as they had existed before the war
 8  NATIONAL SECURITY AND REPRESSION  125

or during the Nazi occupation. Many had taken refuge in the Soviet Union,
where they had become accustomed to Soviet ideas and discipline. Inevitably,
they returned as outsiders to the lands that they notionally ruled.
Adding to tensions with the larger population, Jews represented a dispro-
portionate share of the new Communist elites. Pre-war Communist parties had
attracted many Jewish members, and wartime experience had driven surviving
Jews to Communism as the most forceful antithesis of the Nazi nightmare. As
the new regimes consolidated, they relied on those veteran Jewish militants.
Although they utterly rejected the religion, and commonly changed their
names, Jews were prominent, and dominated the higher ranks of the regimes
in Hungary and elsewhere, and especially in the internal security apparatus.
Mátyás Rákosi himself was Jewish by birth, as were his key associates. In
PolandS, Jakub Berman dominated the secret police mechanisms in the found-
ing years of Communist rule. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, that Jewish
role increased the Communist elite’s sense of living under siege, and its vulner-
ability to resistance by the Catholic church. In later years, it helps explain the
anti-Semitic campaigns that would become such a pervasive part of life in the
Eastern Bloc.
While East Bloc regimes often seem paranoid, they genuinely did face severe
internal dangers. As we know, resistance movements flourished in most coun-
tries for several years after the Communist seizures of power. In fact, if we take
the post-1945 decade, armed insurgency was a constant fact of life for most of
the new socialist states, culminating in open revolution in Hungary in 1956.
Throughout, Western powers genuinely were seeking to undermine and over-
turn the socialist regimes, supporting and sponsoring dissidents and insurgents.
As those states established themselves, they swiftly created secret police
forces closely based on the NKVD model, and under direct NKVD supervi-
sion. Those agencies continued to operate until the end of Communism, and
their names became notorious. Czechoslovakia had its State Security (StB);
Poland its Department of Security (UB); and the German Democratic Republic
acquired its State Security, the Staatssicherheit or Stasi. The Hungarian equiva-
lent was the ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság, or “State Protection Authority”).
In 1948, Romania founded its General Directorate for the Security of the
People, the Securitate.
The socialist states struck at any organizations that refused total assimilation
to the new order, including political parties and unions. They violently sup-
pressed any potential sources of anti-Communist resistance or propaganda.
That meant traditional social elites such as landowners and aristocrats, but
churches and clergy were particularly targeted. Repression manifested in well-­
publicized trials that were intended to deter and terrify potential dissidents. In
the post-1945 decade, Eastern Europe produced a series of notorious show
trials, including the Yugoslav proceedings against Croatian Cardinal Aloysius
Stepinac (1946) and the Hungarian prosecution of Cardinal József Mindszenty
(1949). Those cases poisoned international relations and reinforced worldwide
126  P. JENKINS

Catholic sentiment against Communism. Ordinary clergy and religious believ-

ers suffered terribly, and many were arrested and imprisoned.
As in Stalin’s USSR, Communists themselves might fall victim to the secret
police. Following Yugoslavia’s defection from the alliance in 1948, the Soviets
were keenly vigilant about the slightest sign of deviation from the strict Moscow
line. East European Communists used those fears of deviation as a weapon in
internal struggles. In 1949, Hungarian leader Rákosi decided to remove his
former key ally László Rajk, the internal security chief, whom he feared as a
potential rival for power. Rajk was subjected to a show trial in which, after tor-
ture, he confessed to having served as a Titoist agent and a servant of Western
imperialism. Across the socialist states, internal paranoia and brutality reached
new heights.
The new states established networks of concentration camps and labor
camps. Hungary operated lethal concentration camps like Recsk and Kistarcsa,
where thousands of dissidents and religious believers were murdered through
the 1950s. Czechoslovakia used its uranium mining complexes of Pribram and
Jáchymov to imprison enemies of the state in conditions of forced labor that
amounted to torture. Again, clergy and religious believers were often targeted.
In the Soviet zone of Germany, the old Nazi concentration camp of
Sachsenhausen was reopened as an NKVD facility. Between 1945 and 1950,
some 12,000 people perished there.

After Stalin
The level of repression declined after Stalin’s death. In the immediate succes-
sion contest, NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria was executed, but that marked the
end of the systematic murder that had marked intra-party conflict for a genera-
tion. Thereafter, even when leaders were forcibly removed, as Nikita Khrushchev
was in 1964, he lived to enjoy several years of obscure retirement. After the
Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the country’s democratic-leaning
Communist leaders escaped execution, unlike their Hungarian counterparts
just a decade earlier. Khrushchev’s own Secret Speech in 1956 signaled an eas-
ing of repression, and the population of the concentration camps fell steeply.
This certainly did not mean full democratization, and through the 1960s the
Soviets continued to treat dissidents with a heavy hand, incarcerating some of
the most visible in mental institutions. But the mass Gulag system faded.
Over and above direct sanctions, state hostility could have disastrous conse-
quences in a society where the state and the Communist Party controlled all
employment, housing, and education. A person regarded as suspect faced the
prospect of being confined to menial jobs and conditions amounting to beg-
gary. That was what occurred in Czechoslovakia after 1968, when half a million
Party members were purged. They lost their jobs, while their children forfeited
their chance of higher education and were forced into a kind of internal exile.
Even for the most trusted citizens of the Bloc, foreign travel was a rare luxury
and privilege, exercised under supervision. Throughout the Cold War, a series
 8  NATIONAL SECURITY AND REPRESSION  127

of well-publicized defections of artists and performers drew attention to the

system’s continuing repression.
In Eastern Europe too, the lightening of official pressure must be put in
context. When the Communist regimes fell in 1989, the exposure of secret
police archives proved how very extensive networks of surveillance and infor-
mants remained until the very last days of dictatorship. Religious persecution
also continued. As we will see, from the late 1960s, East Bloc nations became
much harsher toward Jews, and some developed systematically anti-Semitic
policies and rhetoric.
The most Orwellian feature of the Eastern Bloc states was their control and
manipulation of news and information. For a modern audience, accustomed to
the Internet and television cable, the very constrained nature of media in earlier
years can be close to incomprehensible. In Communist states, state and Party
controlled all publications of all kinds, including books, newspapers, and maga-
zines, as well as electronic media. No external media were permitted, unless
they came from politically friendly countries. Radio broadcasts were difficult to
control in a continent like Europe, where only a few miles separated the capitals
of Communist states from Western nations with their broader range of media,
and active outlets like the BBC and Voice of America (VOA). Even so,
Communist states strove to regulate that access through systematic jamming as
well as harsh deterrent laws. As the Cold War progressed, any sense of a united
Eastern Bloc became more tenuous, as different countries went their way cul-
turally as well as economically. However gradually, some countries, such as
Yugoslavia and Hungary, permitted a wider range of cultural expression.

Democracy and Dictatorship?
With a handful of exceptions, no Western nation treated its own citizens with
anything like the same ferocity as the Eastern Bloc. Concentration camps did
not exist in the US, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, or West Germany, nor were
citizens executed or tortured for their dissident politics. Nor, in most cases, did
those regimes face a constant threat of insurrections and guerrilla campaigns
such as occurred in Poland. Unlike the East, Western states did not act as if
they were constantly sitting on bayonets. Western nations found it easy to pres-
ent the Cold War as a straightforward clash that pitted democracy, human
rights, and the rule of law against the “Orwellian” world of secret police, con-
centration camps, and thought control.
But any claims of Western freedom and democracy have to take into account
the racial and imperial structures of the era. Just to take the example of the US,
in 1950, the country had a black minority population of 10 percent, some 15
million people. Most had little access to electoral democracy, and they faced
severe violence if they attempted to assert their rights. They faced gravely
oppressive structures of policing and criminal justice, which in other contexts
we would call a police state. If we imagine that population in terms of a free-­
standing nation, then it would be comparable to a mid-sized European state. It
128  P. JENKINS

would be difficult to claim that this American minority suffered significantly

less oppression than did citizens of Stalinist Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
At this time, West European countries had very small domestic minorities of
color, but they did rule overseas colonial empires, whose residents likewise had
limited political freedom. Even the most liberal Western powers ruled harshly,
and sometimes committed acts of atrocious violence. The British fought nota-
bly dirty campaigns against insurgents in Kenya, Malaya, and elsewhere, using
torture and internment, and in the 1970s, they faced a guerrilla war close to
home, in Northern Ireland. The French war in Algeria was brutal: perhaps half
a million died during the eight-year struggle from 1954 through 1962.
Significantly, one of the few incidents that involved the mass killing of dissi-
dents in the home territory of a Western democracy occurred in Paris in 1961
when police killed hundreds of Algerian protesters. Different rules always
applied to colonial settings and to non-White races.
Western states supported or tolerated severe repression within their sphere
of influence, and especially when that was undertaken by regimes established
after the overthrow of a leftist predecessor. Some of those right-wing successor
regimes became enduring dictatorships, with the full apparatus of secret police
and the torture and imprisonment of dissenters, and open contempt for demo-
cratic forms. After Mosaddegh was unseated in Iran, the restored regime of the
Shah persisted until 1979. The Brazilian military regime that took power in
1964 lasted over 20 years and was notably repressive. Some such regimes out-
lasted the Cold War itself. In the Congo, Lumumba’s successor Joseph Mobutu
became president of the country that he renamed Zaire, holding on to power
until 1997. Indonesia’s Suharto retained the presidency from 1967 through
1998. Chiang Kai-Shek ruled Taiwan until 1975, but martial law continued
until 1987. Despite some turbulence, South Korea’s military dictatorship was
no less enduring. Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, the Congo, Taiwan, and South
Korea: these were scarcely minor or marginal players in the international system.
The list of US-sponsored right-wing dictatorships could easily be extended,
particularly with such Latin American examples as the Nicaraguan Somoza
dynasty or Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner (see Chap. 13). If not totalitarian, all
such regimes were authoritarian, and some were extremely corrupt. In every
case, the regimes readily blamed all opposition on Communist subversion and
thereby maintained US support.

The Limits of Democracy

Further complicating the simple East-West dichotomy were a few Western-­
aligned societies in Europe itself where democracy was non-existent, or at best
tenuous. Spain in the 1940s was recovering from a civil war between left and
right, which left a hard right dictatorship in power until 1975. The Communist
Party remained strictly prohibited, and leftists were subject to imprisonment,
torture, or forced labor. Most Western Allies regarded Spain as a hangover of
pre-war fascism. Its strategic position, however, made it a desirable ally, and in
 8  NATIONAL SECURITY AND REPRESSION  129

1953 the US-Spanish Pact of Madrid allowed American bases in the country.
Greece, likewise, kept leftists under harsh restraint after its Civil War, and the
Communist party was banned. Restrictions on democratic rights were limited
still further in 1967, following the military coup d’etat, and leftists and dissi-
dents suffered dreadfully. The Communist Party remained illegal in Portugal,
under slightly less draconian conditions. All these states operated tight censor-
ship. Yet Portugal was a founder member of NATO in 1949, and Greece fol-
lowed in 1952. Not until the 1970s would these three nations liberalize, to the
point of granting full rights to Communists.
Other Western countries created regimes that were authoritarian and
military-­oriented, even if not totalitarian. As social crises pitted left- and right-­
wing factions against each other, it was natural for rightists to denounce their
enemies as Communists, and to seek US or British aid, even to the point of a
military removal of a democratically elected government. In 1960, Turkish
officers carried out the first military coup in the nation’s modern history, justi-
fying the action in terms of loyalty to NATO and to anti-communism. (The
nation had joined NATO in 1952.) The new regime executed the Prime
Minister and two other leading politicians. Unrest and leftist agitation led to a
second coup in 1971, followed by martial law and repression, and yet another
military takeover took place in 1980. Again, the Western alliance emerges as a
two-tier framework, where some states fell far short of democratic principles.
Italy was another setting for recurrent plots. Facing strong Communist and
left-wing pressure, Rightists agitated for an authoritarian or even fascist take-
over on the lines of the Greek coup of 1967, and one limited attempt was made
in 1970. From the late 1960s, the far right devised a radical approach by which
Italian democracy would be destabilized by terrorism and violent conflicts
between extremists of different shades, through a “strategy of tension.” In the
1970s, extensive terrorist violence seemed to be implementing that strategy of
tension and came close to destroying the country’s democracy. Even in Italy,
the democratic system appeared tenuous.

Red Scare or Red Menace?

We might regard these exceptions as extreme or marginal, but even the core
Western nations experienced varying degrees of repression, and at times, events
that have been characterized as witch hunts or show trials. All those countries
recognized a quite authentic danger of subversion or penetration from the
Eastern Bloc, so that observing and restraining potential internal enemies was
considered to be essential. The dilemma was in deciding how far such highly
targeted operations might spill over into poisoning social values and demo-
cratic rights, as it certainly did on occasion. Because of that country’s cultural
power, many of the most celebrated instances occurred in the US, although
similar things happened elsewhere. American history in this era is sometimes
described in terms of anti-Communist paranoia, but while paranoia certainly
did exist, there was also a genuine threat.
130  P. JENKINS

In the 1930s and 1940s, many thousands of Americans joined the

Communist Party for a variety of reasons, many of which seem laudable today.
They supported international peace and disarmament, campaigned for the civil
rights of racial minorities, or favored labor movements and economic equality.
In modern language, they were progressives, a label that became a Communist
buzzword in the 1940s before entering general usage. In many areas, a
Communist social sphere offered a wide range of social and cultural activities.
At the same time, the US Communist Party (CPUSA) was compromised in its
subservience to Soviet policy and its close cooperation with Eastern Bloc agen-
cies and intelligence. The Party had a special category of clandestine members,
and some worked directly with Soviet spies. The Soviets heavily funded the
Party and its activities. A Soviet-oriented party genuinely was dangerous in the
world as it developed after 1946, with the ever-growing likelihood of war. It
was not difficult to imagine domestic Communists serving as spies or saboteurs
against the US war effort. That prospect was all the more perilous given the
strong Communist presence in labor unions, in key centers of war production,
and major cities.
From 1947 onward, US authorities at all levels of government passed ever-­
harsher laws against Communism and undertook investigations of Communist
organizations and fronts. In 1947, President Truman’s Executive Order 9835
introduced a systematic loyalty program to identify and remove subversives
from federal employment. The list of presumed subversives was systematized in
the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, with its wide range of
Communist-associated front groups. As in contemporary Europe, labor unions
were a principal ideological battlefield. When the Taft-Hartley Act reformed
US labor relations, it penalized unions whose officials would not publicly reject
Communist Party membership. That was a blow to the more radical and mili-
tant union association, the Confederation of Industrial Organizations (CIO),
where Communists remained powerful at all levels. This was sensitive because
the labor movement was such a critical source of votes and funds for the
Democratic Party. By 1949, CIO leaders had removed most Communists from
positions of power and expelled several stubbornly leftist unions.
Anti-Communist investigations reached new heights in 1949–1950. In
1950, the Internal Security Act (the McCarran Act) required all members of
Communist or Communist-controlled organizations to register with the
Justice Department, and a clause gave the government emergency powers to
intern Communists if they posed a threat of espionage or sabotage. Hence the
scathing description of this law as a Concentration Camp Act. Congress passed
the law over President Truman’s veto. The US Justice Department also under-
took a criminal investigation of Communist Party leaders. In 1949, the US
prosecuted 11 leaders of the US Communist Party under the 1940 Smith Act
that prohibited “advocating the overthrow of the US Government.”1 That case
resulted in a series of appeals and subsidiary trials that lasted for nine years. In

1
 The Smith Act, 76th United States Congress, 3d session, Ch. 439, 54 Stat. 670, 18 U.S.C. § 2385.
 8  NATIONAL SECURITY AND REPRESSION  131

1951, the US Supreme Court upheld the convictions. In 1954, the Communist
Control Act prohibited the Party and criminalized membership in the Party
itself or its controlled organizations.

HUAC and McCarthy
Since the 1930s, the US Congress had organized well-publicized legislative
investigations into foreign subversion within the US.  In 1945, the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) became a permanent com-
mittee, and it became a critical theater for exposing Communism in unions, the
media, and many aspects of American life. In 1947, the group addressed
Communist influence in the influential motion picture industry, focusing on a
group of filmmakers and writers called the Hollywood Ten. This began a period
of blacklisting known or suspected Communists in the movie industry, which
did not relax until the 1960s.
HUAC’s proceedings acquired a predictable and even ritualistic quality.
Simply refusing to answer a question resulted in contempt charges, with severe
criminal penalties. Witnesses could rely on the Fifth Amendment to the US
Constitution—hence the notorious phrase so often repeated in these hearings,
“I’ll take the Fifth.” That however had the effect of making them appear
obstructive, or even admitting that they were concealing sinister behavior. The
only alternative was to make a humiliating surrender to the Committee’s
authority and to prove full repentance from a Communist past by naming
names, by denouncing old friends and associates.
Besides the celebrated HUAC, many individual states formed comparable
investigative bodies and pursued their own investigations. One trial of many
suggests the issues at stake and the delicate balance between civil liberties and
the legitimate defense of national security. Born in Croatia, Steve Nelson
became a US citizen. From the 1920s, he became a leading figure in the
CPUSA, and he served with distinction in the Spanish Civil War. He was a
courier and later agent for the NKVD, tasked with finding information about
the Manhattan Project, and was in contact with some scientists in that project.
The widow of one of his close friends from Spain married J Robert Oppenheimer,
who later headed the Manhattan Project. By any reasonable standard, Nelson
was a grave security threat. In 1950, at the height of the fighting in Korea,
Pittsburgh authorities raided the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Communist
Party, prosecuting Nelson and others for sedition. A federal trial followed, but
the cases collapsed in 1957, and Nelson was freed.
Such investigations made for sensational media reporting, including in the
new medium of television. The foundation they offered for public visibility was
exploited by Joseph McCarthy, US Senator from Wisconsin, who in 1950 gave
an incendiary speech at Wheeling, West Virginia. Beyond declaring that the US
State Department was filled with active Communists, he claimed to have a list
naming those malefactors. McCarthy parlayed this sudden fame to begin
sweeping investigations of the allegedly disloyal, using wild tactics of
132  P. JENKINS

innuendo, guilt by association, and falsehoods. His rash demagoguery became

still more brazen in 1953 when he chaired the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations. The term “McCarthyism” came to signify not just fanatical
and unreasoning anti-Communism but a willingness to taint and destroy inno-
cent people with baseless charges.
McCarthy was aspiring for still greater national power, and presumably the
presidency. Although few critics were courageous enough to resist him pub-
licly, the Senator’s career ended in 1954, following a television expose by com-
mentator Edward Murrow. The Senate censured McCarthy, who lost his
primary power base, but who retained very wide public popularity. It was his
methods, not his cause, that were condemned. In the following years, the
courts increasingly expanded the rights of free speech and dissent, and also
limited the aggressive power of Congressional committees to investigate politi-
cal movements and personal behaviors. The weakening of the legal arsenal
against dissent proved vital to the emergence of the mass anti-war protest
movements of the following decade.

Witch Hunts?
Popular revulsion against McCarthy found a literary echo in Arthur Miller’s
1953 lauded play The Crucible, which ostensibly concerned the Salem witch
trials of 1692, but which was commonly recognized as a thinly veiled attack on
McCarthyism. But that witch-hunt analogy is troubling in its implication that
the various investigations were attacking individuals who were blameless or
innocent. Particularly in the late 1940s, the great majority of those targeted
genuinely were Communists, and many were keenly active in the Party and in
many associated organizations. Some, like Steve Nelson, really were for-
eign agents.
The power of the witch-hunt theme must be understood in light of later
official investigations of US Communism, which proceeded after the CPUSA
had been virtually destroyed. Although the Party continued after 1954, it was
irreversibly weakened, and its activities were subject to intense surveillance.
Law enforcement agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), thoroughly penetrated party structures, persuading or coercing many
activists to inform on its doings. That included some highly placed individuals
in the Party leadership, including figures who channeled Soviet funds to the
CPUSA, and who laundered its money. In 1956, the FBI formed a Counter-­
Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, to disrupt and discredit the Party, to
encourage schisms and defections. That program provided the matrix for later
efforts against radicals and anti-war protesters, including most notoriously
Martin Luther King Jr. Witnessing the later exposure of official misbehavior
against domestic dissidents of all shades, liberals and radicals saw no reason to
think that matters had been any different during the earlier anti-Communist
years, which were presented as a baseless witch hunt. Particularly during the
1970s, a considerable outpouring of books and films depicted the years of the
 8  NATIONAL SECURITY AND REPRESSION  133

Red Scare wholly in those terms, focusing especially on creative artists and film-
makers ruined by official sanctions.
In popular media, the Red Scare was analyzed alongside other forms of
“Cold War paranoia,” of numbing conformity and repression. That approach
dominated the study of the popular culture productions of the time, especially
the horror and science fiction films that so regularly depicted an America under
siege by monstrous alien beings. The 1956 science fiction film Invasion of the
Body Snatchers showed the inhabitants of a small city being taken over by sinis-
ter aliens who appear in pods, but who grow to assume their shapes and absorb
their identities. At the time, the pod beings were probably intended to symbol-
ize Communist infiltrators. In most later writing, however, the story is usually
taken as an allegory of anti-Communist paranoia, as rational people fall prey to
McCarthyite vigilantism, and individualism falls to Red Scare conformity.

The West and Anti-Communism

The focus on US affairs detracts from the comparable phenomena that were
occurring in other Western countries through these same years. No other
country produced a crusading figure anything like as swashbuckling or sensa-
tional as McCarthy, that was partly a matter of different national traditions or
political behavior. It reflected the much greater American use of television as a
mass medium years before other nations.
Other countries severely restricted Communist activities. The Communist
threat was evident in the new West Germany, where adherents were not numer-
ous: the Party received less than 6 percent of the vote in the first Bundestag
elections in 1949. Yet the new country was a frontline state constantly facing
the danger of war, and in any such vision, domestic Communists were viewed
as allies or tools of the east. The government restricted the employment of
Communists, who were subjected to many political limitations. West German
law penalized those who rejected democracy and peaceful means of change, a
law originally designed against Nazis, but which was applied to Communists.
In 1956, the Federal Constitutional Court banned the German Communist
Party on those grounds. West German internal security was in the hands of the
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the BfV or
Verfassungsschutz. Throughout the Cold War, this engaged in extensive surveil-
lance of radicals and potential subversives, a statement that was true of all
nations. Those operations involved placing infiltrators and sleeper agents inside
subversive parties and movements.
Other countries too had their anti-Communist activism. Britain never
responded to Communism on anything like the American model, and many
Americans harmed by anti-Communism policies in their television and film
found refuge in this country. But Britain did implement many policies against
Communists as individuals, and organizations, and Communists were removed
from sensitive positions. Like the FBI, internal security agencies such as MI5
kept the Communist Party under close surveillance, and thoroughly penetrated
134  P. JENKINS

the organization by means of infiltrators and informants. The near total access
that the authorities had to the Party’s innermost secrets contributed powerfully
to the fact that the British never contemplated banning the movement. A
banned party would be forced underground, where its activities would be far
more difficult to track.
A similar picture emerges of other key countries in the Alliance. Canada
banned its Communist Party in 1940 because of the Soviet non-alignment pact
with the Nazis. After the war, Communist activities continued through the
Labor-Progressive Party, a transparent front, which elected a number of
Members of Parliament and public officials. However, Party activities remained
heavily constrained. In 1957, American investigations of highly placed subver-
sives briefly spilled over into the country when the US Senate’s Internal Security
Subcommittee charged a Canadian diplomat, Edward Norman, as a subversive
threat. Norman’s subsequent suicide stirred public outrage and led the
Canadian government to threaten to refuse future security cooperation with
the US.  Despite their close alliance, different standards prevailed in the two
countries.
Also closely aligned to Britain was Australia, where debates over Communism
produced one of the country’s most celebrated national debates. In 1940,
Australia had like Canada attempted to ban the Communist Party, but unsuc-
cessfully. Communism continued to concern the political right after the war,
largely because the Party’s strong position in certain key unions would make it
dangerous in the event of a new war. Following the 1949 election, the new
Liberal-Country government dissolved and banned the Party through legisla-
tion, which the Supreme Court overturned in 1951. The government then
sought to change the Constitution to grant it the necessary powers, which
meant securing national approval in a referendum. That referendum became a
far-reaching debate about party and class loyalties, but also about fundamental
values of civil liberties and free speech. As in other countries, the Catholic
church was a key voice in the anti-Communist cause. Despite furious cam-
paigning, the referendum rejected dissolving the Communist Party by a paper-­
thin majority of just 50.6 percent.
Orwell’s 1984 imagined the world divided into three rival super-states, each
absolutely repressive and totalitarian, morally and politically indistinguishable
from each other. Projecting three, rather than two, superpowers was quite
prophetic for the time, but the political vision bore little resemblance to the
real world of the emerging Cold War. Quite apart from the conduct of any
individual politician or bureaucrat, Eastern and (most) Western states were
divided fundamentally by their social organizations, with totalitarianism in the
east and complex civil societies in the west, with multiple independent and
competing structures, each with its public voice. We must be struck by how
frequently Western courts struck down over-broad anti-Communist legisla-
tion, even at the direst times of public panic or even hysteria. However flawed
they might be, and however vulnerable they sometimes appeared, those dem-
ocratic structures gave the core Western nations immense advantages over
their Communist rivals.
 8  NATIONAL SECURITY AND REPRESSION  135

Further Reading

For Soviet repression, see for example Michael David-Fox ed., The Soviet Gulag
(2016); and compare Molly Pucci, Security Empire: The Secret Police in
Communist Eastern Europe (2020).
Anti-Communist purges in the West have been exhaustively examined. Some
important recent American examples include Thomas Doherty, Show Trial:
Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018), and Larry Tye,
Demagogue (2020) on Joseph McCarthy. Harvey Klehr studies The
Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History (2010).
Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse describe parallels to the US experience in
Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State,
1945–1957 (1994).
Repression in Western-allied Global South nations has been widely discussed.
See for instance Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran second edi-
tion (2018), or Jeremy Seal, A Coup in Turkey (2021).
Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions
and State Violence (2016).
 CHAPTER 9

Spies, Saboteurs, and Defectors

In 1951, a US court convicted Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for spying for the
Soviet Union, activity that involved passing crucial nuclear secrets. The two
were sentenced to death in the electric chair, which was eventually carried out
at Sing Sing prison in June 1953. Critics cited the case as a glaring example of
injustice and intolerance, which proved so potent because the couple seemed
so ordinary. Ethel was a young mother, typical of so many other urban Jewish
families, who was presented as a martyr to “Red Scare paranoia.” The Rosenberg
affair became a worldwide cause celebre, which attracted such celebrities as
Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre. Mass protests occurred in many nations,
as the campaign to save the couple from execution offered a huge propaganda
advantage to the Soviets and to Communists worldwide. The case later fea-
tured in many fictional works, including E. L. Doctorow’s novel The Book of
Daniel (1977), which became a popular 1983 film. In Tony Kushner’s play
Angels in America (1991–1993), Ethel’s ghost appears to confront and com-
fort the fanatical anti-Communist Roy Cohn, who had prosecuted her.
By the end of the twentieth century, there was no question  that both
Rosenbergs were indeed guilty of the espionage with which they were charged,
although it is possible to debate the infliction of the death penalty. The impor-
tance of their activities is questionable. Although their work assisted Soviet
nuclear efforts, they alone did not “give Russia the Bomb.”1 But beyond this,
the case demonstrates the reality of espionage, variously defined, as a factor in
Cold War conflict. It shows the powerful cultural and symbolic dimensions of
such activity, which were comparable to any military advantage that might have
been gained. Spies and secret agents defined Cold War culture.

 Quoted in J. Sorkin, Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature
1

(New York: Popular Press, 1989), 117–118.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 137

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_9
138  P. JENKINS

Knowing About the Enemy

Espionage and intelligence gathering are as old as warfare itself, and most of
their standard functions long predated the Cold War. Spies observed and tried
to appropriate the military technology of rival nations. They tried to determine
the intentions of enemy commanders and leaders, which could be at least as
important as stealing some new weapon system. In the context of the Cold
War, the great majority of that activity was strictly technological and electronic
in nature, but as we will see, that still allowed plenty of room for human activ-
ity, for the kind of culture of betrayal that emerges in so many of the notorious
spy cases of the era.
The nuclear standoff relied on highly sophisticated means of surveillance
and reconnaissance, in order to determine what the adversary was doing or
planning at any given moment. Each side needed information on the number,
quality, and location of enemy weapons so that they could be targeted in time
of war. More urgently, they needed to be alert for any signs that those weapons
were being prepared for an actual attack. Most scenarios for future wars envis-
aged the decisive battles occurring within days or at most weeks of an initial
attack. Such tight timing made it essential for each side to know its enemy’s
intentions precisely. Might an apparent mobilization, whether by NATO or the
Warsaw Pact, represent a standard wargame, or was it a prelude to a full-scale
invasion? If it was indeed the latter, then that gave very little time to prepare an
effective response, and literally, hours could count.
Through the twentieth century, major military powers had increasingly
come to rely on technological means to obtain such information. Each army
read the signals circulated within enemy forces, and when possible decoded
them to discover enemy plans. Signals intelligence—SIGINT—includes both
direct communications between people (COMINT) and other forms of non-­
direct electronic signals. During the Second World War, British decoders work-
ing at the legendary Bletchley Park had won great victories in reading coded
German signals and broken their ENIGMA (ULTRA) codes. Knowing German
intentions and capabilities proved a war-winning strategy, although we must
recall that other sides too had their own successes, and the Germans and Soviets
fought a bitter signals war. The need to decode enemy signals gave a powerful
boost to sophisticated means of electronic technology and promoted the emer-
gence of modern computing.
Throughout the Cold War, all the military powers used SIGINT as a crucial
component of policymaking and military planning. In 1952, US efforts were
consolidated into the National Security Agency, headquartered at Fort Meade,
Maryland. NSA became a massive and heavily funded organization that
employed tens of thousands. The US used many means of gathering intelli-
gence, establishing multiple facilities, and listening centers around the world.
Although many remain secret, the enterprise finds an evocative memorial in
Berlin’s Teufelsberg, the “Devil’s Mountain,” the surviving site of the prime
NSA listening station in this pivotal border city. Initially, intelligence-gathering
 9  SPIES, SABOTEURS, AND DEFECTORS  139

activities against the Soviets relied on aircraft flying close to Soviet air space or
within it, although these were vulnerable to attack. From the mid-1960s, these
were supplemented and then largely replaced  by elaborately equipped
submarines.
SIGINT was critical to every international struggle of these years, from the
Korean and Indo-China wars onward. Although the US primarily targeted its
Communist adversaries, it monitored the communications of neutral and
friendly countries. The work of this agency long remained highly secret, to the
point that its activities were commonly denied: the acronym NSA was said to
stand for No Such Agency. The British counterpart was the Government
Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), which was equally shy of public
attention.
The Soviets maintained their own  equivalent operations, working respec-
tively under the KGB and the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie,
Military Intelligence). By the 1970s, Soviet efforts were much larger than
those of the US in terms of the number of individuals involved: perhaps
350,000 personnel against 70,000 Americans. Like the US, the Soviets oper-
ated an extensive worldwide network in friendly countries. Among the most
important of its overseas facilities was that at Lourdes in Cuba, established in
1962 and located conveniently close to US territory.

Surveillance and Reconnaissance
Enemy nuclear weapons were naturally central to all such efforts at intelligence
gathering. Beyond the immediate threat of war, detailed information of enemy
capacities was essential to any kind of arms control or reduction. Any and all
negotiations depended on accurate knowledge of the number of warheads and
delivery systems controlled by either side, and for obvious reason, neither
superpower was willing to accept the sworn word of its rival about such mat-
ters. Such information could be obtained by random physical inspection by
teams allowed to wander the enemy’s territory freely to gauge compliance with
treaty agreements, but the Soviets were deeply reluctant to contemplate such
an approach. The only other alternative was surveillance from the skies, or from
space, which became a fundamental fact of the nuclear age.
The US developed a highly secret program to supply aerial photographs of
Soviet territory, a project that was difficult given the Soviet willingness to attack
any aircraft that ventured near its territory. The main solution was the Lockheed
U-2, which was designed to fly at 70,000 feet, far above the capacity of most
air defenses then available. The first U-2 entered service in 1956 and carried
out flights across Eastern Bloc and Soviet territory. The intelligence gained
allowed the US to gain crucial information about Soviet resources, and dis-
proved claims about the alleged “bomber gap” and “missile gap.” However,
the surveillance project detonated an international crisis in 1960, when a
surface-­to-air missile brought down a U-2 over the USSR and the Soviets cap-
tured its pilot, Gary Powers. That event poisoned relations between the then
140  P. JENKINS

US leader Eisenhower and Khrushchev, who had, over the previous year, devel-
oped a good working relationship; this event also derailed the vital Four Power
Summit scheduled to be held in Paris. Other U-2 reconnaissance missions were
critical to the outcome of the Cuban confrontation in 1962.
In these same years, the Americans turned to space-based reconnaissance,
with the CORONA program introduced in 1959. That project became still
more urgent following the loss of Gary Powers’ U-2. Satellites supplied visuals
of astonishing clarity, allowing the Americans to observe the Communist pow-
ers through a metaphorical keyhole—hence the KH acronym used for succes-
sive launches. A total of 144 such satellites were launched. Between 1971 and
1986, the center of activity shifted to the KH-9 Hexagon or Big Bird, a series
of superbly accurate photographic reconnaissance satellites. Space-based sur-
veillance was the function of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
founded in 1961, and at the time considered far more secret even than the
NSA. Suggesting the continuing importance of space-based surveillance, the
mere fact of NRO’s existence remained classified until 1992.
The US devoted much effort to obtaining physical examples of East Bloc
equipment, to understand the enemy’s resources. One astonishing example of
such  activity occurred in 1974 when US ships sought to retrieve a nuclear-­
armed Soviet missile submarine that had sunk deep in the Pacific Ocean some
years before. The resulting effort, Project Azorian, demanded technological
expertise on a scale that has been compared to the Moon landing.

The Human Factor

The colossal investment in electronic intelligence gathering might suggest that
the human element had become irrelevant, but that would not be accurate.
Human spies were involved in gaining access to enemy signal systems. No less
important, spies could tell a country what their enemies did or did not know
about its affairs. Those tasks gave immense weight to the activities of intelli-
gence of all kinds, including deep penetration agents and defectors, who could
supply their employers with the data they needed to make accurate assessments.
To take one example, SIGINT and aerial reconnaissance supplied the West
with invaluable information about the Soviet missiles in Cuba. But scarcely less
important in this crisis was the work of one agent in place, Oleg Penkovsky, a
colonel in Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. From 1961, Penkovsky was
working for British MI6, which shared information with the Americans. Much
of it proved invaluable, showing for instance that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was
considerably smaller and less combat-ready than had been supposed. In 1962,
Penkovsky supplied detailed information about the Soviet missiles then being
installed in Cuba. He was arrested on October 22, as the crisis was approaching
its height, and executed the following year. About the same time as Penkovsky
was recruited, the US secured the services of another well-placed GRU officer,
Dmitri Polyakov, who remained active until his retirement in 1980. For an
amazing 20 years, Polyakov maintained a flow of information that made him
 9  SPIES, SABOTEURS, AND DEFECTORS  141

one of the West’s best sources in the Cold War. Among other things, he con-
firmed the genuineness and depth of the split between the Soviets and China,
which contributed to President Nixon’s decision to seek a détente with China
in 1971–1972. Polyakov was eventually arrested and executed in 1986.
The Soviets, likewise, had their sources, who contributed to undermining
the West’s technological advantages. Among the most effective was naval offi-
cer John Walker, who worked for the Soviets from 1968 through 1985. Among
many other treasures, his information helped the Soviets determine where US
submarines would be at any given time, a fact that would be immeasurably
significant in the event of actual combat.

Signals Versus Humans

Other cases suggest the limitations of even the most advanced technologies of
intelligence gathering. After the end of the Second World War, the Americans
had been highly successful in breaking the codes of Soviet military and indus-
trial agencies, giving them an excellent sense of Soviet strengths and weak-
nesses.  For several years, however, an American cryptanalyst named William
Weisband had been working for the Soviets and kept them informed about
those successes. In 1948, the Soviets undertook defensive measures, changing
all the exposed codes, and effectively turning out the light that the US had
used to observe its workings.
In Britain, George Blake was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service,
MI6, at the end of the Second World War, and became an experienced officer.
At some point, he became a Communist, possibly during his captivity by North
Korean forces during the Korean War. Throughout the 1950s, he kept his
Soviet handlers informed of British activities against them, and of Communist
agents they had recruited. His greatest achievement in that cause came in
Berlin in the mid-1950s when Western forces dug a tunnel into East Berlin to
tap into the landline communication of Soviet armed forces. Although this
scheme, Operation Gold, was widely cited as a Western triumph, the fact that
Blake betrayed its existence meant that the West received only the information
that the Soviets chose to let them have. The fact of human betrayal, of treason,
sabotaged any potential technological advantage.
Scarcely less significant was the case of William Martin and Bernon Mitchell,
two NSA cryptologists. In 1960, the two defected to the Soviets, giving them
extensive information about agency activities. In a news conference, the two
exposed NSA activities worldwide, including actions against friendly or allied
nations. Besides the actual intelligence payoff of the defection, the Soviets won
an immense propaganda victory.
The fact that such intelligence gathering was and long remained so secretive
has largely shaped our view of the espionage cases and defections of the era.
Not until the 1970s was a detailed account of ENIGMA published in English.
Although Western governments and media denounced the treachery of Blake,
Weisband, or Martin and Mitchell, they could scarcely do so in a way that
142  P. JENKINS

accurately reflected the centrality of signals and electronic intelligence to poli-

cymaking, nor could they indicate just how damaging those betrayals had been.
Even after Weisband was arrested, concern about the hyper-sensitive nature of
SIGINT meant that a public trial would be too dangerous, so that he escaped
prosecution for his most serious activities. Hence, a case like his or that of
Martin and Mitchell attracted nothing like the interest in popular culture that
it might otherwise have done.
The explosive sensitivity of such technologies shaped, and misshaped, popu-
lar perceptions of espionage. In such an environment, countries faced the
dilemma of explaining how they had acquired particular information, and in
some cases, that meant giving disproportionate importance to human intelli-
gence, to spies and spy rings—to real-life versions of James Bond. That con-
tributed to the Cold War mythos of the secret agent.

False Flags
Beyond gathering intelligence, spies could affect the behavior of enemy powers
in many ways. As agents in place within enemy countries, they could mount
propaganda or even shape policy. Through proxies and surrogates, they carried
out actions to destabilize or discredit rivals. Such actions were all the more
important when the nuclear threat made it impossible for nations to risk overt
acts of war, but they could inflict a great deal of damage on rivals through clan-
destine and deniable means. That included disinformation and propaganda but
also more direct forms of provocation.
To take one illustration from many, in 1967, a West Berlin police officer shot
and killed a student during a violent protest. The incident was traumatic for
democratic West Germany, and it sparked the student mass movement that
would become so powerful in the tumultuous year of 1968 and over the fol-
lowing decade. Decades later, it emerged that the police officer responsible was
a Communist who was working with the East German secret police, the Stasi,
although it is not certain that the shooting was specifically commanded by that
agency. If it was a deliberate provocation, it succeeded beyond any reasonable
expectation. This is not to say that the student movement would not have
emerged without the backing of Communist agencies, or that the movement
would not have developed its terrorist fringe. But this direct human interven-
tion contributed to weakening a crucial member of the Western alliance. Spies
and secret agents really could affect national policy.

Double Agents
Some cases of espionage and infiltration became so celebrated that they shaped
popular interpretations of the Cold War, and left a significant mark on popular
culture. In turn, they guided the conduct of future investigations.
Britain produced one of the most significant examples in the case of the
Cambridge Ring of Five, which had its roots in the Communist upsurge of the
 9  SPIES, SABOTEURS, AND DEFECTORS  143

1930s. Like many young people of the time, a group of undergraduates at

Cambridge University joined the Communist movement and, in this instance,
were drawn into active espionage for the Soviet Union. Some held positions of
real power. Guy Burgess worked for MI6 and held an influential role in the
BBC; Donald Maclean was a prominent diplomat who was well informed on
Anglo-US relations during the post-war period; Harold “Kim” Philby was a
senior officer in MI6. As a wartime officer in the domestic security agency MI5,
Anthony Blunt gained access to details of German military plans and intelli-
gence activities, which he passed to the Soviets. John Cairncross worked at the
decoding center at Bletchley Park and later joined MI6.
All these spies and agents were thus in an excellent position to observe and
sabotage Western efforts against the USSR, to expose Western agents and clan-
destine operations, and to promote Soviet interests and propaganda. In 1949,
a British attempt to organize guerrilla warfare activities against the Communist
regime of Albania failed catastrophically, largely because Philby was one of its
key organizers. He might even have told the Soviets when the Americans were
bluffing about potentially using nuclear weapons in Korea. In 1951, the defec-
tion of Burgess and MacLean to the Soviets provided the additional bonus of
poisoning Anglo-US relations and intelligence cooperation. Further scandals
followed when Philby defected in 1963, and again in the late 1970s, with the
exposure of Blunt. Fairly or otherwise, all contributed to an image of British
weakness and incompetence and of Soviet brilliance.
Over and above their intrinsic significance, the stories of the Cambridge Five
had an inordinate impact on popular culture, sparking and sustaining interest
in the world of secret agents, and raising popular awareness of the clandestine
world of deception and betrayal. The Cambridge spies were depicted more or
less openly in countless novels and films, although their actual importance was
arguably far less than figures like George Blake. Through the 1960s, interest in
that underworld was further driven by frequent new revelations of spies and
penetration agents, with the arrest of numerous “rings.” Ordinary consumers
of news regularly witnessed the exchanges of each side’s prisoners that occurred
in Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie or the city’s Glienicke Bridge.
Other countries too had their harrowing revelations of treason and penetra-
tion. Germany was a natural setting for such stories, because of the intimate
connections between Communist and Western areas, and the close family ties
crossing the emerging border. The first president of the West German security
agency (BfV) was Otto John, who in 1954 suddenly disappeared to the
Communist East, in an apparent defection. He returned the following year,
claiming that he had been abducted. The West Germans convicted him of trea-
son, but the details of the case remain murky. In 1974, it became known that
one of the personal assistants to German Chancellor Willy Brandt was a Stasi
agent, a revelation that forced Brandt’s resignation.
144  P. JENKINS

American Spies
Spy scandals in the US not only had a huge social impact but repeatedly
reshaped national politics. Some of the most sensational such cases coincided
closely with the investigations described in the previous chapter and naturally
affected perceptions of the disloyalty of domestic Communists.
During the war years, the US had developed its nuclear capability through
the Manhattan Project, which was based at Los Alamos, New Mexico. This
facility was kept under the highest possible security, but later investigation
showed how vulnerable it had been to Soviet penetration. The “Atom Spies”
included a remarkably large cohort of individuals. Among the most important
was the German-born British physicist Klaus Fuchs, who supplied the Soviets
with key intelligence about the amount of uranium or plutonium that the
Americans would use for their bombs. It is still debated whether his informa-
tion laid the foundation for the later hydrogen bomb. The British tried and
convicted him in 1950. But Fuchs was far from alone. Only in the late 1990s
was it confirmed that another physicist, Theodore Hall, had been a vital Soviet
source of nuclear information for the Soviets. Hall reportedly was anxious to
avoid any one power having a monopoly of the nuclear secret.
Another key figure was David Greenglass, who formed a spy network with
his sister Ethel and her husband Julius Rosenberg. The courier for Greenglass’
material was Harry Gold, who performed the same role for Klaus Fuchs. The
Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950, alongside many other investigations and
arrests in that key year. Sentencing them to death, the judge, Irving Kaufman,
virtually accused them of being accomplices to mass murder. By placing the
nuclear bomb in Soviet hands years earlier than would otherwise have been
possible, the Rosenbergs had directly caused “the Communist aggression in
Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that
millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.”2
Another scandalous case involved the head of the Manhattan Project,
J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had many Communists in his circle of
friends and family, including some who were involved in espionage. He admit-
ted those contacts in HUAC hearings in 1949, and subsequent research sug-
gest that he resisted blandishments to work for the Russians. Concerns were
revived in the McCarthy years, and in a sensational hearing in 1954, he was
deprived of his security clearance. The case sharply divided America’s scientific
community, as some of the impeccably anti-Communist credentials defended
Oppenheimer. Particularly damaging was the hostile testimony of Edward
Teller, the father of the US hydrogen bomb.

2
 Quoted in Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage
and America’s Traitors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
 9  SPIES, SABOTEURS, AND DEFECTORS  145

VENONA
Since the 1920s, the Soviets had operated intelligence operations in the
US. The sheer scale of those ventures was revealed by the VENONA program,
which was only publicly acknowledged in 1995, and it has been the subject of
much subsequent scholarship. VENONA was a successful effort by US intelli-
gence agencies, together with British, Canadian, and Australian allies, to deci-
pher the secret communications of their Soviet counterparts from the
mid-1940s onward. The project produced a vast trove of information that
pointed to legions of Soviet spies operating in the West. In virtually every case,
agents were identified only by code names, but these could be penetrated easily
enough by incidental information about times, places, and travels. Even so,
many cables remain unbroken, and hundreds of agents’ names still cannot be
convincingly associated with named individuals. Most presumably died unde-
tected and unpunished.
The VENONA documents leave no doubt about the scale of Soviet espio-
nage and the existence of high-level defectors and agents of influence. If
Franklin Roosevelt had died between 1941 and 1944, his successor would have
been Vice President Henry Wallace, who had identified Laurence Duggan as
his favored candidate for Secretary of State and Harry Dexter White as his
Treasury Secretary. VENONA records reveal that both were Soviet agents. So
was senior OSS officer Maurice Halperin. So was President Roosevelt’s aide
Lauchlin Currie. This suggests a degree of successful penetration at least com-
parable to anything the Soviets achieved in Britain. Harry Dexter White was a
key architect of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement that laid the foundation
for the post-war financial system.
One still controversial case involved Alger Hiss, who enjoyed a distinguished
career in several agencies under the Roosevelt administration, culminating in a
position in the State Department. In that role, he attended the 1945 Yalta
conference and was involved in the establishment of the United Nations. In
1948, former Communist Whittaker Chambers alleged that he and Hiss had
both been members of a clandestine Communist cell in the 1930s, which had
as its goal the infiltration of the US government. In 1950, Hiss was convicted
of perjury and received a prison sentence. Prominent on the Congressional
investigation was Richard Nixon, whose efforts made him a rising star for the
Republican right and ensured his candidacy as Vice President on the 1952
Republican ticket. Nixon would, of course, be a deeply controversial figure,
and his role in the case reinforced a general sense among liberal observers that
Hiss had been falsely accused. As with the Rosenbergs, Hiss’ case inspired
much later writing, and as with those other suspects, his guilt would later be
confirmed. Hiss had been named as a likely Soviet agent by several defectors,
and the VENONA documents reveal the existence of an agent called ALES,
who was probably Hiss. Although Hiss still has his defenders, the overwhelm-
ing weight of evidence points to his guilt and to Chambers’ truthfulness.
146  P. JENKINS

The Mole Hunts

If some alleged spies were genuinely guilty, others might be falsely accused, and
false charges tainted and disrupted the US intelligence community. Central to
the story was the highly experienced intelligence officer James J.  Angleton,
who served as Counter-Intelligence chief from 1954 through 1975. Angleton
was convinced that US and Western agencies had been the target of successful
East Bloc penetrations much like the British intelligence services. His investiga-
tions created an atmosphere of internal dissent and, on occasion, real paranoia.
Through the Cold War years, the US received many East Bloc defectors of
varying degrees of importance, and some proved very valuable. One, for
instance, exposed George Blake as a Soviet spy. Even so, Angleton was deeply
worried that some of these defectors might still be working for their original
Soviet employers. That impression was confirmed in 1961 when a new KGB
defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, told of extensive Soviet penetration of the CIA and
other agencies. He warned that the Soviets would send multiple false defectors
to discredit him. Throughout, he stressed the role of Soviet disinformation and
deception. Angleton thoroughly accepted Golitsyn’s interpretation, beginning
several years of intense searching for the Soviet moles, the deep penetration
agents allegedly in place within the CIA and other Western agencies. Golitsyn
even went on to argue that the political split between the USSR and China was
in fact a deep deception designed to undermine and confuse the West, a view
that became ever less probable as the years went on.
The roster of defectors grew in 1964 with the flight to the West of Yuri
Nosenko, a KGB officer who had been working with the West for two years.
He claimed to have personal knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald, whom he had
encountered during the latter’s defection to the Soviet Union. Nosenko
scorned any suggestion that the KGB might have regarded him as anyone of
importance, still less an active agent. That account was music to the ears of US
agencies who were anxious to downplay any possible Soviet role in the assassi-
nation, but Angleton saw Nosenko as a fake defector sent to spread disinforma-
tion. From that point of view, the question then arose why the Soviets were so
anxious to distance themselves from Oswald if in fact they had nothing to hide.
The CIA treated Nosenko cruelly, and he spent years in solitary confinement.
Angleton’s zeal to root out alleged Soviet moles even led him to suspect Henry
Kissinger, who between 1969 and 1977 served as National Security Advisor
and then as the US Secretary of State.
For several years, the CIA community suffered conflicts and rivalries over
the credentials and truthfulness of the various defectors, which resulted in bit-
ter inter-personal splits and deep factionalization. So gravely did these feuds
undermine the workings of the agency, and its overseas allies, that some even
suggested that James Angleton, the great mole-hunter, might himself be the
much-sought Soviet mole. He finally resigned from the agency in 1975. In the
same years, the FBI suffered a similar furor over the genuineness of another
Soviet defector, code-named FEDORA (Aleksey Isidorovich Kulak) who
 9  SPIES, SABOTEURS, AND DEFECTORS  147

offered his services to the agency in 1962. Like the CIA, the FBI spent years
seeking out moles in its own ranks.
The CIA’s internal struggles had a substantial impact on public opinion.
Different factions publicized their competing views through stories leaked to
friendly media outlets, where they were amplified through subsequent discus-
sion and speculation. Particularly during the 1970s, right-wing activists in the
US and Western Europe drew on the views of like-minded allies in the intelli-
gence community to portray the Soviet Union in the harshest and most con-
spiratorial terms. Such media debates brought the technical language of
intelligence and espi9onage into common parlance.
Partly reflecting CIA concerns, other Western intelligence agencies became
deeply concerned about possible Communist subversion in their own nations.
During the late 1960s, Angleton was convinced that the experienced Canadian
security officer Leslie James Bennett was himself a Soviet mole, and a lengthy
inquiry followed. Bennett was forced to resign, although no evidence was
found of his guilt, and he was subsequently exonerated. Other allegations
pointed to possible moles at high levels of government. In Great Britain, a
number of Members of Parliament certainly did have connections to Eastern
Bloc agencies, although their actual usefulness to their patrons was debatable.
Central to right-wing speculations was Harold Wilson, who served as Prime
Minister from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. In right-wing
mythology, he was an active agent of Eastern Bloc regimes, and he even owed
his leadership of the Labour Party to the clandestine murder of his predecessor
(That charge was also false). During the mid-1970s, dissident rightist members
of the British intelligence community carried out strenuous propaganda cam-
paigns against Wilson and his allies, promoting claims of an imminent coup
d’etat against the elected government.

Spies as Superheroes
Of its nature, the intelligence world is clandestine. Yet during the Cold War,
spies and their doings occupied center stage in popular consciousness, com-
monly as the warriors on the front lines of global struggles. Spies had a long
pedigree in literature, and even Sherlock Holmes had combated espionage at
the turn of the previous century. But new forms of mass media vastly enhanced
that popularity, and disseminated awareness of the language and thought-­
world of intelligence.
The most famous fictional exemplar was James Bond, who first appeared
combating Soviet agents in Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale. Bond
became a global sensation through a series of other novels and film adaptations.
President Kennedy was a devoted reader of Bond books, with From Russia
With Love as a special favorite. The triumphant successes of the Bond franchise
opened the door to countless other spy and secret agent heroes, some fantastic,
others painfully realistic. The well-informed John Le Carré offered a highly
nuanced view of the global conflict, and in his first literary hit—The Spy Who
148  P. JENKINS

Came in from the Cold (1963)—he presented Western agencies as scarcely less
sinister and manipulative than their Eastern counterparts. Le Carré echoed the
betrayals of Britain’s Cambridge spies in his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974),
which became enormously popular through film and television adaptations.
Spy stories, broadly defined, became a mainstay of popular culture in
Communist countries. Those included fictionalized glorifications of Felix
Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police system in the 1920s. Spy
themes were commonplace in East European cinema, in productions like the
Hungarian Fotó Háber (1963) or the Polish Rendezvous with a Spy (1964).
Western audiences would immediately recognize the characters and themes in
such productions, except that the political sides are reversed, with Western
agents as the evil enemies seeking to subvert Communist advances.
In the 1960s, Yulian Semyonov’s fictional series Seventeen Moments of Spring
told the story of Max Otto von Stierlitz, a Communist agent who infiltrated
the Nazi regime and ran a powerful intelligence operation throughout the war.
He targeted Americans who wanted to arrange a separate peace with Germany.
Although the subject matter predated the later East-West Cold War, it popular-
ized the work of the NKVD and glorified their campaigns against Western
infiltration and subversion. The series reinforced the popular Soviet theme of
the continuity between German Nazism and American Cold War aggression.
Von Stierlitz was often termed “the Soviet James Bond.” His fame became still
greater in 1973 when Seventeen Moments of Spring became a television series,
one of the most popular productions in Soviet television history. When describ-
ing his decision to enter the KGB, Vladimir Putin cited his deep interest in the
many popular works of spy fiction with which he grew up in the 1960s, best
represented by writers like Semyonov.

Did Spies Matter?

So central were spies of various kinds to popular images of the Cold War that it
must be asked just how important they actually were. It is easy to exaggerate
the role of such figures, especially in matters of the acquisition of weapons or
technology, but transfers of knowledge did not necessarily involve any clandes-
tine acts. The Americans regularly underestimated the technological skills of
their Soviet rivals, to the point of assuming that any dramatic breakthrough or
innovation must have been the product of espionage. In fact, the Soviets had
excellent engineers and scientists and were quite capable of reverse engineering
sophisticated Western aircraft or missiles. The Soviets, like the Americans, had
profited from the same body of German and Japanese wartime research.
In one almost humorous instance, the Soviets did not even have to resort to
devious means. In 1946, the Soviets were painfully aware of their inferiority to
Western nations in jet engines needed to power military aircraft. The best
engine available at the time was Britain’s Rolls-Royce Nene compressor turbo-
jet, and Soviet designers suggested obtaining examples through a simple com-
mercial transaction: why not just buy the engines? Stalin mocked the idea,
 9  SPIES, SABOTEURS, AND DEFECTORS  149

asking reasonably, “What fool will sell us his secrets?”3 But with little argu-
ment, the British government did in fact agree to sell the engines to the USSR,
which promptly reverse-engineered them, and produced excellent engines of
their own. Those Soviet engines powered the MiG-15 fighter, which came
close to dominating the skies over Korea. Few spies could have dreamed of
such a triumph by clandestine means.
Reinforcing the human element in this story, the fact that a country had
access to certain information said little about how they proposed to use it.
Through multiple means, including signals intelligence, the Soviets had repeat-
edly been informed that a German attack on their country was imminent in
June 1941, yet for whatever reasons, they chose to ignore that intelligence.
Even the best intelligence could achieve little when not combined with wise
policy decisions.
Accounts of Cold War espionage, fictional and factual, constitute an immense
library, but few ever give enough space to the failures of such ventures, when
even the cosmically large investments in intelligence gathering did not tell
nations some critical facts about their enemies. For all their sophistication,
Western intelligence services did a poor job of predicting such momentous
developments as the first Soviet nuclear test, the outbreak of the Korean War,
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. In
later years, the US over-estimated the strength of the Soviet economy. It is only
a little unfair to say that despite all their vast expenditures, the US knew abso-
lutely everything about the USSR in the 1980s except that it was about to
evaporate. Soviet analysts, in their turn, badly misjudged Western abilities and
intentions, notably when in the early 1980s many foresaw an imminent US
attack on the Soviet homeland. Each blunder in its way potentially threatened
horrific consequences.
Intelligence gathering and espionage were fundamental facts of the Cold
War, but they have to be kept in perspective.

Further Reading

The obvious romantic appeal of espionage and intelligence has attracted many
writers. Far more has been published on, for instance, the Cambridge Spies
than on several specific crises and wars of the Cold War era that killed many
thousands.
For intelligence operations in general, see James Callanan, Covert Action in the
Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations (2009); Thomas Rid,
Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political
Warfare (2020).

3
 Sebastien Roblin “Fact: Britain Helped Russia ‘Build’ Their MiG-15 Fighter Jet,” National
Interest August 26, 2020, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/fact-britain-helped-russia-
build-their-mig-15-fighter-jet-167663.
150  P. JENKINS

The world of electronic intelligence gathering is described in Stephen

Budiansky, Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence
War Against the Soviet Union (2017). For Britain, see John Ferris, Behind the
Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence
Agency (2020). Monte Reel explores surveillance in A Brotherhood of Spies:
The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War (2018); see also Casey Sherman and
Michael J. Tougias, Above and Beyond: John F. Kennedy and America’s Most
Dangerous Cold War Spy Mission (2018); Wayne D.  Cocroft and John
Schofield, Archaeology of the Teufelsberg: Exploring Western Electronic
Intelligence Gathering in Cold War Berlin (2019). James Hamilton-Paterson,
Blackbird: The Untouchable Spy Plane (2017) tells the story of the SR-71.
On the CIA, Randall B. Woods is the author of Shadow Warrior: William Egan
Colby and the CIA (2013). Jefferson Morley examines The Ghost: The Secret
Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (2017). For the Soviet intelli-
gence world, see Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors: A New
History of Soviet Intelligence (2015); and Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya
(2020). See also several important books by Christopher Andrew, such as
The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World
(with Vasili Mitrokhin, 2005). For Soviet espionage in the US, see John Earl
Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
(2000); John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The
Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2009); Howard Blum, In the Enemy’s
House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the
Russian Spies (2018); Marc Favreau, Spies: The Secret Showdown Between
America and Russia (2019).
On the British experience, see Andrew Lownie, Stalin’s Englishman: Guy
Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring (2016); Richard
Davenport-­Hines, Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the
Making of Modern Britain (2018); and Geoff Andrews, Agent Molière: The
Life of John Cairncross, the Fifth Man of the Cambridge Spy Circle (2020).
Other accounts of spectacular cases include Frank Close, Trinity: The Treachery
and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History (2019), on Klaus Fuchs; see
also Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs
(2020). Lori Clune discusses Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy
in a Cold War World (2016). Anne Sebba discusses Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold
War Tragedy (2021).
Among later cases, David E. Hoffman, The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of
Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (2015) tells the story of Adolf Tolkachev.
Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the
Cold War (2018) describes Oleg Gordievsky.
 CHAPTER 10

Cold War Cultures

In 1982, the documentary Atomic Café used American public information and
propaganda films to reconstruct the attitudes of the 1950s. The overall impres-
sion was of a deeply paranoid society, facing the menaces of nuclear war and the
Red Menace, yet at the same time unable to confront challenges in a realistic
way. An animation from the Duck and Cover film of 1952 showed Bert the
Turtle teaching children how to survive a nuclear attack by hiding under their
desks. Together with (often distorted) memories of McCarthyism and images
of unyielding social conformity, such themes have long dominated American
reconstructions of the Cold War as it affected everyday life. As with all stereo-
types, the picture contains some elements of truth, but even in the US context,
it conceals many nuances. Moreover, each different society had its own distinct
Cold War realities, and the nature of those impacts and perceptions changed
substantially over time. But often in surprising ways, the political and military
confrontation between East and West shaped many aspects of everyday reality,
even the most intimate.

A Militarized Order
To varying degrees, no one alive and conscious in these years could avoid some
familiarity with Cold War realities and imagery, at least if they had any access to
mass media. To take a year at random, we might choose 1954, when television
still remained a minority luxury outside the US, and most still found their news
through radio, newspapers, or the popular newsreels shown in cinemas. In
1954, the most shocking theme for consumers of news was the hydrogen
bomb tests in the Pacific, but other stories concerned the artillery combat
between the PRC and Taiwan, the revelation of the USSR’s Bison jet bomber,
the McCarthy hearings in the US, the coup in Guatemala, and the French
debacle in Indo-China. Images of war, revolution, and international

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 151

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945-1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_10
152  P. JENKINS

confrontation formed a threatening concatenation, with the nuclear menace

never far from the foreground. Those real-life news stories inspired countless
fictional works in novels and films.
Nuclear threats to homelands and civilians further meant that every citizen
was potentially a victim of enemy action. The military threat was manifested
in civil defense programs. Unlike Americans, virtually all Europeans in the
1950s had recent memories of threats from air raids and needed no convinc-
ing about the urgent necessity of shelters. Most European nations east and
west treated Civil Defense preparations very seriously, as cities built deep
bomb shelters on a vast scale, creating whole underground networks. On
both sides of the Atlantic, such programs left a significant mark in the above-
ground urban landscape through the signs directing people to shelters, com-
monly marked with nuclear symbols. At times of special international tension,
the urge to seek underground refuge became a popular fashion. Many ordi-
nary families constructed nuclear shelters in their basements, with supplies
intended to last for months. Such efforts were derided at the time, as they
stood no chance of withstanding a nuclear blast. They might however be
extremely useful in helping people ride out the worst of nuclear fallout, or of
post-war social disorder.
Through much of the confrontation, the fact of military service meant that
citizens of most nations would be directly involved in any potential conflict.
Mandatory military service of various kinds was a standard fact of European
life, including in democratic societies of the West, and many retained it long
afterward. Britain retained conscription (National Service) until 1960, and
Australia, until 1972. The US maintained a draft from 1940 through 1973 and
fought both the Korean and Vietnam wars with armies of draftees. The Vietnam
experience suggests the resistance and hostility that such forced service could
inspire.
But in all the societies affected, the fact of military service normalized and
mainstreamed military values, assumptions, and terminology and often brought
individuals to the front lines of real or potential war, in Europe or elsewhere.
That experience could not fail to make participants aware of the confrontations
in progress. British and Commonwealth soldiers fighting in the Malayan
Emergency knew their enemy simply as the CTs, or Communist Terrorists.
Soviet and Eastern Bloc soldiers in Europe underwent extensive political edu-
cation about their cause and that of their enemies, who were characterized as
imperialists, fascists, or revanchistes—that is, unrepentant Germans seeking to
regain the frontiers and ethnic maps of the Nazi era.

Domestic Impacts
The long decades of the Cold War coincided with enormous changes in the
ways of life and thought of all the societies involved, and it is rarely easy to
determine which of those might have been consequences or products of that
struggle. The fact that a trend occurred during the 1950s, say, does not of itself
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  153

mean that it should properly be linked to the international political dimension.

But in some matters, the connections are plausible, to the point of shaping how
ordinary people organized their families and individual lives. To take one
instance, Cold War realities influenced the higher education that became far
more widely available in many countries during these years. Governments
invested heavily in such education, and particularly in any aspects that would
benefit military research. In the US, the shock of early Soviet triumphs in space
led to what a Sputnik moment, when governments and higher education sys-
tems strongly encouraged careers in engineering and science. It became patri-
otic to enter an engineering career.
Other domestic impacts of the Cold War are debatable, but the linkages are
very plausible. In terms of gender themes, it is difficult not to view the era in
terms of powerful visions of manliness and masculine values, with the glorifica-
tion of every new technological system and a permanent quest for bigger and
better weaponry. In popular historical memory, the 1950s were a time of strict
social and sexual conformity, which was enforced by rigid sanctions against
experimentation of any kind. Across the Western countries, this was an era of
sharply defined gender roles and heavy social commitment to families.
Historically, high birth rates produced the famous Baby Boom generation,
which is defined as those born between 1945 and 1963.
That picture demands some qualification. For one thing, the baby boom of
itself raises questions about the sense of pessimism and foreboding with which
ordinary people supposedly viewed the world in the era of imminent nuclear
threat. The midpoint of that fertility surge in the mid-1950s corresponded
neatly to the dreadful publicity surrounding the arrival of the hydrogen bomb.
Can we deduce that having children in such numbers demonstrated some
degree of confidence in the future, even when living under the shadow of the
bomb? If the contraceptive Pill did not become available until 1960, other
forms of birth control had been thoroughly familiar for decades and had made
possible the “birth dearth” that alarmed governments during the 1930s. The
fact that families had so many children as they did in the 1950s says much
about the relative lack of opportunities available to women outside the domes-
tic setting and the limitations they faced in higher education and the workplace.
Cold War divisions of themselves can scarcely be blamed for the conservative
family and gender attitudes. By modern standards, all Western countries were
extremely conservative or reactionary in such matters long before 1945, and
the Second World War had only marked some degree of loosening. Only in
1944 did French women receive the right to vote, with Italy following in 1945,
and in all Western countries, various forms of legal discrimination in employ-
ment lasted long thereafter. Regardless of what happened in terms of global
political confrontations, the immediate post-war years would have witnessed
the return to civilian life of many millions of men determined to begin families.
The Cold War coincided with the ensuing era of rigidity in gender roles but did
not directly cause it. Matters were different in the Communist world, which
since Bolshevik times had preached gender equality, at least in theory, and
154  P. JENKINS

women were heavily engaged both in the workplace and in the military. But
rarely did that equality extend to real power, or to holding senior ranks in the
Party or government.

Sexualities
Cold War ideologies formed attitudes to alternative sexualities. Since the
1920s, psychiatrists and psychologists had offered a grim view of homosexu-
ality, contextualizing it together with other forms of deviance, including
pedophilia, sexual violence, and murder. In the late 1940s, the US experi-
enced a notorious panic over “sex fiends” of all kinds, as persecution of
homosexuals reached grim heights. Other countries were scarcely less fero-
cious: Germany vigorously enforced its anti-gay laws until 1969. Further
poisoning that atmosphere were successive revelations of cases of spies or
traitors who were gay or “lavender,” suggesting a direct linkage between
deviant sexuality and disloyalty. The British instance of the Cambridge Five
contributed much here, as did the 1960 defections of NSA cryptologists
William Martin and Bernon Mitchell (see Chap. 9). In 1953, President
Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which extended the loyalty sys-
tem in federal employment to include sexual perversion. A “lavender scare”
justified anti-gay purges through the 1960s.
The red/lavender stereotype became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If
homosexuality was so stigmatized, then its exposure was a potentially devastat-
ing act, which a government official would be desperately anxious to avoid.
This left him open to potential blackmail, and actually increased the chance
that he might be induced to give away secret information. In 1959, Allen
Drury’s popular novel Advise and Consent depicted Communists blackmailing
a conservative US Senator on the grounds of a long-past homosexual experi-
ence. The goal was to ensure the approval of a leftist Secretary of State friendly
to rapprochement with Moscow. The book provided the basis for a 1962 film
that broke dramatic new ground in its depiction of the contemporary gay
underworld.

The Cold War and Civil Rights

Cold War divisions had their impact on race relations, especially in the US. In
1945, racial segregation still prevailed throughout much of the country,
although both the federal government and the courts were making steps
toward reform: the US armed forces were desegregated in 1948. Adding to the
pressure for change was the fear that African-American discontent might take
radical or even seditious form, which was all the more likely among the large
cohort of recently discharged veterans. American Communists made intense
efforts to cultivate black support and won some gains.
But if reform was likely, Cold War divisions greatly accelerated it. Through
the 1950s, it was ever more obvious that the colonial empires in Africa and
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  155

elsewhere were disintegrating, and there would certainly be East-West compe-

tition for the support of the new states. Against that background, it was dan-
gerous to have the US marked as the symbol of racial subjugation. Those
considerations pressed heavily on US leaders like President Eisenhower and his
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when they confronted resistance to
desegregation efforts. We see that connection in 1957, when Eisenhower made
the controversial decision to use federal troops to assist in desegregation in
Little Rock, Arkansas, one of the turning points of the Civil Rights struggle.
Such a decision ran starkly contrary to Eisenhower’s normally conservative
beliefs, but it made sense as a response to the intense propaganda advantage
that the Soviets were finding in the affair. If the Civil Rights movement would
have achieved its goals sooner or later, that Cold War imperative greatly
brought victory more swiftly than might otherwise have occurred.

Loyalties
Throughout the Cold War, governments sought to ensure the loyalties of their
own citizens and allies to their distinctive causes, while condemning rival sys-
tems. During the latter years of the Cold War in the 1980s, the economic dis-
parities between the two sides constituted a yawning gulf: the West was
overwhelmingly prosperous and technologically advanced, while the East Bloc
countries were desperately trying to reform. In Asia, that contrast found glar-
ing expression in the contrast between the stunning wealth of Japan, and the
grueling poverty of China. Those realities make it difficult to recall the earlier
phases of the confrontation, when East-West differences were far less marked,
and when the Communist model appeared credible and even admirable. In the
immediate post-war years, the ruin inflicted by the war left West European
nations (and Japan) in a state of extreme poverty and dislocation, and it was
not immediately obvious that they would experience the miraculous boom of
the next three decades. Through these years, later-prosperous Pacific Rim
countries such as Taiwan or South Korea remained desperately poor. Even after
reconstruction was underway, the Soviets positioned themselves as exemplars
of science, progress, and modernity. Particularly in the decade after 1955, years
of intense and perilous military rivalry, ideological conflict between the two
sides involved a real element of competition. Governments needed to win over
audiences at home and abroad.
From the founding of the Soviet state, Communist systems had preserved
the loyalty of citizens by various institutions, incorporating most of the popula-
tion in networks of Party-controlled associations, clubs, youth organizations,
and unions. Like the armed forces, all offered intense “political education,”
which consumers absorbed with varying degrees of seriousness. Ubiquitous
propaganda took the form of posters and visuals, as magazines and newspapers
presented Party messages through cartoons and graphic imagery as well as text.
Holidays and festivals offered the opportunity for parades, inevitably with
strongly patriotic and military themes. Soviet films and newsreels were a highly
156  P. JENKINS

developed industry, immensely strengthened by wartime propaganda successes.

Memories of that Great Patriotic War were kept alive through the 1970s by
beloved and sternly heroic films like Officers (1971) or Only “Old Men” Are
Going into Battle (1973). Internationally, local Communist parties channeled
such materials to domestic audiences.
Most Western societies offered little comparable to the hegemonic Party,
but still found plenty of means to cement loyalty and opposition to
Communism. Anti-Communism acquired firm institutional foundations in
various patriotic organizations and networks. In the US, that included tradi-
tionally conservative groups like Chambers of Commerce, as well as veter-
ans’ organizations like the American Legion. The Legion was highly active
in organizing public displays and events, including dramatic stagings which
tried to depict the Communist takeover of US towns, with all the horrible
consequences. Together with schools, patriotic organizations enthusiasti-
cally used history for patriotic purposes, glorifying past American heroes
and events.
Americans held an unquestioned advantage in the global power of their
mass media, and above all in the cinema. That pre-eminence was all the greater
from the 1930s onward as so many European writers and filmmakers had fled
to the US.  When, in 1949, the National Committee for Free Europe was
formed to coordinate Western propaganda efforts, film magnate Cecil
B. DeMille was a natural choice to serve on its board. Although they differed
on how explicitly they presented propaganda materials, some productions were
quite unabashed. In an attempt to prove loyalty following the HUAC investi-
gations, Hollywood produced many films with boisterously anti-Communist
themes, some depicting Communist espionage or infiltration. From the single
year of 1952, Big Jim McClain starred John Wayne as a heroic investigator of
Communist activities, and Walk East on Beacon was a fictionalized depiction of
the recent espionage case of Klaus Fuchs. My Son John depicted a loyal young
American being led into Communist spy plots. Invasion USA offered a fiction-
alized vision of a Communist assault on the nation. All such productions were
intended to inflame anti-Communist zeal. In later productions, John Wayne’s
1960 film of The Alamo was a strident hymn to patriotic American resistance to
tyrannical invaders. Another hit of the same year was The Magnificent Seven,
which was less overt in its anti-Communist message. Even so, it depicted a
small band of Americans rescuing a Mexican village from invading bandits, in
very much the same way that US forces would present their own well-intended
interventions against guerrillas in Third World nations over the follow-
ing decade.
Besides film, strongly anti-Communist themes permeated such popular
items as comic books, where Superman and Batman regularly asserted
American values. The new generation of Marvel comics that emerged in the
early 1960s was still more explicitly anti-Communist, using Cold War themes
and villains. All of these reached worldwide audiences.
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  157

The Pope’s Divisions

Throughout the Cold War, religious alignments played a critical role in deter-
mining and cementing loyalties and in promoting causes at the grassroots. We
have repeatedly noted the role of conservative Muslim leaders as determined
opponents of Communism, and the same was true of Christians. Policymakers
were not always quick to appreciate the depth and sincerity of such religious
motivations, but in the aftermath of modern-day religious struggles, they seem
much more comprehensible. Stalin reputedly dismissed the political relevance
of religion, asking, “How many divisions has the Pope?”1 Subsequent events
suggested that Popes could actually mobilize sizable forces, both material and
symbolic.
As the world’s largest single institution, the Roman Catholic church played
a special role. Since the Bolshevik revolution, Catholic authorities had been
appalled by the mass persecutions of religions of all kinds in the Soviet Union,
actions that had uprooted the country’s ancient Orthodox Church. Catholic
hostility to Communism and the Red Revolution was further reinforced by the
bloody maltreatment of Catholic clergy and laity in Mexico in the 1920s and,
above all, by atrocities committed by the republican left during the Spanish civil
war in the 1930s. Catholics denounced and resisted persecution in Eastern
Europe after the Second World War and lamented the destruction of the church
in China.
The church integrated those campaigns into an explicitly theological struc-
ture focused on the Virgin Mary as the special defender of Christians against
the Communist menace, as allegedly foretold in the messages that the Virgin
had delivered at Fátima in Portugal in 1917. These ideas were richly cultivated
by Pope Pius XII (1939–1958) who in 1950 further stressed the Marian role
when he proclaimed the doctrine of the Virgin’s Assumption to Heaven.
Throughout these years, Catholic writers and media often interpreted political
conditions in apocalyptic terms, although they were careful not to approve
explicitly the popular idea that Stalin himself might be the Antichrist. One
common theory held that the two cardinals facing persecution in Eastern
Europe, Mindszenty and Stepinac, might be the prophetic Two Witnesses
foretold in the Book of Revelation.
However bizarre such ideas might seem to non-believers, they formed the
basis of an extraordinarily effective machine for propaganda: the word itself was
a Catholic invention. They were circulated through an enormous range of
Catholic publications and media outlets and above all formed the basis of
weekly sermons preached to a large share of the world’s half-billion Catholics,
around a fifth of the global population in 1950. Those Catholics were particu-
larly numerous in countries essential to the Western alliance, especially France
1
 The alleged quote appears in multiple forms. C. L. Sulzberger, “Foreign Affairs; How Many
Divisions Has the Pope? Two Interesting Statements A Cool Reception,” New York Times, June
22, 1957, at https://www.nytimes.com/1957/06/22/archives/foreign-affairs-how-many-divi-
sions-has-the-pope-two-interesting.html.
158  P. JENKINS

and Italy, and a quarter of Americans were Catholic. Between 1945 and 1965,
levels of religious faith and practice remained astronomically high in the
Western world, and not until the mid-1960s did secularization become com-
monplace. The Catholic church remained very strong in Latin American
nations, even those that were officially secular, and the Philippines gave the
church an Asian bastion.
In the 1950s, Catholics were critical to the Christian Democrat parties that
were the foundation for the anti-Communist cause in West Germany, Italy, and
elsewhere, especially to the Catholic labor unions that confronted Communist
rivals. Prominent among this generation of Catholic leaders were the Trinity of
Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Italy’s Alcide de Gasperi, and France’s Robert
Schuman. Catholic politicians were central to forming the institutions promot-
ing European unity, and unifying Western Europe against Communist chal-
lenges. In North America and Australia, Catholic leaders prominently and
dependably supported anti-Communist activism.
But religious activism was by no means confined to Catholics. In 1949,
evangelical preacher Billy Graham began the first of his sensational crusade
campaigns, which became a global phenomenon. Through the 1950s,
Graham’s preaching was fervently anti-Communist, and it exercised part of its
appeal from a popular sense that the world was living in the end ties, con-
stantly threatened by “hell-bombs.” Although he used a very different kind of
rhetoric, liberal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr likewise gave a reli-
gious foundation for anti-Communism, and in a way that exercised broad
intellectual appeal. We have already encountered Whittaker Chambers as the
key witness against Alger Hiss, and in 1952 his bestselling book Witness
(1952) became a potent contribution to anti-Communist literature. He
unabashedly offered a religious and even diabolical context for Communism,
tracing its appeal to the serpent’s temptation in the Garden of Eden. In 1954,
the US Congress modified the Pledge of Allegiance taken by all schoolchil-
dren to stress that loyalty was directed not just to one nation, but to “one
nation under God.”

The Cultural Cold War

Beyond simply denouncing enemies, Communists and anti-Communists alike
engaged in serious and prolonged debates, which involved some of the world’s
leading intellectuals and cultural figures. During the 1930s, Marxist ideas
broadly defined had exercised an immense appeal for intellectuals worldwide,
and the Marxist analysis seemed to be amply confirmed by the twin evils of the
Great Depression, and the rise of Nazism. Many thinkers had openly espoused
Communism and joined Communist-leaning organizations. After 1945, the
Soviets built on their recent achievements in defeating Hitler by claiming to
represent the cause of world peace, which specifically meant the rejection of
nuclear weapons. Such an approach was so effective as it was difficult to find
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  159

anyone who would speak positively on behalf of nuclear annihilation, or of

nuclear weapons as such. From 1948, the Cominform began what was termed
its Peace Offensive, which in 1950 culminated with the Stockholm Appeal, a
plea to end war and to abolish nuclear weapons.
Cultural figures worldwide could easily be persuaded to sign petitions and
give speeches in such campaigns. Formal structures also emerged, such as the
World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace (1948–1949) and the World Peace
Council (1950). Such organizations won the support of a dazzling roster of
cultural superstars, including Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Diego
Rivera. The singer and actor Paul Robeson, the world’s best known African-­
American, was a long-standing supporter of Communist and pro-Soviet causes,
and a member of multiple front groups. Such bodies propagated successive
Soviet claims and campaigns, including prominently the charges of biological
warfare in Korea.
After 1945, it became urgently necessary for non-Communist Westerners to
counter that appeal, to stress that educated people could hold views that
were progressive, socialist, or liberal, while firmly distancing themselves from
Communism. That became easier when the intellectual system of Communism
was so inextricably bound up with the realities of the Soviet Union, with its
aggressive nationalism and extraordinary internal repression. One landmark
was the 1949 book The God That Failed, a collection of essays by some of the
most respected authors of the day, including Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright,
and Ignazio Silone. The common theme was that Communism had previously
exercised its philosophical appeal, but that it had subsequently been discredited
by events.
The non-Communist West found powerful ammunition in the Eastern
Bloc’s record of internal repression and purges, the political executions, and
concentration camp systems. The whole reality was summarized readily by the
single word “Siberia.” Stalinist atrocities had already been widely depicted in
Western media in the late 1930s, and they were widely credited. Koestler him-
self was the author of the 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, which depicted the
ruin and death of a faithful Soviet Communist during the purges, in which he
is induced to make bogus confessions. The book became part of a growing
anti-Communist canon, which included popular works of George Orwell,
especially 1984 and his earlier Animal Farm (1945). Also influential was the
Russian Marxist, Victor Serge, who exposed the Stalinist purges in his novel
The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1950).
One first-hand witness to Soviet horrors was the Ukrainian defector Victor
Kravchenko, who in 1946 published his influential memoir I Chose Freedom.
This gave convincing detail of the mass deaths in the Ukrainian famine in the
early 1930s, the later purges, and the Gulag system. When the book was pub-
lished in Europe, French Communist media delivered venomous attacks on
Kravchenko, who responded with a libel suit. The ensuing “Trial of the
Century,” held in Paris in 1949, featured extensive evidence by both sides, but
160  P. JENKINS

it left no doubt of the truth of Kravchenko’s charges. The reality of such

charges was confirmed by Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956. Thereafter, the
only debate was whether Stalinist crimes resulted from his tyrannical impulses,
or if they were integral to Communism as such. The fact that Soviet brutality
continued unchecked after Stalin’s time was reinforced in 1956 by the suppres-
sion of the Hungarian revolution.
Just as the East had its “peace” organizations, the West also mobilized for
what has been described as the Cultural Cold War, as it exercised its own enor-
mous soft power resources. The Americans made immense use of what had
long been the Communist tactic of proprietary front groups and publications,
where the actual ownership or control was veiled. The CIA’s Propaganda
Assets Inventory claimed boasted influence over some eight hundred publica-
tions. In 1950, the CIA sponsored the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)
which recruited some of the most significant authors and scholars from the US
and Western Europe. Whether directly, or through surrogates like the CCF,
the US sponsored many cultural gatherings or tours, designed to demonstrate
the achievements of the West, particularly in Modernist music, architecture,
and art. In Paris in 1952, the CCF sponsored the Festival of Twentieth-Century
Masterpieces of Modern Arts, which boldly presented cutting-edge achieve-
ments in recent art, sculpture, and music. Positioning the West as the standard-­
bearer of experiment and artistic freedom was a valuable tactic at a time when
the Soviets were rigidly committed to very traditional styles, which in the visual
arts for instance took the form of stultifying Soviet Socialist Realism. The US
exploited the worldwide passion for jazz and sponsored wildly popular tours by
figures like Louis Armstrong.
Western powers used their media resources as a means of promoting their
own image and discrediting the Soviets. During the Second World War, the
BBC had achieved vast prestige as a source of news and inspiration in Nazi-­
occupied Europe, and it pursued that role in the decades of Communist domi-
nation. The US joined these efforts through its radio stations, especially Voice
of America (VOA). Radio Free Europe (1949) targeted the satellite nations of
the Eastern Bloc, while Radio Liberty (1953) aimed at the Soviet Union: the
two subsequently merged. By the early 1950s, Western stations were offering
programming in most of the languages of the Eastern Bloc, including many
minority languages within the Soviet Union itself. VOA began its broadcasts
to the Soviet Union in 1947, to which the Soviets responded with jamming,
while VOA sought mobile shipborne locations for its facilities. Other East
Bloc countries struggled to suppress Western broadcasts, in some cases
through the 1980s. But if the Soviet Bloc remained difficult to access, the
British and US stations had a mighty impact worldwide, especially in the newly
independent colonial countries then in the process of defining their relation-
ships to East and West. Although not intended for international propaganda
purposes, the US broadcast to its own personnel in Europe through the
Armed Forces Network, which exposed millions of enthusiastic Europeans to
US popular culture.
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  161

The Red Future

Khrushchev’s rejection of Stalinism transformed the Soviet Union, and funda-
mentally changed the ongoing propaganda war over the following decade. As
we have already seen, the Soviets suffered serious self-inflicted blows in these
years, including the slaughter in Hungary, and the ongoing scandal of the
Berlin Wall. But even against this background, the Soviets also scored real vic-
tories, which had their impact on the emerging nations even more than Europe.
The Soviets became surprisingly successful in stressing the qualities of their
society. In the 1920s, the Soviets had boasted a modernist vision of an emerg-
ing socialist utopia. By the mid-1950s, such a dream no longer carried any-
thing like the same uncritical conviction, but actual Soviet society in the
post-1956 decade appeared to have much to recommend it. Living standards
improved substantially, and the younger generation did have extensive educa-
tional opportunities. If glaring weaknesses remained, there was the hope that
reforms and liberalization would continue.
Oddly, the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev (1956–1964) enhanced the
favorable Soviet image in these years. Khrushchev’s flaws were many and obvi-
ous. He owed his career to slavish obedience to Stalinist policies, with all the
violence that entailed, and in public appearances and statements, he often
emerged as a bully and boor, highly emotional and easily roused to volcanic
anger. On his extremely well-publicized 1959 visit to the US, Khrushchev
sometimes projected an image of arrogant Communist triumphalism, which
assisted his bluffs about Soviet nuclear capabilities. In an iconic moment at the
United Nations in 1960, he offered a loud and furious response to criticism of
Soviet policy in Eastern Europe, in which he banged his shoe on the podium.
Yet he always conveyed a sense of authentic spontaneous humanity that was
very different from the godlike image presented of Stalin, or the bland bureau-
cracy of Khrushchev’s own successors. Even on his US visit, he emerged as
inquisitive, quirky, and even friendly, and that visit laid the foundation for
warmer US-Soviet ties over the following year. Khrushchev was depicted in
Western popular media, and even comedy, in ways that would have been incon-
ceivable for Stalin. Moreover, he was associated with an era of liberalization,
de-Stalinization, and the expansive triumphs of the Soviet space program. In
non-aligned and Global South nations, people could cheer his ability to stand
against the imperial powers and often to win serious diplomatic victories.
If tight censorship still prevailed, Soviet culture flourished during the
Khrushchev Thaw. Cinema enjoyed a real efflorescence. In the 1920s, Soviet
cinema had produced some masterpieces, above all by Sergei Eisenstein, but
the Stalinist era of Socialist Realism was far less distinguished. From the late
1950s, Soviet film entered a really creative period in multiple genres, making
the USSR a leading center of film production. Some films enjoyed great inter-
national success, like The Cranes Are Flying (1957) or Ballad of a Soldier
(1959) with their Second World War themes. In 1958, Sergei Gerasimov
adapted the classic novel of the Russian civil war—And Quiet Flows the
162  P. JENKINS

Don—into a truly impressive six-hour epic. But not all cinema offerings were
so overtly patriotic. One popular production was Amphibian Man (1962), a
wildly imaginative fantasy at least equal to anything that might have been pro-
duced in contemporary Western Europe. Also from 1962, Nine Days in One
Year was a much-praised romance set in the world of Soviet nuclear research.
Any list of the world’s greatest-ever films invariably includes three or four items
from the director Andrei Tarkovsky. Most admired in retrospect is his Andrei
Rublev, which was made in 1966 but not released for several years in its
intended form. Over and above all these achievements, Polish and Czechoslovak
studios made some of the most impressive films of the era. Particularly acclaimed
from Poland was Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958), which tackled
the very sensitive subject of the anti-Communist guerrilla struggle in that
country in the 1940s.
Soviet literature achieved real successes in both high and low cultures. Poets
like Yevgeny Yevtushenko achieved superstar status, to the point of holding
readings in stadiums at home, and also winning international acclaim. The
relaxation of literary censorship during the Thaw allowed the appearance of
long-banned writings from the Stalin era. In 1962, the government allowed
the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of prison camp life in his
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In 1967, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master
and Margarita finally became available, 30 years after its completion. One dar-
ing effort was Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago, which traced its heroes from
before the Bolshevik Revolution through the Great Purges. Completed in
1956, the book was refused publication in the USSR, but a copy was smuggled
to Italy, where it was published. The CIA sponsored a Russian-language ver-
sion and encouraged the book’s wide distribution, helping to make it a global
bestseller. Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature, and a film version
in 1965 became one of the most successful releases of all time. Although the
US intended Dr Zhivago to embarrass the Soviets, the scheme backfired, as the
book reinforced the idea that modern Soviet culture was worth studying and
admiring.
The Soviets achieved real international success in genre writing. Particularly
successful from the late 1950s onward were the Strugatsky brothers, Boris and
Arkady, who made their impact on the hitherto Anglo-American-dominated
field of science fiction. Among their leading competitors was Poland’s Stanislaw
Lem, whose novels sold in the tens of millions. Tarkovsky’s production of
Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris is often cited as one of the greatest science fiction
films ever made. Any such listing would also include the 1963 Czechoslovak
space film Ikarie XB-1, which was also based on a Lem novel. Internationally,
such works appealed especially to teenagers and young adults, to the educated
and aspiring, and exactly the audiences that the Soviets hoped to reach by such
expressions of soft power.
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  163

The Clash of Symbols

Triumphs in science fiction reflected a real-world association of the Soviet bloc
with scientific advances and achievements. Demonstrating that linkage was the
Soviet space program, which from the 1957 satellite Sputnik onward scored
repeated firsts. Propaganda victories included the first man in space, Yuri
Gagarin, in April 1961. In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman
in space, and she remains the first to have undertaken a solo mission. In 1965,
a Soviet cosmonaut became the first to undertake to leave a vehicle in space and
float free. Such a space-walk was so important because that ability was essential
for any future mission to the Moon or beyond. At least in its early days, the US
space program suffered several well-publicized failures and humiliations. Even
after they had begun to score real successes, with John Glenn’s orbital flight in
1962, the Space Race remained a genuinely open contest between astronauts
(US) and cosmonauts (Soviet). Only gradually after 1966 did the Americans
decisively move ahead in the contest for space exploration, which culminated
in their 1969 moon landing. Throughout the 1960s, space symbolism gave a
stirringly modern and heroic tinge to Communism.
Throughout the Cold War, East and West fought many symbolic battles,
great and small, with a view to proving the superiority of the respective sys-
tems. Besides the Space Race, the culture of spectacle affected areas of life, and
the Communist powers showed themselves very able in these matters. The
Soviets cultivated favorable opinions through vast international gatherings, fes-
tivals, cultural events, and exhibitions, at which they could display their achieve-
ments to the best advantage. They particularly advertised their achievements in
high culture, in ballet and classical music. Chess was another enduring field for
displaying Soviet intellectual glories, which made the US victory in the 1972
World Championships a source of real grief.
International sporting events offered splendid environments for one-­
upmanship, and both sides devoted huge resources to maximizing their victo-
ries. All the Communist countries invested heavily in sporting spectacle, and
there would be lasting controversies over the role of performance-enhancing
drugs. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the US and the Soviets were finely bal-
anced for supremacy, and the two superpowers between them took almost half
the medals. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were all among the leading
winning nations (the two German formed a united team). Although the US
lead in gold medals was painful, Eastern Bloc media blazoned their own tri-
umphs. The East Bloc’s commitment to sport explains the sensational treat-
ment of events in which the West gained unexpected triumphs, such as the
1972 Summit Series in hockey between the USSR and Canada, or the US vic-
tory in the same sport in 1980.
The Soviets found many opportunities for depicting the evils of the US in
ways that appealed far beyond the ranks of committed Communists. They
focused on American racial injustices and the Civil Rights struggles, as well as
the country’s alleged militarism. In posters and cartoons, Ku Klux Klan hoods
164  P. JENKINS

offered an obvious means of stressing the country’s alleged racism. The milita-
rist theme became a strong component of the Western anti-nuclear movement,
which regularly used cartoonish visuals of heavily bemedaled American (never
Soviet) generals brandishing missiles and hydrogen bombs. The Soviets
exploited the anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements that gained such force
from the mid-1950s onward. Beyond general propaganda, they offered many
young people from the Global South the opportunity to receive higher educa-
tion in the USSR, with a view to drawing the young and talented to the
Communist camp. Those core Soviet themes—world peace, anti-imperialism,
and anti-racism—carried real weight for international audiences, in European
countries as well as emerging nations. They resonated among many Western
liberals and religious thinkers who were by no means fellow travelers.

Banning the Bomb
From the mid-1950s, concern about the Cold War confrontation grew power-
fully in the West, in the US as well as core allies such as Britain. This certainly
did not mean any sympathy for Communism or for the Soviet Union on any-
thing like the lines of the Popular Front years, and any such tendencies would
have appeared ludicrous to the emerging boomer generation in most of the
West. But the new vision involved a more nuanced attitude to the world situa-
tion, and those attitudes were reflected in mass movements and in popular
culture.
The emergence of hydrogen bombs made the threat of nuclear warfare so
pressing that it naturally stirred mass opposition. Britain took the lead in pro-
tests against nuclear testing, and also the existence of nuclear weapons as such,
with the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in
1957. The following year, CND organized the first of what became a powerful
annual event, with mass marches to the nuclear warfare research establishment
at Aldermaston. The movement’s slogan “Ban the Bomb” became a common
meme, much imitated and parodied. The timing of these marches at Easter
reflected the strong role of religious groups among the broad spectrum of left
and liberal activists. Partly inspired by CND, in 1961, the US movement
“Women Strike for Peace” mobilized 50,000 demonstrators in various cities.
The achievement was all the more ground-breaking for its pioneering use of
female imagery and even feminist rhetoric in the cause of disarmament.
Other countries too developed broadly based anti-nuclear movements.
Canada found itself in a near-impossible position because it officially rejected
nuclear weapons, yet at the same time, the country was integrated into a North
American defensive system that assumed the deployment of US nuclear arms.
In 1958, the government accepted the presence of US Bomarc missiles, but
without revealing that these would be nuclear-armed. When that fact became
known in 1960, it stirred a mass national protest, drawing heavily on CND
tactics and rhetoric, but also drawing inspiration from the US Civil Rights
movement. In 1964, protesters focused their attention on the missile sites at La
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  165

Macaza in Québec. These campaigns fostered the development of New Left

radicalism in Canada and severely divided the nation’s political parties. In
Japan, popular fears of being drawn into American wars and nuclear conflicts
drive the mass protest movements of 1960.
On the surface, these movements and cultural trends were politically neutral
and protested against the weaponry and ambitions of both the superpowers, as
well as of lesser nations such as Britain. In practice, artists and activists alike
focused their attention on the war-making schemes of their own countries,
which meant the Western side of the global confrontation. That opened the
way to the exploitation of movements by pro-Soviet groups, and Communists
achieved real influence in the British CND. Of course, the Eastern Bloc permit-
ted no such grassroots movements on its territory and certainly not to protest
the military policies of the Soviet Union or its allies. Whatever their original
intentions, anti-nuclear campaigns in the West undermined faith in Western
military and political strategies. In 1960, Constantine Fitzgibbon’s sensational
dystopian fantasy When the Kissing Had to Stop presented the British anti-­
nuclear campaign as a clandestine Soviet front, and a step towards a brutal
Communist takeover of the United Kingdom.
Quite apart from the grassroots movements, many policymakers became
extremely nervous about the nuclear standoff. In the US and elsewhere, it
became increasingly respectable to challenge the doctrines of nuclear warfare,
with the seemingly callous language of MAD and megadeaths. From a critical
liberal standpoint, the nuclear balance was a regrettable necessity, but aggres-
sive militarists on the Western side were as much to be condemned as their
Soviet counterparts. If that view fell short of full moral equivalence, it did mark
a significant shift in elite attitudes. In a celebrated farewell address in 1961,
President Eisenhower warned:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwar-

ranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial com-
plex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will
persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties
or democratic processes.2

Coming from such a conservative figure, these were sobering words.

The Eve of Destruction

Popular culture did much to spread awareness of nuclear dangers, and to chal-
lenge Cold War assumptions. From early in the nuclear age, film and literature
offered nuclear images that were both thoughtful and threatening, visions of
imminent cataclysm became mainstays of popular fiction. In 1950, Ray

2
 “Transcript of President Dwight D.  Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961),” https://www.
ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript.
166  P. JENKINS

Bradbury’s popular book The Martian Chronicles imagined human settlers of

Mars as the last survivors of the race, after the Earth perished in a nuclear war.
Even the Japanese monster character Godzilla was inspired by a real-life disas-
ter in 1954 when the crew of a fishing vessel was exposed to fallout from a US
thermonuclear test. The resulting film was intended as a metaphor for
Hiroshima, although that critique was purged from the version released to US
audiences.
In the early 1950s, some fictional treatments of future wars offered a strongly
anti-Communist stance, imagining the West heroically defending itself against
Soviet aggression. In one successful treatment, Cyril Kornbluth’s popular novel
Not This August (1955) portrayed a Soviet invasion of the US heartland. But
over time, science fiction treatments focused intensely on the destruction
wrought by any such war, regardless of ideology. The most popular such books
included Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), which imagined
future monks stubbornly preserving the remains of civilization after a nuclear
cataclysm. The same year brought Pat Frank’s bestselling account of a near-­
future war in Alas Babylon. The book ends with a survivor reporting the war’s
(supposedly) victorious conclusion:

“We won it. We really clobbered ’em!” Hart’s eyes lowered and his arms drooped.
He said, “Not that it matters.” The engine started and Randy turned away to face
the thousand-year night.

Throughout the new literature of apocalyptic, the focus is on the cata-

strophic destruction rather than the actual foreign perpetrators: “not that it
matters.”3
In shaping public opinion about nuclear issues, some films became far more
influential than a thousand well-researched journalistic analyses might have
been. The extinction of humanity following a war was movingly depicted in the
1959 US film On the Beach, which became a global sensation (the film was
based on a novel by British writer Nevil Shute). Other post-apocalyptic films
followed and became a large genre in the 1960s. Two 1964 films in particular
had a special impact in the US. Apart from Dr Strangelove, this was the year of
Fail Safe, which imagines a US bomber squadron mistakenly dispatched to
attack the Soviet Union. After the destruction of Moscow, the US president
must make the horrible decision to accept the sacrificial destruction of New York
City as the only means of averting war.
Although US popular culture was powerful worldwide, other countries too
had their own apocalyptic visions. In Britain, the 1965 film The War Game
offered a documentary-style study of the effects of nuclear war on a small city,
an account that was so horrific in its realism that the film was banned by the
BBC, which itself had commissioned it. The War Game subsequently won
many international prizes, including an Academy Award for best documentary

3
 Pat Frank, Alas Babylon (Bantam Books 1960) 278–279.
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  167

production. As in the US, science fiction-oriented films and television produc-

tions often used the idea of a nuclear holocaust as a means of creating a post-­
apocalyptic reality. Although Eastern Bloc writers were more constrained in
their ability to criticize official positions, Soviet science fiction too explored
anti-nuclear themes, especially in the popular 1971 novel Prisoners of Power, by
the Strugatsky brothers.
Over and above the visual arts, anti-nuclear themes were prominent in pop-
ular music, and especially the folk song revival that began in the late 1950s.
Before they turned their attention to the Vietnam conflict, protest singers in
the English-speaking world were focusing on the nuclear threat. To take one
example of hundreds, in 1962, Bob Dylan denounced the Masters of War, and
another song warned that A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. In 1965, Barry McGuire
achieved a worldwide hit with his song Eve of Destruction, which warned that
“If the button is pushed, there’s no running away/There’ll be no one to save
with the world in a grave.”4 He stressed the flaws of both sides in the conflict,
causing many US stations to ban his song.
The sheer volume of such productions popularized key themes and images,
which became central features of mass culture: the mushroom cloud; the glow
of radiation (which was in fact a mythical concept); the creation of monsters;
and in summary, the end of civilization. Often, the future war was described as
a nuclear “holocaust,” a word which had not yet acquired its exclusive modern
sense of the mass killings of Jews in the second world war. These were the cul-
tural commonplaces of the world in which the Baby Boom generation
came of age.

The Quest for Enemies

Surging concern about nuclear war had a substantial and surprising effect on
the depiction of enemies, both in popular culture and in larger public debate.
From the early 1960s, it became difficult to offer convincing Soviet or
Communist villains in Western film or fiction, at least in the simplistic way that
might have applied in earlier years. For British or European observers, denounc-
ing an opponent as Communist tended to recall the worst images of the
McCarthy phenomenon and its attendant paranoia. But in the US too, a series
of major films and novels made villains of the domestic right wing, including
militarists and extremists within the US establishment, that military-industrial
complex. As we have seen, Dr Strangelove depicted American ultra-rightists
and generals in terms not too far removed from contemporary Soviet propa-
ganda. Such visions were in full force years before the emergence of sizable
public opposition to the Vietnam conflict, which so aggravated domestic ten-
sions in the US.

4
 
Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction,” https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/19338134/
Barry+McGuire/Eve+of+Destruction.
168  P. JENKINS

In terms of mass popularity in this era, it would be difficult to rival the James
Bond novels and subsequent films, but from 1961, with the publication of
Thunderball, author Ian Fleming made an explicit decision not to use
Communist villains. Instead, he invented a fictional criminal syndicate called
SPECTRE, which was wholly apolitical. SPECTRE retained that role through
the series of films that appeared from 1962 onward, and many other franchises
of the era used similar devices. Alternatively, Chinese Communists replaced the
Soviets as villains, with all the racial stereotypes that implied. Soviet or Eastern
Bloc villains were no longer believable or acceptable. When the great science
fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) envisaged a then-plausible near future,
it depicted a friendly global collaboration between two equally matched space-
faring powers, the US and the Soviets. And clearly, these are Soviets, rather
than simply Russians.
This is not to suggest that US or Western nations ceased to be concerned
about Soviet or Communist threats, and anti-Communism remained a funda-
mental reality of public life in the US and elsewhere through the 1960s and
beyond. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia revived older images of
Soviet aggression, as did the country’s new crackdowns on dissidents. But con-
cepts of the East-West conflict were shifting from what had been known over
the previous decades, to permit genuine debate and disagreement. New cul-
tural forces challenged the basic political assumptions of both sides, and pro-
foundly complicated the question of what those sides even stood for.

Further Reading

From a large literature on civil defense, see Matthew Grant, After the Bomb:
Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945–1968 (2009); Andrew
Burtch, Give Me Shelter: The Failure of Canada’s Cold War Civil Defence
(2012); Michael Scheibach, Alert America!: The Atomic Bomb and the Show
That May Save Your Life (2019); and Edward M.  Geist Armageddon
Insurance: Civil Defense in the United States and Soviet Union,
1945–1991 (2019).
On Cold War cultures, especially film and literature, see Ann Sherif, Japan’s
Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (2009); Tony Shaw and Denise
J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for
Hearts and Minds (2010); J. Hoberman, An Army of Phantoms: American
Movies and the Making of the Cold War (2011); John Sbardellati, J. Edgar
Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War
(2012); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the
World of Arts and Letters (2013); Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art,
Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy; and Duncan White, Cold
Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (2019).  A sweeping
study can be found in Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the
Cold War (2021).
 10  COLD WAR CULTURES  169

For global frontiers of the cultural Cold War, see Patrick Iber, Neither
Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (2015);
Łukasz Stanke, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West
Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (2020). Impacts on the aca-
demic world are addressed for instance in David H.  Price, Cold War
Anthropology (2016).
Soviet popular culture in these years forms the subject of some important
scholarship that seriously revises older Western assumptions about the closed
and rigid nature of that society. Major works include Kristin Roth-Ey. Moscow
Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the
Cultural Cold War (2011); and Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The
Soviet Lives of Western Culture (2018).
Regional and local impacts of the Cold War are discussed for instance in David
W. Mills, Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains (2015). For popular
attitudes and social movements, see Christopher R. Hill, Peace and Power in
Cold War Britain: Media, Movements and Democracy, c.1945–1968 (2018);
Nicholas Barnett, Britain’s Cold War: Culture, Modernity and the Soviet
Threat (2018).
Issues concerning sport are covered in Toby C.  Rider, Cold War Games:
Propaganda, The Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy (2016); Toby C. Rider
and Kevin B. Witherspoon, eds., Defending the American Way of Life: Sport,
Culture, and the Cold War (2018); and Robert Edelman and Christopher
Young, The Whole World Was Watching: Sport in the Cold War (2020).
On gender and family, see Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and
American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (2014); Philip E. Muehlenbeck,
ed., Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (2017); and
Victoria M.  Grieve, Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood In The
1950s (2018).
On the space race, see Teasel Muir-Harmony, Operation Moonglow (2020).
For religious factors in the story, see Uta Balbier, Altar Call in Europe: Billy
Graham, Mass Evangelism, and the Cold-War West (2021).
 PART III

The Struggle Redefined: 1968–1991

 CHAPTER 11

Crisis of Ideologies: The World in 1968

In November 1968, the Beatles released their song Back in the USSR. This
parody of contemporary California surf music juxtaposed lively Western popu-
lar culture with the often grim face of Soviet Communism. At once, the song
mocked both Communism and simplistic US sentimentality.
But despite that ambiguity, the triumphant popularity of the Beatles, and of
songs like Back in the USSR, suggested the broad success of “the West” in
presenting itself as superior to any ideological rivals, especially among the siz-
able cohort of baby boomers. Despite all the US efforts to wage a cultural Cold
War, the West’s greatest successes came from non-government-sponsored
commercial efforts, in the form of American rock and pop music and the musi-
cal explosion that grew out of Britain in the 1960s. That in turn manifested in
terms of personal appearance—hair styles and clothes—as well as other produc-
tions, such as the James Bond films. By the mid-1960s, Soviet bloc countries
were viscerally hostile to the emerging youth culture that they portrayed as a
sign of Western failure and decadence. They struggled to prevent that culture
from surreptitiously spreading through their own societies. Young people in
the Eastern bloc risked severe penalties to engage in that culture, and above all,
its music, which conveyed a sense of liberation, personal and social. No govern-
ment or propaganda agency could have dreamed of so crushing a cultural
triumph.
But that cultural triumph did not extend to “Western” values as they had
been conventionally defined since 1945. Politically and socially, new ideas of
liberation and pacifism were destabilizing the West as much as the East, unset-
tling anti-Communists as much as Communists. For many in Europe, these
new values led to a simultaneous rejection of both superpowers. Rising pres-
sures were explosively obvious in that year of 1968, which produced so many
potent images and symbol of change. So abundant were key events, and so

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 173

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_11
174  P. JENKINS

concentrated in a very short period, that it is difficult to avoid the often-cliched

word “revolutionary.” For both left and right, 1968 set the agendas for decades
to come.

1968: Vietnam
US-Soviet tensions cooled substantially after the war threat of 1962. Of
course, the Cold War itself remained very much alive, as was apparent in such
countries as the Dominican Republic and Indonesia, to say nothing of
Vietnam. But as we have seen, the nature and dimensions of the global con-
frontation changed significantly, and especially in the US itself, where aggres-
sive anti-Communism appeared dated. In most countries, popular
consciousness of nuclear dangers declined following the ending of most test-
ing in 1963, and anti-nuclear activism faded. It became possible for ordinary
people to forget the vast arsenals of the competing superpowers, which was
ironic in light of the actual scale of investment in weaponry. By 1968, the
world still had around 40,000 nuclear weapons, so that in terms of available
armaments, the situation was in some sense even more dangerous it had been
a decade earlier.
As the war in Vietnam came to occupy center stage in political debate, it
revolutionized political ideologies. It placed a deep strain on traditional con-
cepts of “the West,” and the central role of the US, while inspiring new ideolo-
gies that challenged the familiar assumptions of the Soviet Union. In both
these trends, the year 1968 was critical.
Through 1966 and 1967, US policymakers were becoming nervous about
the seemingly endless surge in military demands for personnel—for what at the
time was termed manpower. It was quite feasible that the US commitment
could soon approach a million, which might be barely tolerable if victory was a
genuine possibility within a foreseeable future. That vision became unaccept-
able in early 1968, when the North Vietnamese broke the truce created for the
New Year festival, Tet. The resulting offensive sent 80,000 NVA and Viet Cong
against a hundred centers across Vietnam. Communist forces captured the his-
toric center of Hue and attacked the US embassy in Saigon. The battle for Hue
was particularly savage, claiming perhaps 14,000 lives in all, counting both
military and civilian dead.
By any objective measure, the resulting battles resulted in a complete US
victory. Communist forces were systematically routed with losses so heavy that
many Viet Cong units ceased to function. Worse, by exposing so many units
that had been clandestine, the Communists forfeited some of their earlier
advantages. But politically, the Tet offensive was a disaster for the US, and for
Johnson. It showed clearly that the war was nowhere near being won, and that
victory would demand an inconceivably vast new troop commitment. Also in
the first half of 1968, the US was engaged in a grueling series of battles around
the key base of Khe Sanh, which were claiming ever more US lives. The cam-
paign looked like a North Vietnamese attempt to reproduce their triumph over
 11  CRISIS OF IDEOLOGIES: THE WORLD IN 1968  175

the French at Dien Bien Phu. Together with ancillary battles, the six-month
siege of Khe Sanh killed around 1000 Americans and over 5000 North
Vietnamese, not counting ARVN losses. US commanders in Vietnam devel-
oped Operation Fracture Jaw, which envisaged the use of tactical nuclear weap-
ons if defeat seemed likely at Khe Sanh.
That continuing conflict was catastrophic for US morale at home, and for its
reputation abroad. Anti-war sentiment grew within US forces in Vietnam, aug-
mented by deepening racial resentment. On the home front, many who actively
favored the war effort felt that if it was not going to be pursued with proper
determination, then the time had come to withdraw. In March 1968, a pro-­
peace candidate came close to defeating Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire
presidential primary, demonstrating the force of public discontent. The
Democratic Party dissolved into factional warfare. On March 31, Johnson
made the sensational announcement that he would not stand for re-election in
November. He limited bombing attacks on the north. Ending the strikes that
October removed obstacles to peace negotiations involving all parties, which
began in Paris. But hopes of a speedy end to the war were dashed, and as we
will see, negotiations were slow and complex.

1968: Asian Dimensions

Complicating the peace process, and actively threatening to reignite violence, was
the continuing militancy of Asia’s other Communist powers. North Korea
adopted fiercely aggressive tactics against the US and South Korea, in deliberate
attempts to foment a new war and to reassert the North’s credentials as the van-
guard of anti-US militancy. In late 1966 North Korean forces undertook ambushes
of US and ROK forces, killing several Americans. In January 1968, just a few days
before the Tet Offensive, North Korean commandos attacked the official resi-
dence of the ROK president in an assassination attempt. The following day, North
Korean forces seized a US spy ship, the Pueblo, compromising intelligence materi-
als. The crew was detained throughout the year, and the commander was forced
to sign a “confession.” These acts almost invited US retaliation, to the deep con-
cern of the Soviets. The shooting down of a US aircraft in 1969 made the US
consider a range of military responses, including nuclear weapons.
The Vietnamese struggle stirred militancy among other Communist powers
and fueled China’s ongoing Cultural Revolution. Curiously, the turmoil in
China played some role in reducing Western concerns about the Soviet Union.
From 1966 the Cultural Revolution gave China an image of extreme and fanat-
ical aggression in the revolutionary cause, which made the staid Soviets seem
rational in contrast. If China was entirely beyond the pale, then it appeared
reasonable to negotiate with the Soviets. A joke popular in various European
countries in these years suggested: “The optimists are learning Russian. The
pessimists are learning Chinese.”1

1
 The joke is much quoted. See, for instance, Warren Treadgold, The University We Need:
Reforming American Higher Education (New York: Encounter Books, 2018).
176  P. JENKINS

Losing the West?
Among the Western allies, outrage at the Vietnam involvement placed deep
strains on traditional concepts of US global leadership. In Europe, anti-­
Americanism became commonplace and overt. The war promoted the idea of
moral equivalence, the idea that Americans and Soviets were equally cynical in
pursuing their own interests, and that no great moral difference separated the
causes for which they purported to be fighting. As we have seen, few of the US’
traditional allies actively supported the war effort and none in Europe. Some
Western countries indeed publicly opposed the war and offered aid to war
resisters and deserters. Neutral Sweden was a visible opponent, but the
Canadian government was scarcely more friendly to US policies. In Britain,
strong left-wing movements urged the government to be more vigorous in
denouncing the war. Of course, countries like Britain and Canada remained
firmly committed to mutual defense against the Soviets, but the alliance had
strict limits.
Within many Western nations, Vietnam generated the most intense public
disaffection since the end of the Second World War, and most of it was directed
against the US. As the war grew in scale and became ever more divisive, anti-­
war movements proliferated and drew mass support, both in the US and in
many other nations. Crucial here was the generational shift associated with the
Baby Boomers, and the revolutionary change implied by the mass extension of
higher education. Universities and colleges boomed, producing very large
audiences for radical and experimental ideas and movements. New Left ideolo-
gies became ever more prominent and evolved rapidly.
Anti-Vietnam War protests surged across Western nations in 1967–1968. In
the Spring of 1968, radicalism found a focus in mass student protests in Paris,
which offered a wide-ranging critique of capitalism, imperialism, the US, and
conservative French society. Heavy-handed police responses expanded the pro-
tests, and street violence followed. The May crisis escalated rapidly as millions
of workers struck and occupied factories, bringing the economy to a halt.
Throughout these conflicts, generational tensions were very much in evidence,
with younger radicals much in evidence in the labor protests as much as the
student movement. The movement sparked a vigorous upsurge, which was
utopian and anarchist as much as socialist or Communist.
The protests threatened the survival of the regime itself. President de Gaulle
vanished from view for several days, during which he reaffirmed the support of
his military should it be needed to crush outright revolution. In the event, that
was not required, and the movement faded after several weeks. Significantly in
light of historical experience, the mass upsurge unsettled the country’s power-
ful Communist Party almost as much as the conservatives, and the Communists
were anxious to reduce tensions. Communists were critical to achieving the
labor settlements that restarted the economy and, arguably, saved De
Gaulle’s regime.
 11  CRISIS OF IDEOLOGIES: THE WORLD IN 1968  177

68’ism
The French experience, “May 68,” exercised immense influence worldwide,
and was reflected in mass upsurges in many other nations, especially Italy, West
Germany, Japan, and the US itself. Although very diverse, the new radicalism
usually stressed themes of personal liberation far removed from familiar class
issues. Over the next two years, the new radicalism was manifested in causes
such as feminism and gay rights activism, as well as environmentalism. Italians
described the multifaceted cultural radicalism that emerged from this ferment
as sessantottismo, 68’ism, a word that can usefully be applied to many societies.
The combined crises of 1956 had created a schism in Communist circles
worldwide, out of which had developed a New Left that rejected the familiar
assumptions of mainstream Soviet-aligned Communism. While that older ide-
ology placed all its hopes in the industrial working classes of the advanced
nations, newer critics viewed that working class as often conservative, consum-
erist, and selfish, and instead looked to the marginalized—to racial minorities,
to peasant populations, and to revolutionary movements within the Third
World. Insurgencies in Algeria and Vietnam fitted poorly with traditional
Communist assumptions about the social foundations of revolutionary change.
The emerging radicals enjoyed a complex and often contradictory relationship
with Communism, especially as expressed by the Communist nations. The
radical movements idolized countries such as Cuba and North Vietnam that
were Communist and avowedly revolutionary, but at least on the surface, with-
out the baggage of the Soviet experience. Many radicals were no less excited by
the images emerging from China’s Cultural Revolution, as millions of dedi-
cated young people overthrew entrenched institutions. If that experience hor-
rified mainstream Western audiences, some European radicals espoused Maoist
ideologies and symbols. A new revolutionary pantheon included Mao, Ho Chi
Minh, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara.
The newer movements were frank about the necessity of armed violence,
and indeed its redemptive character. Such ideas found expression in Mao’s
particular variant of traditional Marxist theory. His guerrilla experience stressed
the role of the peasants and the countryside, and when the Communists con-
trolled the countryside, they were able to seize the cities. Applied to a global
scale, that suggested a special role for the world’s poorer and less developed
nations, the “countryside” from which the metropolitan nations could be sur-
rounded and overcome. The developing vision of the New Left gave armed
revolution a central role in radical debate that it had not possessed since the fall
of the Nazis.
In theory, the new approach marginalized the West and its white popula-
tions, but even so it inspired new movements within those very nations.
Militants took inspiration from the innovative tactics of armed resistance then
coming into vogue. In 1956–1957, the Arab resistance against the French in
Algeria concentrated their efforts on urban warfare. Apart from choosing
urban targets, the movement developed effective new means of operation
178  P. JENKINS

based on a tight organizational system of self-contained cells, which minimized

the damage that would be done by the capture of one or two militants.
Although the guerrillas were defeated in the short term, their campaign inspired
the larger movement, that ultimately triumphed in 1962, suggesting that the
heroic sacrifice of a relatively small movement could lay the foundation for
national liberation: one could win a war by seemingly losing it. That was the
story offered by the influential 1966 Italian film The Battle of Algiers, which
fascinated and inspired radicals around the world—in the Global South, but
also in Western Europe, and in the US. The film showed that even if guerrillas
lost a war to the point of being annihilated, their heroic example could still
inspire a victorious national revolution. The dirtier and more repressive the
campaigns waged by governments, the greater the public disaffection, and the
degree of popular radicalization. As we will see, those ideas transformed revo-
lutionary politics.

American Turmoil
The US shared in the radical explosion, in 68ism, but the year had an especially
grim quality, symbolized by the assassinations of Martin Luther King that
April, and of Presidential contender Robert F Kennedy in June. Those acts
seemed to end hopes of peaceful political change and reform. Internal political
violence and polarization surged, making the familiar language of East-West
confrontation appear all but irrelevant. Many Americans, like West Europeans,
bitterly attacked the US government and its military establishment. Anti-war
themes and imagery permeated mainstream popular culture, suggested by the
widespread use of the Peace Sign. Originally designed for the British CND, by
the late 1960s, it was a logo of the US anti-war protests.
That chaos opened the way to a new administration that directly contra-
dicted the radical hopes of the year. Although anti-war dissent remained fer-
vent, many Americans were alarmed by the social chaos and racial unrest that
was underway, and which seemed to be growing worse. In the presidential
election of that November, third party hard right candidate George Wallace
secured 13.5 percent of the popular vote (Wallace’s vice presidential candidate
was Curtis LeMay, former head of the SAC). That took many Southern and
white working-class votes that would otherwise have gone to the Democrats.
Conservative Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency, although with a
tiny popular vote majority over his Democratic rival. As we will see, Nixon’s
presidency would mark a dramatic new phase in Cold War approaches and
alignments.

Socialism with a Human Face

In Eastern Europe too, domestic conflicts made the international confronta-
tion appear irrelevant. Never efficient, economic systems in most nations were
stumbling badly in the mid-1960s, and complaints about living standards were
 11  CRISIS OF IDEOLOGIES: THE WORLD IN 1968  179

magnified by the increasingly obvious contrast with Western Europe. Issues of

artistic freedom, free speech, and censorship were contentious.
In early 1968, the most dangerous situation was in Poland, where students
and intellectuals led protests that unsurprisingly were met with repression.
Even so, they detonated a national wave of demonstrations. As in the West, the
Polish movement mobilized many thousands of young adults and teenagers,
including workers and school students. Polish leader Władysław Gomulka, who
had initially inspired reformist hopes, cracked down on protesters and reform-
ists. He diverted popular discontent away from the regime’s own failings by
strengthening a vigorous anti-Zionist campaign already in progress, which rap-
idly morphed into anti-Semitism. In part, that allowed the regime to exploit
popular hostility to the brutal Communist regimes of the post-1945 decade,
when Jews had occupied such a prominent role in the Party and secret police
apparatus. Polish Jews joined the many Soviet citizens fleeing to Israel.
Although the Polish protests of what was remembered simply as “March 1968”
fell short of open revolution, the crisis profoundly affected the response of the
East Bloc nations to other dissidence as it arose.
The other storm center was in Czechoslovakia, which since 1953 had been
under the hardline Stalinist rule of Antonin Novotny (he became the country’s
president in 1957). In January, Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary
of the Communist Party and initiated reforms that included a reduction of
centralized Party control, and some economic liberalization. The state would
reduce its rigid control of speech and the media, and people would be able to
travel more freely. As Dubček famously proclaimed that April, the government
would permit “Socialism with a human face.” Initially, reforms were quite
modest and would not, for instance, allow rival political parties, still less full
market capitalism. Through the following month, however, matters rapidly ran
out of Party control in what became known as the Prague Spring. New parties
began to form, and the media became ever more outspoken, including through
the new medium of television. Together, these changes were fast bringing
Czechoslovakia closer to the European norms of the time.
The Soviets and the other East Bloc nations were multiply disturbed at these
changes, not least because to speak of democratization or humanization implied
that those values did not characterize their own systems. They were alarmed at
the swift disintegration of Party control and authority once even mild reforms
were instituted, and saw a terrifying precedent for future developments in all
East Bloc nations. Memories of the Polish emergency were still raw. The Soviets
feared a collapse in the Warsaw Pact alliance, very much on the lines of what
would actually occur in 1989. At the same time, the Soviets wished to avoid a
public relations catastrophe such as they had experienced in Hungary in 1956.
Both sides sought compromise, agreeing to some limits on reforms, and reas-
serting Czechoslovak membership in the Warsaw Pact.
After months of negotiation, the Soviets moved to a military response, with
the cooperation of their allies in the Warsaw Five, namely Hungary, Poland,
Bulgaria, and East Germany. On August 20–21, some 200,000 Soviet-led
180  P. JENKINS

troops invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, in Operation Danube, the only

actual campaign undertaken by the Warsaw Pact. The Czechoslovak govern-
ment refused to resist, and fewer than a hundred were killed in the ensuing
protests. The Soviets installed a new hardline regime, which punished and
imprisoned suspected enemies, although not carrying out the mass executions
that would have been inevitable in earlier years. Even Dubček survived until
1992. In the post-1968 decade, Czechoslovakia became the harshest state in
the Eastern Bloc.
In November 1968, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev declared the princi-
ple that when “forces hostile to socialism” tried to turn a socialist country
toward capitalism, then that became a problem not just for that particular
country, but for all socialist nations.2 This principle, the Brezhnev Doctrine,
explicitly declared a Soviet right and duty to prevent a withdrawal from social-
ism, by military means if necessary. Once socialism was established, once the
ratchet had turned, it could never be reversed.
It is difficult to exaggerate the international reaction to the invasion of
Czechoslovakia, and to the images of Soviet tanks occupying the streets of
Prague. The affair revived military fears in Europe itself and raised fears that
Soviet aggression might be directed against other Communist nations that
opposed its policies, including Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania. The British
briefly feared a Soviet bloc attack against Western Europe. Particularly follow-
ing the revolutionary upsurge elsewhere in the West, the action discredited
Soviet Communism and the individual Communist parties that so slavishly
expressed its views.

Dissidents
The crisis abruptly terminated any Western hopes that the Soviet Union would
grow closer to Western norms, that it would “normalize” and relax its policies.
Reinforcing that message were events in the USSR itself, where affairs in
Czechoslovakia galvanized an already stirring movement. Although the Soviet
Union experienced little overt dissidence comparable to that in Eastern Europe,
activism was growing. Some writers and intellectuals were already publishing
materials critical of the regime, either smuggling their writings abroad for over-
seas publication. In 1966, the government prosecuted two of the most visible
dissident writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who received harsh sen-
tences in labor camps. That trial inspired other dissidents, and critical works
received wide underground domestic circulation as “self-published,” samizdat.
The most celebrated such production was the Chronicle of Current Events,
widely read from its foundation in 1968, although thoroughly illegal.

2
 Harry Schwartz, “The Khrushchev/Brezhnev Doctrine at Helsinki,” New York Times, August
5, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/05/archives/the-khrushchevbrezhnev-doctrine-­
at-helsinki.html.
 11  CRISIS OF IDEOLOGIES: THE WORLD IN 1968  181

Protests mounted during 1968. In August, a small group gathered in

Moscow’s Red Square to protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
These were incarcerated in mental hospitals, in what became a standard tech-
nique for suppressing dissent. Some intellectuals signed protests against the
invasion, including the high-profile poet Yevtushenko. Another key activist was
Andrei Sakharov, a pivotal figure in the development of Soviet thermonuclear
weapons. In 1968, his opposition to the creation of anti-missile systems led
him to circulate his arguments in samizdat, as a result of which he was excluded
from military research. Despite the crackdown, these protests marked a critical
stage on the development of the dissident movement that would become so
potent a force in the following decade. The Soviet campaigns gained enormous
sympathy among Western intellectuals and policymakers, and further poisoned
the image of Soviet Communism in the West.

Many Vietnams
Globally, the 1968 experience sparked the growth of many radical and revolu-
tionary movements, many of which in turn found strong support in the Western
New Left. Radicalism was already surging across Latin America, inspired by the
Cuban example, and the struggle in Vietnam. In October 1968, mass protests
developed in Mexico City, coinciding with the Olympics shortly to be held in
that city, which would naturally attract a global media audience. Armed police
met the demonstrations with lethal force, killing perhaps 400.
The other great symbolic event of the year occurred in Medellín, Colombia,
that August and September, during the conference of the continent’s Catholic
prelates, CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano). Between 1963 and
1965, the Catholic Church held its Second Vatican Council, which opened the
way to rethinking virtually every aspect of church life and social teaching.
Around the world, that transformed the political attitudes of Catholics, many
of whom moved to the forefront of liberal or left activism. In Latin America,
new theological positions insisted on the unique importance of the poor in the
Christian message, and the crying need for activism in the cause of social jus-
tice. That radical liberation theology was powerfully expressed at Medellín. It
soon became the basis for radical movements across the continent, often in de
facto alliance with Marxist causes and sects.
Revolutionary movements proliferated across Latin America, many inspired
by The Battle of Algiers. In 1969, Brazilian militant Carlos Marighela, pub-
lished his Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. (Marighela perished at the
hands of Brazilian police later that year.) Urban guerilla movements began a
series of “armed propaganda” actions, which included robberies, kidnappings,
and bombings. But the Battle of Algiers model had sweeping implications for
those who defended the state, as much as those who challenged it. The same
story taught security forces the desperate means that would be needed to sup-
press an urban guerrilla rising. Movements organized in cell systems must be
182  P. JENKINS

countered by excellent intelligence, drawing on extensive interrogation and

torture, and supplemented by extra-legal violence and killings.
By 1968, such theories of both insurgency and counter-insurgency were
becoming the common currency of revolutionary struggle. Urban guerrilla
movements were highly effective in Argentina, so much so that they provoked
a ruthless military crackdown in 1976. The ensuing “dirty war” in that country
slaughtered tens of thousands. It was Argentina that pioneered the use of the
word “disappear” as a transitive verb: police could “disappear” a suspect. A
similar trajectory occurred in Uruguay, which produced its Tupamaro guerril-
las, before they too fell prey to military repression. The guerrilla movements
and civil wars that were such a feature of Latin American life over the following
two decades generally had their root in 68ism, and usually in specific events
of 1968.
The resulting conflicts would long agonize US policymakers, who faced the
dilemma of distinguishing between authentic manifestations of genuine strug-
gle against injustice and planned Soviet or East Bloc interventions. Put simply,
should such insurgencies be seen as an integral part of the Cold War? Anxious
to prevent a spread of Communist and pro-Castro contagion in Latin America,
the US offered substantial aid to counter-insurgency movements, and involve-
ment in illegal violence and torture severely damaged the country’s reputation
worldwide. Singularly controversial was the US Army School of the Americas,
which offered instruction in counter-insurgency, drawing on the Vietnam
experience and especially on the Phoenix program. From the late 1960s, the
School trained large numbers of personnel from Latin American countries who
applied those tactics to internal repression in their own countries. The US
became an acknowledged leader in techniques of torture and so-called enhanced
interrogation.
The reality lay somewhere between the two approaches, of global Communist
conspiracy and spontaneous local action. On occasion, East Bloc and Cuban
intelligence agencies took advantage of emerging crises in an opportunistic
way, supplying arms and training, but did not control operations. At other
times, as with some of the European urban guerrilla movements, East Bloc
nations contributed much more actively and directly. Support for anti-Western
proxies offered the prospect of significantly weakening Western and Western-­
affiliated states without facing the dire consequences of launching direct attacks
upon them. Not easily attributable to any given sponsor, such acts were easily
deniable.

Jews and Arabs
The traumatic year 1968 placed Jewish issues on the front lines of Cold War
conflict. Partly, this was an outgrowth of Middle Eastern conflicts. As we have
seen, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 made the Jewish state the
unchallenged military power in the region. In consequence, Israel became a
 11  CRISIS OF IDEOLOGIES: THE WORLD IN 1968  183

symbol of Western imperialism and a magnet for Jewish populations within the
Eastern bloc who wished to migrate there.
The Soviet Union had a lengthy tradition of anti-Semitism, which now
became much more acute. Jews were viewed as being loyal to two nations, the
USSR and Israel, a grave crime in the Soviet perspective. When Jews applied for
permission to leave the country, they were denied visas, joining the stigmatized
population of refuseniks. From the end of the decade, the number of visas
issued to Jews increased substantially, in response to diplomatic needs and pres-
sures. But the fact of taking such visas, and deserting the Soviet Union, further
enhanced the image of Jews as potential traitors to the Soviet cause. Soviet
campaigns against Zionism segued easily into attacks on Judaism as such, and
on individuals Jews, regardless of their politics. That current spilled over into
eastern European nations with their own toxic history of anti-Jewish senti-
ment, especially Poland. East Bloc anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism would play
an important international role in coming years, in pushing many liberal
Americans to strongly anti-Soviet positions. This was a significant influence in
creating the neo-conservative movement that became such a strong compo-
nent of the coalition that supported Ronald Reagan.
Middle Eastern affairs also played a role for the emerging New Left. While
discrediting the Arab states, the 1967 war shifted the focus of anti-Israel resis-
tance to Palestinian groups themselves, especially the al-Fatah guerrilla move-
ment. In March 1968, Fatah fought a stubborn battle against Israeli forces at
Karameh, in Jordan, which inspired Palestinian activism, and multiple new
sects and armed militias formed over the next two years. Some, like the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), used innovative tactics of urban
terrorism and undertook sensational acts such as airline hijackings. In July
1968, three PFLP militants hijacked an El Al flight and diverted it to Algiers,
forcing Israel to free Arab prisoners in exchange for the hostages. Such actions
were greatly admired by leftists worldwide, and the Arab guerrilla groups
offered support and training for militants from Europe and elsewhere. This laid
the foundation for the international terrorism that became so notorious in the
1970s, when airline hijackings in particular became so commonplace.
At least in popular perception, the various guerrilla and terrorist movements
were free-standing and independent. As authentic voices of Third World resis-
tance, they were often idolized by young left-wing groups who had nothing
but contempt for the Soviets. Even so, it was an open secret that many of these
groups, especially among the Palestinians, cooperated with Eastern Bloc intel-
ligence services, from which they received arms and finance. Such groups gave
the Eastern Bloc useful proxies to use against Western powers through acts of
terrorism and destabilization.
184  P. JENKINS

The Mother of All Demos

In its impact on later history, cultural and well as political, 1968 defied hyper-
bole. But one episode that December had a significance far beyond what might
have been dreamt at the time, and it would transform the history of the Cold
War. On December 9, 1968, computer pioneer Doug Engelbart spoke to the
San Francisco meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE. What he did that day has gone
down as The Mother of All Demos. In a 90-minute session, Engelbart demon-
strated a bewildering host of new technologies which for the first time showed
how computers could be used for communications and information retrieval,
rather than simply for processing numbers. Among many other innovations, he
showed the use of windows, word processing, hypertext, efficient navigation,
and video conferencing. He even introduced a device that he called a “mouse.”
He outlined the idea of an interlinked network of communicating computers,
which found expression the following year in DARPANet, the forerunner of
the Internet. Engelbart’s session introduced the world of personal computing
as it has existed ever since, with all the incalculable consequences for commerce
and communication, not to mention human interaction.
At a time when public interest in science was so concentrated on space
travel, few would have foreseen the implications of these new technologies for
global politics. But the new computing worlds that emerged over the following
decades caused economic and cultural revolutions worldwide, to the immense
advantage of the US and the West. As the Soviets and their allies refused to
allow the untrammeled operation of free enterprise and were so bitterly reluc-
tant to permit the free flow of information, so they fell every further behind in
those technologies, and the consumer societies built upon them. The Eastern
Bloc became ever more glaringly an economic backwater. Although citizens of
those countries contributed hugely to the new technological world, they usu-
ally did so after migrating to the West and enjoying its freedoms. China, mean-
while, shared the same alarm about expanding domestic freedoms, but
nonetheless recognized the critical need to modernize its economy, and after
1979, to work within the emerging global economic structures. Despite the
acute divisions in the West, and the turmoil unleashed by the political insurgen-
cies, those technological advantages proved critical to Western success in the
Cold War.

Further Reading

For the wide-ranging protests and crises of 1968, see, for instance, Mark
Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2003); and Richard Vinen,
The Long ‘68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies (2018).
Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
(2017) offers an excellent summary of the military situation in Vietnam dur-
ing that crucial year.
 11  CRISIS OF IDEOLOGIES: THE WORLD IN 1968  185

Josef Pazderka, ed., The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: The Russian
Perspective (2019).
The growing crisis in the Middle East is described in Anat N. Kurz, Fatah and
the Politics of Violence: The Institutionalization of a Popular Struggle (2005).
For the pioneering era of high tech and computing, see Leslie Berlin,
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age (2017).
 CHAPTER 12

A Cold Peace, or War by Other Means?

April 30, 1975, marked a powerful symbolic turning point in the Cold War.
Although US forces had withdrawn from Vietnam, the war continued, and that
Spring the North Vietnamese forces launched a powerful offensive, pressing
hard on the capital, Saigon. As defenses crumbled, the US organized its
Operation Frequent Wind, the mass evacuation of US personnel and of South
Vietnamese who had worked closely with them. This culminated in the heli-
copter evacuation from the roof of the US embassy, as thousands clamored for
help. After the helicopters reached the safety of aircraft carriers waiting off the
coast, the craft were pushed into the ocean. The visual images gave a harrowing
picture of American failure and defeat, and the destruction of weapons on
which it had relied during the war. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.
Defeat in Vietnam coincided with many other disasters for the US both at
home and overseas, projecting an image of pathetic weakness, while the Soviets
were advancing their interests around the globe. At least for a few years, it was
not far-fetched to imagine a Western collapse not unlike what overcame the
Eastern Bloc after 1989. Albeit briefly, it looked as if the Cold War was over,
and the Eastern Bloc had won.

Détente
Although the imminent threat of Armageddon faded after 1962, both sides
remained extremely well-armed. Making that situation still more dangerous
was the arrival of Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) weaponry,
which made it nearly impossible for surveillance to determine just how many
warheads either side might be deploying. The Soviets took full advantage of
US weakness during the closing years of the Vietnam War to build up their
armed forces. Admiral Sergey Gorshkov presided over a huge expansion of the
Soviet navy, which became a potent blue-water force capable of global

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 187

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_12
188  P. JENKINS

interventions. That included both surface ships and nuclear submarines, with
heavy reliance on nuclear weapons. In a sense, this reproduced what had hap-
pened to the US Navy in the late 1950s.
Confronting the new situation was US President Nixon, whose political
reputation has been destroyed by the Watergate scandal, but who deserves
credit for his attempts to build a new balance between the superpowers. He
was strongly influenced by Henry Kissinger, who variously served as National
Security Adviser (1969–1975) and as Secretary of State (1973–1977). Kissinger
was deeply shaped by his historical interpretation of nineteenth-century
Europe, and its balance of power that transcended ideological conflicts. That
was vital if, as seemed likely, the US was entering a period of decline, both
absolute and relative, in which it would have to form a new relationship with
its rivals. With the Soviets, Kissinger favored détente, a reduction of tensions
or, simply, of relaxation, which fell short of full entente, of cordial understand-
ing. For Kissinger, that meant setting aside traditional ideological obsessions,
so that symbolic causes should not be allowed to get in the way of peacemaking
in a nuclear-armed world. Realpolitik, the politics of the realistic and practical,
carried the day.
The administration began diplomatic initiatives aimed at balancing rising
Soviet power. For twenty years, the US had regarded the People’s Republic
of China (PRC) as a pariah state, refusing to grant it diplomatic recognition.
The Cultural Revolution deepened Chinese isolation, and the rest of the world
found that country’s affairs obscure and baffling. In the Fall of 1971, the coun-
try experienced an elite conflict and a botched coup attempt that resulted in
the death, perhaps murder, of senior Party leader Lin Biao. This pointed to
savage internal policy debates, perhaps involving a new international orienta-
tion. Yet Nixon himself had long been positioned at the uncompromising end
of the anti-Communist spectrum and made his political career as the exposer of
Soviet espionage. It caused astonishment when in 1971 the US announced
Nixon’s upcoming visit to China. In February 1972, Nixon and Mao met in a
cordial atmosphere. Diplomatic links followed as the PRC replaced the
Republic of China (ROC), the Chinese Nationalists, on the UN Security
Council. Beyond promoting peace between historic rivals, the new policy drove
a further wedge between the old Communist partners, and the new US-China
diplomatic relationship could not fail to alarm Moscow.
In 1969, the US undertook direct talks with the Soviets on the nuclear bal-
ance. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks—SALT—focused on the number of
nuclear delivery systems that each side could deploy and the relative balance of
ICBMs and submarine-launched weapons, or SLBMs. The negotiations
acknowledged the enormous Western advantage in SLBMs and limited the
total number of nuclear-capable submarines available to the US. Throughout,
both sides were conscious that even the limited number of warheads was quite
enough to annihilate both nations, but the important principle was the
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  189

prevention of a further nuclear race. Agreement was reached in 1972 on SALT

I, and Nixon came to Moscow to sign the new treaty, in a move scarcely less
astonishing than his Chinese venture. The two sides agreed on strict constraints
on anti-ballistic missiles, again preventing a new arms race, and maintaining
confidence in the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The US
and Soviets further agreed on symbolic acts of cooperation, with a joint space
mission to be carried out in 1975. Negotiations began on a new round of
SALT II talks, which would achieve significant reductions in the absolute num-
ber of delivery vehicles on both sides: SALT II would be signed in 1979. In
1975, the US and Soviets joined the international convention prohibiting the
development or use of biological weapons.
The otherwise benevolent atmosphere of these years was briefly threatened
in October 1973 when Egypt and Syria launched a remarkably successful
strike against Israel during Yom Kippur and Ramadan, the holy seasons of
Judaism and Islam, respectively. For a few critical days, it seemed that Israel’s
survival might be endangered, until the arrival of huge quantities of US aid,
weaponry, and supplies. But at the country’s worst moments, Israeli military
leaders discussed the possibility of using nuclear arms, at least in the form of a
demonstration blast. The crisis acquired another nuclear dimension when
Nixon believed that the Soviets were shipping nuclear weapons to Egypt,
briefly causing the US to move to DEFCON 3 readiness, and opening the
prospect of a superpower exchange. But with that one unnerving exception, a
new and safer balance of power really did seem to have come into existence.
Another reminder of the underlying issues in East-West conflict came in
Chile, where Marxist Salvador Allende took office as President in 1970. Chile
had a strong tradition of constitutional democracy and of military restraint in
intervening in politics. Allende was elected democratically, and he made none
of the sudden moves to Soviet-style policies that had occurred in Cuba. Even
so, Nixon and Kissinger were alarmed at the possible spread of Communism
throughout the continent, where Chile and Cuba might become the two sides
of a potential “Red sandwich.” The CIA worked with domestic rightist groups
to destabilize the regime, supporting protests and labor actions that wrecked
the economy. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean armed forces took power
in a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, and the ensuing repression claimed
several thousand lives. That coup created worldwide protests and contributed
to the potent anti-Americanism that was such a potent force in Western Europe.
But it played little role in the larger picture of détente, where both US and
Soviet leaderships followed realpolitik as exemplified by Kissinger. If the West
criticized the Soviets for its crackdown in Czechoslovakia, then the Soviet Bloc
naturally denounced the US-backed repression in Chile. But such concerns
should not be allowed to get in the way of the practical needs and interests of
each side.
190  P. JENKINS

The End in Vietnam

The most immediate threat facing the new global balance was still the war in
Vietnam. The Nixon administration faced insuperable challenges, as much of
public opinion was demanding a prompt withdrawal from the conflict. Nixon
spoke the language of peace, but a “peace with honor” that would ideally
maintain the Western position in Vietnam. A policy of Vietnamization meant
that South Vietnamese forces themselves took a steadily larger share of the
defense efforts while relying on overwhelming US airpower where needed. At
first, this model proved workable, and ARVN units clearly improved in quality.
A major North Vietnamese offensive at Easter 1972 was held and then defeated
by the US forces and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), heavily
backed by air campaigns to interdict supplies and reinforcements. From April,
the US resumed heavy bombing of North Vietnam, using B-52s among other
aircraft, in Operation Linebacker. The ferocity of the new attacks persuaded the
North Vietnamese to resume stalled peace negotiations. That December, 200
B-52s were the main focus of the devastating raids of Linebacker II, which
targeted Hanoi and Haiphong. Throughout the year, the US used its new dip-
lomatic channels with the Soviets and Chinese to place pressure on the North.
But Nixon’s efforts were crippled by the growing resistance to the war
within the US itself, which reached colossal proportions following the invasion
of Cambodia in May 1970. Further undermining support for the war effort
were exposés of atrocities, such as the massacre at My Lai village in 1968,
which created international outrage when it was exposed in 1970. Public fury
had a direct effect on the war effort, as ever more hostile Congresses placed
strict limitations on the direct US role, and cut funding. In 1973, Congress
passed a War Powers Act that would severely limit the power of any President
to enter any future war without Congressional approval.
Nixon’s policies acknowledged those restraints, as he and Kissinger privately
realized that the fall of the South was really a matter of time. In the meantime,
the South had to be persuaded to accept a peace settlement that would allow
US withdrawal without the country collapsing overnight. By 1973, the last US
forces were indeed withdrawn, and at the same time, the US ended its military
draft. Kissinger himself shared that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, together with his
North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho. But the “decent interval” only
lasted two years. Without the threat of US airpower, the North Vietnamese
organized their new offensive in 1975. They faced nothing like the same resis-
tance that their predecessors had in 1968 and 1972, and the South’s defenses
collapsed.
Although estimates of the war’s human damage vary widely, a reasonable
estimate suggests that this Second Indo-China War claimed some 1.3 million
lives between 1964 and 1975. The vast majority, of course, were Vietnamese.
The US lost 60,000 lives in that whole period 1963–1975, 9000 of whom
perished between 1970 and 1972, in the final phase of the country’s armed
involvement. Those figures do not include hundreds of thousands of dead in
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  191

Cambodia and Laos, Communists also took power in 1975. The victorious
regime in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, began a purge of the population that
took the principles of Stalin or Mao to their logical limit, exterminating every-
one who could be associated with the old social order. By 1979, some two
million died, around a quarter of the population.

American Crisis
At just this time, domestic affairs in the US significantly weakened the nation’s
political establishment and overturned its older assumptions about interna-
tional relations and the Cold War itself. In the process, the country’s growing
unrest raised many ghosts from the most intense confrontations between East
and West.
The situation had its roots in elite divisions over the Vietnam War. In 1971,
analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked classified documents concerning the origins and
development of the US role in that war, which starkly contradicted official
stances. These Pentagon Papers were gravely embarrassing, leading the Nixon
administration to create a clandestine team of “plumbers” to prevent further
leaks. That became part of a larger scheme to investigate and discredit political
opponents, using extensive wiretapping. Concern about national security
merged into clandestine efforts to secure the President’s re-election in 1972,
partly by securing illicit funding, but also by subverting any opponents who
might pose a real threat. The eventual Democratic candidate, George
McGovern, stood on the Party’s radical left wing, and Nixon crushed him at
the polls in November.
But those underground operations came at an exorbitantly high price. In
June 1972, Nixon operatives were caught in a burglary at Democratic National
Headquarters in Washington’s Watergate Complex. What at first seemed to be
a trivial episode grew into a scandal that dominated national affairs over the
next two years, as sources within the FBI and other agencies leaked extensive
material to journalists, and those revelations, in turn, formed the basis of
searching Congressional investigations. The Nixon White House was directly
linked to Watergate and other burglaries, and to making illegal payments.
Facing certain impeachment, Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974. The
Cold War context of the Watergate affair must be stressed. The immediate
quest for leaks and potential moles followed familiar tactics developed by US
intelligence agencies against penetration by Communist powers. Decades of
experience around the world, especially in Latin America, had made those same
agencies experts in tilting elections to a favored side or faction. In a sense, these
methods were brought home to the US. The Watergate team was drawn from
anti-Castro activists with strong CIA ties, and one key Nixon operative was
E. Howard Hunt, who had been involved in most of the key CIA activities in
the Caribbean over the previous two decades.
Between 1972 and 1976, the Watergate investigation metastasized into a
series of exposés about the misdeeds of US agencies throughout the Cold War
192  P. JENKINS

to date. Those revelations reached an agonizing climax with the US Senate

Select Committee chaired by Frank Church, which reported in 1975. This
revealed CIA involvement in multiple attempts to oust regimes and assassinate
foreign leaders over the past two decades, offering grotesquely rich detail
about CIA methods and tactics. Other exposés revealed FBI methods of inter-
nal security, especially the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)
that had operated since 1956. The investigation demonstrated the highly
intrusive and disruptive methods used against suspects, often without a legal
foundation.
The various investigations generated a bewildering range of accusations and
conspiracy theories, some of which were well-founded, such as the CIA’s
efforts to mobilize the Mafia against Fidel Castro, and the use of bizarre experi-
mental drugs to achieve mind control. Also reasonably documented was CIA
involvement in drug trafficking to fund irregular forces in Indo-China. Other
charges were speculative or outrageous, such as the reputed involvement of US
agencies in the celebrated assassinations of the 1960s, including those of both
Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. Throughout that story, the
Soviets made whatever mischievous contributions they could, spreading false
rumors backed by forged documents. In 1976, a House Select Committee
dismissed the most explosive charges of direct involvement in assassination, but
they revealed still more material about covert US activities in Cuba or South
East Asia. The continuing wave of scandals could not fail to have its impact on
the CIA itself, which suffered many restructurings, purges, and mass resigna-
tions. The clandestine services suffered particularly.

The Crisis of Anti-Communism

These proceedings had damning consequences for the anti-Communist cause
and the assumptions on which Cold War actions had been founded. The
intelligence investigations operated on the apparent belief that alleged sub-
versives never posed any real threat and that probes into Communist activi-
ties were always a cover for actions against well-intentioned dissidents. What
had once been the radical or left-wing approach to such matters—the “witch-
hunt” theory—became the mainstream theme of media coverage.
Throughout, the CIA or related agencies themselves appeared to be the sin-
ister enemies of American democracy, and a principal motor of reactionary
causes worldwide. That demonization of the US and its role in the Cold War
was reflected in dozens of popular films and books that appeared in the mid-
and late 1970s.
Assassination and conspiracy themes permeated popular culture, both
through fiction and in (supposedly) non-fiction exposés. In the now-popular
vision, President Kennedy was presented as a foe of militarism and the military-­
industrial complex, who was murdered for his refusal to pursue far-right poli-
cies in Cuba or Vietnam. Ironically, given his real attitudes and behavior, he
became a martyr for peace and coexistence. When the Soviets appeared in any
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  193

such conspiratorial accounts, it was virtually always as a foreign power that

could be scapegoated for actions that were in fact the work of sinister US
forces. If the new mood in the US and much of the West was not actually pro-­
Communist, it was at least anti anti-Communist.
Further enhancing the sense of alarm across the West was the severe eco-
nomic downturn that followed the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, when the oil-­
producing nations embargoed supplies to the US and other nations, and
massively raised energy prices. The economic effects were dire, creating for
many nations the worst economic decline since the late 1940s. Severe unem-
ployment and surging inflation afflicted the US and much of the world, while
the new importance of oil boosted the Soviet economy. Mass popular disaffec-
tion discredited many Western governments and gave new impetus to leftist
movements. Financial crises had their direct military impact, forcing govern-
ments to retrench and cut spending. Britain, in particular, accelerated the
spending cuts and program reductions that had so undermined its military
capacities since the 1950s.

The Soviets Turn South

As the failure in Vietnam demonstrated, US weakness and disorientation made
it impossible to maintain its global predominance. The abundantly supplied US
bases were opened to Eastern Bloc naval and air forces: from 1979, the Soviet
Navy found a valuable home at Cam Ranh Bay. Worldwide, the Soviets
expanded their influence in a way that would have been inconceivable in earlier
years. In 1974, a military coup overthrew a long-standing rightist regime in
Portugal, and for some months it seemed that the country might become the
first Communist state in Western Europe.
Scarcely less significant, Portugal had for centuries controlled a sizable colo-
nial empire in Africa, chiefly in Angola and Mozambique. The removal of
Portuguese rule was followed by the creation of a left-wing and Soviet allied
regime in Mozambique, and by a ruinous civil war in Angola. The regional
balance shifted startlingly with the arrival of Cuban military units to support
the left-wing forces in Angola, the MPLA—the Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola. Cuban interest in Central Africa was nothing new, and
the revolutionary prospects here had excited Che Guevara, but now the Soviets
supplied generous transportation facilities and logistics, including heavy weap-
ons. Cuban and MPLA forces established their hold over most of the country,
defeating the pro-Western army, the National Union for the Total Independence
of Angola (UNITA). At their height in 1975, the Cubans mobilized 25,000
troops in Angola. In Mozambique, Cuba offered extensive aid, including mili-
tary advisers as well as doctors and teachers.
Cuban forces likewise supported the leftist and pro-Soviet regimes in
Ethiopia, where a 1974 coup established a Marxist military dictatorship
called the Derg. In 1976, the neighboring leftist state of Somalia became
openly Marxist-Leninist and adopted revolutionary socialist styles. In
194  P. JENKINS

1977, the Somalis invaded the Ethiopian region of Ogaden, provoking a

powerful response by tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers, reinforced by
large Soviet contingents. The Eastern Bloc was thus intervening in a war
between two well-­armed African nations, both of which were avowedly
Marxist-Leninist, a striking sign of the times. Over the coming years, the
East Bloc armed- and supplied-state of Ethiopia became a leading military
power in eastern Africa.
The West challenged these rising powers through its own proxies, encourag-
ing South African and Zairean intervention against the MPLA and the Cubans.
But ten or twenty years earlier, Soviet interventions on any such in Africa would
have been met by a sharp US ultimatum, and a direct military riposte. Such
responses were simply not possible in the new political world. Beyond the
ongoing political crisis, US forces were shrinking in numbers, and morale was
low. Shortly after the fall of Saigon, the Khmer Rouges seized a US merchant
ship, the Mayaguez, provoking a rescue mission. The resulting raid went badly
wrong, and forty Americans died. If the action had no military significance in
its own right, it reinforced the broader picture of indecision and ineptitude.
Even if Americans had any wish to use force internationally, the US no longer
appeared a reliable ally. In 1975 and 1976, opinion surveys in the US showed
overwhelming majorities opposed to overseas interventions to defend any ally,
with the possible exception of Canada.
The new political atmosphere was apparent in the administration of Jimmy
Carter, who owed his election as president to his boasted lack of connection
with older political establishments. Carter also personified an important shift
in US public opinion toward the recognition and assertion of human rights as
a central theme in US foreign policy. In 1977 and 1978, Carter emphasized
human rights as a core of his political agenda, which shaped how he dealt with
many nations hitherto sympathetic to the US cause. The president warned
that US policies must not be shaped by an “inordinate fear of Communism.”1
The new US policy must be praised for its contribution to improving demo-
cratic rights in many nations, and his commitment to peace sometimes rein-
forced US national interests. In 1978, Carter brokered a historic peace
agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Camp David Accords, which had
the effect of bringing Egypt firmly into the US orbit. Only a few years previ-
ously, Egypt had been a valued Soviet ally. But in some cases, Carter’s pressure
for human rights improvements destabilized long-standing US allies, and gal-
vanized opposition, at a time when the US was declaring strong opposition to
military intervention. New crises unsurprisingly followed, in Iran and Central
America.

1
 “Text of President’s Commencement Address at Notre Dame on Foreign Policy,” New York
Times, May 23, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/23/archives/text-of-presidents-­
commencement-address-at-notre-dame-on-foreign.html.
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  195

Europe in the 1970s
Western and anti-Communist positions in Europe were at a low ebb in the
mid-1970s. Traditional right-wing parties had become unpopular during the
post-1973 economic recession, which further sparked corruption scandals
across the continent. Leftist parties did very well in several nations, epically
Italy, where the PCI earned 34.4 percent of the national vote in 1976, bringing
them close to replacing the Christian Democrats as the largest party.
At this time, Communist parties across Europe were stressing electoral
democracy and adopting positions critical of the Soviet Union, in a movement
that became known as Euro-Communism. This grew out of genuine horror at
the suppression of the Prague Spring, but it also reflected shock at the coup in
Chile. Could a progressive regime survive without widespread alliances with
non-Communist parties? Western Europe’s new Communist leaderships
announced their openness to alliances with other parties on the left and center.
But even in that benevolent setting, the potential election of a Communist-led
government in Italy or elsewhere would be a stumbling block for NATO, and
would inevitably affect future cooperation in matters of security and intelli-
gence. (The PCI, like other Communist parties, was still receiving major Soviet
funding.) Communist parties remained strong in France and were thriving in
Spain, Portugal, and Greece following the removal of rightist dictatorships in
those countries.
West European nations were affected by the intense wave of terrorism that
became a feature of the 1970s. This included attacks by international move-
ments, especially of Arab origin, such as the Palestinian group that targeted the
Munich Olympics in 1972. As we have seen, such groups differed in their
degree of relationships to sponsor states, but many received arms and training
from East Bloc nations or from Soviet-allied nations in the Middle East. That
relationship, whether direct or indirect, was much discussed in the context of
the domestic terrorism that assailed several European countries in these years.
The core question was whether such groups were autonomous, a response to
specific local circumstances, or did they have a larger Cold War context? That
anti-­Soviet interpretation was popularized in many media pieces and books,
such as the bestselling 1980 novel The Spike, by Robert Moss and Arnaud de
Borchgrave, and Claire Sterling’s 1981 exposé The Terror Network. In the US,
these views were presented in well-publicized Congressional hearings.
West Germany offered a troubling example. Out of the 1968 student move-
ment emerged the highly active terror movement called the Red Army Faction,
the RAF or the Baader-Meinhof group, which carried out many sensational
attacks in West Germany and overseas. Although its origins were murky at the
time, later revelations confirmed that the East German Stasi had supplied train-
ing and logistic support, as had Soviet-connected Arab movements. West
German militants fleeing police could easily find refuge on the other side of the
Iron Curtain. If the Stasi were not directly controlling or directing terrorists in
the West, the existence of those groups offered rich opportunities to destabilize
196  P. JENKINS

and discredit Western rivals, without attracting direct blame, or inviting

retaliation.
In Italy, one of the weaker members of the NATO front, state-sponsored
terrorism undermined the state. Multiple radical groups had emerged from the
upsurge of 1968, and some adopted violent tactics. A few followed the new
urban guerrilla model, most notoriously the Red Brigades, which undertook
many armed attacks through the 1970s. Many of these operations were clearly
the work of home-grown leftists, but at least parts of the movement were
appropriated for other causes. In retrospect, we know that the PCI in the late
1960s was alarmed at the prospect of a rightist coup, and had worked with the
Soviets and other East Bloc nations to develop a potential armed response.
From 1967, Italian Communist militants had traveled to East Bloc nations for
training in clandestine warfare, and that was over and above the role of far-left
sectarian groups. Beyond finding arms and training in East Bloc countries,
especially Czechoslovakia, some Red Brigades units became the instruments of
foreign intelligence agencies. In 1978, strikingly well-trained urban guerrillas
kidnapped the key Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro, who was then
negotiating with the Communist Party for a “historic compromise” between
the two sides. A national crisis followed, in which the Brigades killed Moro.
Controversy still reigns about who orchestrated the attack, whether we should
look to US or East Bloc clandestine agencies.

Détente in Europe
If European nations faced domestic turmoil, international relations improved
significantly, creating a kind of European détente. In every sense, the central
front of the East-West encounter was Germany, where as we have seen the
West German Federal Republic did not acknowledge the eastern boundaries of
the East German state, the DDR, and did not recognize the Polish state that
occupied former German lands. The key Western figure here was the popular
and charismatic Willy Brandt who served as Foreign Minister from 1966 and
became Chancellor in 1969, and who made the creation of a new diplomatic
order the centerpiece of his agenda. His Eastern policy, his Neue Ostpolitik,
involved recognizing the two German states as equal and separate entities,
each of which respected the territorial integrity of the other. The two coun-
tries signed the Basic Treaty (Grundlagenvertrag) in December 1972, open-
ing the way to the DDR’s recognition by the leading Western powers over the
next two years. Unlike in previous years, recognizing the East German state
would not mean granting it control over Berlin, where the rights of all four
occupying powers would be respected. Brandt’s approach also meant accept-
ing the post-­war frontier settlement. A series of treaties in 1970 and 1971
promoted good relations with the Soviets, Poland, and Czechoslovakia as well
as the DDR.
Together, Brandt’s policies constituted a major step away from Cold War
standoffs, and conservative West Germans were outraged by his concessions.
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  197

But in accepting current realities, they closely resembled the policies that Nixon
and Kissinger were advancing in the same years. US economic policies contrib-
uted to the changes. In 1971, Nixon announced a radical financial shift when
he ended the convertibility of the US currency to gold, in effect terminating
the Bretton Woods system that had prevailed for a quarter century. This “Nixon
Shock” alerted Europe and Japan to the coming of a new global system in
which the US would act unilaterally, forcing them to look more to their own
regional concerns and interests.
German developments laid the foundation for new arrangements on a
Europe-wide scale. In 1973, the Soviet Union and Finland proposed a
Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, which over the next two
years debated principles that could be commonly agreed. The final phase of the
conference agreed what became the Helsinki Accords, which were signed by all
European states except Albania, as well as the US and Canada. The Accords
included ten principles—hence the description the Decalogue, or the Ten
Commandments—to govern relationships between states. These included ter-
ritorial integrity and the inviolability of frontiers, as well themes of peaceful
coexistence, cooperation, and non-intervention in internal affairs. Other “com-
mandments” included respect for human rights and freedoms, including the
freedom of speech and religious belief. Coming so shortly after the recent
US-Soviet space venture, the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the Helsinki agreement
marked the symbolic highwater mark of East-West rapprochement. But in the
context of the time, and the accumulating disasters that the US was undergo-
ing, it made it look uncomfortably as if the emerging peace was being defined
according to Soviet needs and interests. In 1976, US President Gerald Ford
made a disastrous blunder when he stated that “there is no Soviet domination
of Eastern Europe.” Although not intended as a serious analysis, it seemed to
confirm the US neglect of Soviet power.

Against Communism
The apparent Soviet triumph contained some disturbing portents of weakness
and failure. An Eastern Bloc that was willing to project its power around the
world was exposing itself to many potential commitments and conflicts, allow-
ing the Western Bloc to choose where it would focus a counter-attack. But that
military commitment demanded a massive economic foundation, which the
Soviets did not possess (we will return to this theme in Chap. 15). The Soviets
fell increasingly behind the West, as the economic disparity became even more
marked. After the mid-1960s, the country abandoned effective attempts at
economic reform, and the years of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982) were marked
by decline and stagnation. Soviet GNP contracted steadily from the early
1970s. The country resembled a failing Third World country that happened to
be spectacularly well armed. Journalist Xan Smiley semi-seriously compared the
USSR to a bitterly poor African nation like Upper Volta (the modern Burkina
198  P. JENKINS

Faso) except that it was “Upper Volta with rockets.”2 It was hard to see how
long that paradoxical status could be sustained.
Even the diplomatic successes produced their difficulties. The more the
Soviets engaged with the West, the more vulnerable they became to political
and diplomatic pressure about their own internal policies and conduct. At
Helsinki, the East Bloc had agreed to wide-ranging principles of human rights,
in areas that they were conspicuously failing. Soviet dissidents achieved broad
international respect, marked conspicuously by the award of the 1975 Nobel
Peace Prize to Andrei Sakharov. Also highly visible was Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
who had for years been working on his exposé of the Soviet prison camp sys-
tem, The Gulag Archipelago. This created a sensation when it appeared in the
West in 1973 with an English translation, although it actually offered little
material that was new or surprising to historians. In 1974, the Soviets expelled
Solzhenitsyn and stripped him of his citizenship, and in the West, he became an
outspoken critic not just of Communism, but of Western secularism. His 1978
Commencement Address at Harvard University had a special impact.
Solzhenitsyn’s appeal to spiritual and often mystical values had a profound
influence on many Westerners, who found a new and philosophically grounded
foundation for anti-Communism at a time when that ideology was fallen into
deep disrepute.
In other nations, the Helsinki agreement stimulated new resistance and dis-
sent. In Czechoslovakia, where post-1968 repression was at its worst, unofficial
dissidence had a countercultural quality, centered on the psychedelic rock band
Plastic People of the Universe. When members of the group were arrested in
1976, opponents of the regime were stirred to sign the courageous protest that
became known as Charter 77, which specifically cited the Helsinki principles.
Although this movement too was persecuted, unofficial dissident networks
spread throughout the country. As so often, Poland offered another center of
resistance. Following rioting in 1970, a new government had instituted sub-
stantial reforms, which created a brief era of prosperity. As in the West, that
boom came to a crashing halt during the post-1973 recession, and discontent
mounted, with widespread protests in 1976. Human rights rhetoric and
democracy campaigns found a strong institutional foundation in the nation’s
powerful Roman Catholic church. One apparent exception to the regional pic-
ture was Hungary, where some degree of liberalization (New Economic
Mechanism) created a degree of prosperity and Western trade. The country
was wryly described as “the happiest barracks in the Soviet camp.” Yet here as
throughout the region, governments were incurring impossible debts through
subsidies to failing and unprofitable economic concerns, and a political reckon-
ing could not be long delayed.
Human rights activism found a focus in Jewish dissidence and the demand
to emigrate to Israel. The campaign found a prominent face in 1977, when the

2
 Quoted for instance in John Horvath, “Yearning for Change—Again,” Telepolis, April 13,
2008, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Yearning-for-Change-Again-3418101.html.
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  199

Soviets arrested militant activist Natan Sharansky for high treason, a charge
that could have brought the death penalty. Sharansky received a harsh prison
sentence, creating another visible martyr for the human rights cause. Those
efforts received powerful support from Jewish groups and human rights activ-
ists in other nations, particularly the US, who tried to force Soviet concessions,
to the point of derailing détente. US Senator Henry Scoop Jackson used the
issue to limit the normalization of trade with the Soviets and criticized the
SALT II process. The resulting visibility made him a plausible presidential can-
didate in 1976 and laid a foundation for a new and harder line in conservative
approaches to the Soviets. Following the ultra-liberal Democratic Party cam-
paign of 1972, some prominent former liberals adopted sternly anti-Soviet
positions that set them at odds with the party. Although Jewish issues were by
no means the only factor driving this concern, they did motivate some key
activists. The neo-conservatives, or “neocons,” gravitated toward the
Republican Party, and later became staunch supporters of Ronald Reagan.
Détente contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

The Present Danger and the New Right

Perceptions of US decline and Soviet advances stimulated a new and more mili-
tant anti-Communism in the West. For conservatives, the mid-1970s rap-
prochement was less an augur of peace than a surrender, a kind of appeasement.
The common conservative charge was that the Allies were drifting toward a
neutral relationship with the Soviets reminiscent of that of Finland, in which
nations abstained from any words or acts that could provoke Moscow. The
Helsinki Accords were of course signed in that country. “Finlandization”
became a common and highly negative conservative term in this era.
Just as loathed was the idea of moral equivalence, the approach that saw no
essential difference between the causes of liberal democracy and Communism,
and which accepted and tolerated Communist rule over Eastern Europe. The
concept was popularized by neo-conservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick, US ambas-
sador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration, but it had a
special relevance in the debates of the late 1970s. In response to claims of
equivalence, conservatives pointed to the revelations of the Gulag, and to more
recent Communist atrocities. Those included the mass exodus of refugees who
fled the new regime in Vietnam, as well as the mass killings then being reported
in Cambodia. The spread of Soviet influence worldwide provoked near-­
apocalyptic fears of the loss of Western access to oil and other essential materi-
als, which would drive the West into irreversible decline. In this view, the
continuing terrorist onslaught reflected Soviet machinations.
Just how pressing were the dangers facing the West was a divisive matter
within the US intelligence community. Conservatives were skeptical of the
annual National Intelligence Estimates that assessed Soviet military strength,
and which formed the background to détente. In 1976, the CIA assembled
several different teams to assess Soviet weaponry and strategic intentions, and
200  P. JENKINS

one report in particular—by Team B, led by Richard Pipes—suggested that the

Soviets were rapidly establishing a military advantage that would allow them to
attack and destroy the US. According to these reports, the CIA had systemati-
cally underestimated Soviet abilities and the capacities of several new missiles
and bombers. By this interpretation, the Soviets no longer accepted the prin-
ciple of MAD and were ready to fight a war with nuclear weapons.
The Team B report was criticized as alarmist, but it had a profound influ-
ence on conservatives. Some Team B members were prominent in the
Committee on the Present Danger, or CPD, formed in 1976, and which
included an impressive group of politicians, officials, and intellectuals. The
name harked back to an earlier and harsher phase of the Cold War, and in fact
the title was borrowed from a group formed to support President Truman’s
robust anti-Soviet policies in 1950. Many CPD members later served in the
Reagan administration. In the short term, the New Right mobilized to resist
any form of strategic arms limitation, on the assumption that the Soviets would
be utterly deceptive in their dealings.
From the mid-1970s, hardline conservatives came to the fore in the political
life of several Western nations, demanding an extensive revision of existing
policies toward the Soviets, a combination of military and ideological rearma-
ment. At the time, figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher seemed
to belong to a remote fringe of right-wing politics, but their views acquired the
status of a new orthodoxy.

Further Reading

The final phase of the Vietnam War is described in George J. Veith, Black April:
The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975 (2011).
For President Nixon’s response to the new military and diplomatic environ-
ment, see William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball, Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The
Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (2015); Ken
Hughes, Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties
of Reelection (2015); and James Cameron, The Double Game The Demise of
America’s First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms
Limitation (2017).
Henry Kissinger’s impact on Cold War policymaking is described in Alistair
Horne, Kissinger 1973: The Crucial Year (2009); Barry Gewen, The
Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (2020); Thomas
Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography
(2020). See also Andrew L.  Johns and Mitchell B.  Lerner, eds., The Cold
War At Home And Abroad: Domestic Politics And US Foreign Policy Since
1945 (2018), and John Gans, White House Warriors: How the National
Security Council Transformed the American Way of War (2019).
For the Chilean crisis, see Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-­
American Cold War (2014).
 12  A COLD PEACE, OR WAR BY OTHER MEANS?  201

The Carter years are the subject of Brian J.  Auten, Carter’s Conversion: The
Hardening of American Defense Policy (2008); Daniel J.  Sargent, A
Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the
1970s (2015); and Justin Vaïsse, Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand
Strategist (2018). For African policies, see Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in
Africa: Race and the Cold War (2016).
For a somewhat more optimistic view of the Soviet economic picture, see Dina
Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the
Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange (2016)
For the powerful impact of new attitudes to human rights, see Barbara J. Keys,
Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s
(2014); Sarah B. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists
Transformed U.S.  Foreign Policy (2018); and Jean H.  Quataert and Lora
Wildenthal, eds., The Routledge History Of Human Rights (2020). The
Helsinki agreement is the subject of Michael Cotey Morgan, The Final Act:
The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (2018).
Christopher R. W. Dietrich offers a new perspective on the energy politics of
these years in his Oil Revolution: Sovereign Rights and the Economic Culture
of Decolonization, 1945 to 1979 (2017).
 CHAPTER 13

Four Minutes to Midnight: The World in 1980

In January 1980, Jimmy Carter delivered his State of the Union Address to the
US Congress. Coming from a leader whose whole presidency had been devoted
to peacemaking and human rights, his tone was bleak, harking back to the
worst years of the 1950s. He declared, “The implications of the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second
World War”—worse, by implication, than earlier crises over Cuba or Berlin.1
While not announcing a revival of the US military draft, he did re-establish
selective service registration for young American men, the essential precursor
to such a step. Carter withdrew the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II (SALT
II) treaty from Senate consideration. The US and other nations announced a
boycott of that year’s Olympics, to be held in Moscow, an event that the Soviets
avidly hoped would be a propaganda spectacular. Those moves ended US-Soviet
détente, and seemingly justified all the warnings that the American hard right
had been issuing throughout the détente years.
The new atmosphere of crisis grew out of conditions not just in Afghanistan
but also in several regions, as each side faced novel challenges to its traditional
authority within its supposed spheres of influence. It also reflected the central
importance of two novel themes that had not been central to earlier phases of
the Cold War, namely, energy—above all, oil—and much more startling to
many at the time, of religion. The result was to make the years 1979 and 1980
pivotal to the Cold War confrontation and also singularly perilous. A series of
disparate crises on three continents mapped the battlefields for the coming and
final decade of that struggle.

1
 Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address 1980,” January 23, 1980 https://www.jimmycart-
erlibrary.gov/assets/documents/speeches/su80jec.phtml.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 203

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_13
204  P. JENKINS

Challenges: The Soviets
Soviet difficulties in Eastern Europe became much more acute in 1978 when
the archbishop of the Polish see of Krakow, Karol Wojtyła, became Pope as
John Paul II. This was multiply surprising, as no non-Italian Pope had been
selected for several centuries. But the political implications were far reaching,
above all in Poland, where Catholicism was so central to national identity, and
to anti-Communist resistance. The new Pope’s visit to his homeland in June
1979 brought euphoric public demonstrations drawing millions and pointed
to a broad rejection of Communism and secularism, as well as Soviet domina-
tion. A frontal challenge to Soviet authority could not be far off. In August
1980, protests at the Gdansk shipyards led to the formation of the Solidarity
labor union, which became a focus of national resistance, closely aligned to the
Catholic church. Within a year, Solidarity commanded ten million members,
and its leader Lech Wałęsa was the de facto head of mass anti-Communist resis-
tance. The Polish crisis was so troublesome for the Soviets because Poland was
the linchpin of its military arrangements in Europe and could not be allowed
to slide into neutralism or hostility. A direct clash of some kind was all but cer-
tain, and the key question was whether it might involve armed Soviet
intervention.
Making the year 1980 even more sensitive were events in Yugoslavia, which
an independent Communist power had for decades been a setting for East-­
West tension. The prospect of a Soviet invasion had often served as a focus for
Western war games. The country’s independence and stability found a monu-
mental focus in its veteran leader, Marshal Tito, who died at an advanced age
in May 1980. Although the situation remained stable for several years, the
prospect of a new European theater of conflict was sobering.
Beyond Europe, Castro’s Cuba remained faithful to Soviet policies, but its
economic situation was becoming increasingly disastrous, with the failures of
socialist planning, aggravated by US-enforced economic sanctions. As in other
Communist countries, dissidents were struggling against repressive constraints.
In March 1980, Cubans began seeking asylum in foreign embassies, persuad-
ing the government to allow some emigration. Seizing the chance to escape,
Cubans began a mass exodus, mainly from the port of Mariel. Many took to
the seas in ramshackle boats, in what was called the Mariel boatlift (on the anal-
ogy of an airlift). By October, 125,000 Cubans had fled their country, offering
a potent propaganda victory to critics of Communism. Like the DDR, Cuba
showed itself such an oppressive and impoverished dictatorship that its resi-
dents would risk their lives to escape.
In another key way, the older Communist world was transforming in these
same years. After China’s Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the country’s
new leader, Deng Xiaoping was determined to reverse China’s isolation and
backwardness. His economic reforms, which used a market model, laid a foun-
dation for the very rapid expansion of the coming decades. In 1979, Deng
visited the US, where enthusiasm for good relations surged. However
 13  FOUR MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT: THE WORLD IN 1980  205

incongruous it seemed, a photograph of him in Texas wearing a cowboy hat

offered a potent visual symbol of a diplomatic revolution in progress. Stronger
US-China ties posed a serious threat to the Soviet global position, as did the
potential rise of a new economic superpower.
Like the US, China was also concerned about Soviet military expansion and
cooperated with Western powers to contain and reverse it. In 1979, Soviet-­
aligned Vietnam invaded Chinese-oriented Cambodia and overthrew the
Khmer Rouge. But this action detonated what has been described as the Third
Indo-China War, as the Chinese and the US combined to support guerrillas
resisting the Vietnamese occupation, including Khmer Rouge units. Warfare
persisted through the 1980s.

Afghanistan
The most urgent threat to Soviet power came in Afghanistan, which had for
some years been subject to growing Moscow influence. In 1973, a coup
dethroned the conservative monarchy, creating a modernizing republic with
strong socialist elements. However, the country struggled to resist full Soviet
domination, until in 1978, the Communist People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) took power in a coup, the Saur Revolution, which created
a Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new regime introduced radical
reforms and brutally suppressed opposition. But the PDPA was split between
warring factions, leading to a new coup in September 1979. Alarmed about the
regime’s stability and survival, the Soviets invaded on December 27. Soviet
special forces stormed the presidential palace, killing the president. The subse-
quent occupation involved 100,000 Soviet troops. From the Soviet point of
view, the operation was not a wanton and unprovoked invasion of a random
neighbor, as implied by Carter, but rather a fraternal intervention in a socialist
country, justified by the Brezhnev Doctrine. The Soviet assault was widely con-
demned, by the United Nations as well as the Organization of Islamic
Cooperation
The Afghan struggle focused attention on Islamic groups as the leading
opponents of Communism. In itself, this was not new, and the Soviet Union
had in the 1920s faced armed Islamic resistance across many regions of Central
Asia and the Caucasus. This Basmachi revolt was thoroughly familiar in Soviet
culture, to the point of inspiring a whole genre of romantic adventure films
known as Easterns, Ostern, on the analogy of US Westerns. Some, like the
1970 White Sun of the Desert, were among the most popular films in Soviet
history. But such productions recalled a dangerous era, and the Basmachi rising
had even led to Soviet interventions in Afghanistan itself.
Historically, the US had regarded Islam as a valuable ally against Communism
and cooperated with Islamic clergy against left-leaning secular nationalists in
Iran and elsewhere. But militant Islamist groups became much more active and
prominent in the 1970s, due in part to the perceived failure of secular national-
ist regimes across the Middle East. Both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supported
206  P. JENKINS

activism by such groups, and from 1975, the two countries armed and supplied
jihadi resistance fighters—mujahideen—against the Afghan republic. They
were supported in this by the CIA. That insurgency became much more intense
following the PDPA seizure of power, as the government implemented reforms
that violated traditional Islamic norms, especially concerning the social posi-
tion of women. In his 1980 State of the Union, Jimmy Carter stressed US
cooperation with Pakistan, which would be the main channel for aid to the
resistance.

Challenges: The Americans
The US too faced the loss of control in regions it regarded as firmly its own.
South Korea suddenly loomed as a flailing source of instability. The population
was restive after decades of military rule, and mass protests threatened the
regime in 1979. Long-serving President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by
the head of the Korean CIA, and a new regime was in turn ousted in yet
another coup. In May 1980, new protests in Gwangju were suppressed with
hundreds of fatalities. Quite apart from human rights concerns, the situation
raised the strong likelihood that the North Korean regime would intervene,
whether by clandestine subversion or open invasion.
Carter’s human rights doctrine had a particular impact on Latin America,
where the US had long tolerated dictatorial regimes on the grounds of their
hostility to Communism. As Harry Truman had reputedly declared of Rafael
Trujillo, long-standing dictator of the Dominican Republic, “He’s a son of a
bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”2 If the attribution of the quote is question-
able, it accurately reflects official attitudes. The quote was often applied to
members of the Somoza family who ruled Nicaragua for most of the period
from 1927 through 1979. The US regarded that country as clearly within its
orbit, indeed its informal empire, and US forces had actually occupied
Nicaragua from 1909 through 1933.
In the 1970s, opposition to the Somozas coalesced around the Sandinista
National Liberation Front (FSLN), which took its name from Augusto Sandino,
an early opponent of US power. The FSLN was Marxist in orientation and
looked to Cuban examples. Even so, the US did not act directly against it as the
movement expanded its influence, and it seized power in July 1979. The US
even granted the country aid, on the condition that it did not seek to assist
revolutions in other nations in the regions. By 1980, it was obvious that the
new Nicaraguan regime was indeed supporting insurgents in other nations,
particularly El Salvador, where a bloody civil war was raging. Already during
the Carter administration, the US was becoming alarmed about Nicaragua’s
possible role as a “second Cuba” in the Western hemisphere, spreading revolu-
tion throughout Central America. Meanwhile, coups established leftist or
Marxist regimes in other Caribbean nations, including Suriname and the island

2
 The quote is variously attributed to others, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.
 13  FOUR MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT: THE WORLD IN 1980  207

of Grenada. In 1979, the Caribbean threat became still more urgent following
misleading reports of the presence of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba.
Like the war in Afghanistan, the developing situation appeared to confirm
the New Right analysis of Soviet global ambitions. Indeed, the Soviets used
their new allies to locate SIGINT listening stations in both Afghanistan and
Nicaragua to expand their intelligence capacities. The weakening or removal of
the Sandinista regime would be a challenge facing any new US administration.
As with the Soviets in Poland, the question was whether direct military force
would be needed to achieve the goal.

The Arc of Crisis

Beyond traditional concerns about its immediate neighbors, the US faced an
existential threat in terms of energy supplies. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war dem-
onstrated the extreme vulnerability of the West to threats to its oil supply, and
that message was reasserted by a new energy crisis in 1979, as Americans faced
long lines for gasoline supplies. The new centrality of petroleum made it more
vital than ever to defend the conservative Arab states that were so pivotal to
global production, above all Saudi Arabia. It also gave a special role to Iran,
whose Shah was a firm Western ally, who even joined the British in suppressing
the guerrilla war in Oman. The strength of Soviet-aligned states throughout
the Middle East was a real concern to the West, especially if pro-Western sup-
plier nations joined that bloc. In 1978, US National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski warned of the existence of an Arc of Crisis along the shores of the
Indian Ocean. If the fragile states of the region ever crumbled, then “the
resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values
and sympathetic to our adversaries.”3
But Iran ran afoul of the US’ post-Vietnam mood, and revulsion at the
country’s support of dictatorships. The Shah’s regime unquestionably was
repressive, with a large secret police network, which tortured and imprisoned
dissidents. From 1977, opposition to the regime mounted troublingly. In ear-
lier years, the US had worked closely with the regime and had particularly paid
and cultivated networks of Islamic clergy and preachers. Those efforts now
ended. Resistance to the regime coalesced around radical clergy, who had by far
the best networks in the country for propaganda and social organization. By
the Fall of 1978, the country was approaching a revolutionary explosion, with
mass demonstrations and strikes, and growing signs of disaffection among the
armed forces. In February 1979, the charismatic clerical leader Ayatollah
Khomeini returned from exile, and the Shah was forced to flee Iran. An Islamic
Republic was declared, with the imposition of Islamic legal and moral principles.
After several decades in which political Islamism has been so central to inter-
national affairs, it is difficult today to realize how baffling this situation was to
policymakers and analysts, particularly in the West itself. Through 1978, even

3
 Zbigniew Brzezinski, In Quest Of National Security (Routledge, 2019), Chap. 9.
208  P. JENKINS

well-informed commentators on Iran were discussing what was assumed to be

the significant role of various secular leftist factions in the new order, above all
of Iran’s Communist Party, the Tudeh. Religion as such was scarcely a serious
category of analysis. However, implausibly, the Iranian situation was contextu-
alized as part of the larger Cold War conflict within that Arc of Crisis, even
though the Islamist leadership that actually did take power in Iran detested the
godless Soviets at least as much as the Americans. The Islamic Republic that
eventually emerged rooted out the Tudeh and the secular left quite as thor-
oughly, and as ruthlessly, as the CIA could ever have wished.
American involvement escalated later that year, when the exiled Shah was
admitted to the US for medical treatment. In protest, Iranian militants seized
the US embassy in Tehran, taking over 50 hostages, and beginning a situation
that endured until January 1981. The hostage affair was profoundly humiliat-
ing for the US and offered wonderful support for the right-wing argument that
the country had forfeited its power and prestige. Cold War divisions deter-
mined the conduct of the situation. In other settings, it is likely that the US
would have intervened militarily to avenge the taking of the embassy, an outra-
geous provocation and indeed an act of war. But any such act would very prob-
ably have acquired a superpower dimension, as the invaded nation would
naturally turn to the Soviets, who were indeed preparing contingency plans for
their own intervention in Iran. The standoff with the Soviets strictly con-
strained the US’ range of options. The US did indeed carry out a rescue
attempt in April 1980, which failed disastrously, but never the full-scale assault
that might have been expected.
The continuing Iranian situation helps explain Carter’s dramatic response to
the Soviet role in Afghanistan, which seemed to be part of a regional threat
across the whole “arc.” In November 1979, an Islamist group had even tried
to launch a coup in Saudi Arabia, briefly seizing the Grand Mosque at Mecca.

The European Theater

Despite the wide geographical spread of US-Soviet rivalries, the main focus of
military confrontation remained in Europe, which would be the scene for any
direct combat. Here too, developments in the late 1970s threatened to desta-
bilize the existing military balance. Earlier discussions of nuclear combat had
relied on the MAD scenario, in which neither side would risk nuclear escalation
for fear of risking the destruction of its homeland. But that still opened the
possibility of crushing nuclear assaults strictly limited to in Europe itself. If the
Soviets used nuclear weapons against Allied forces in Europe, but avoided US
or perhaps British targets, would the US respond by firing its missiles against
the USSR, and bringing on a Third World War? Would the US risk New York
City to avenge Munich or Vienna? This would involve an extraordinarily risky
gamble by the Soviets, but particularly in the aftermath of Vietnam and the
resulting US disillusion about foreign commitments, such a decoupling of the
Atlantic alliance was conceivable.
 13  FOUR MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT: THE WORLD IN 1980  209

The plausibility of such threats is indicated by successive Soviet war plans

that have come to light since the end of the Cold War. In their 1970 plans, the
Warsaw Pact assumed that the US would resort to nuclear weaponry at an early
stage, which demanded a quick counterstrike. That required the use of hun-
dreds of Soviet nuclear weapons during a lightning conquest of Western
Europe, which would destroy key NATO ports like Rotterdam, Wilhelmshaven,
Antwerp, and Bremerhaven. Also targeted for destruction were such great cit-
ies as Hamburg and Vienna, Amsterdam, and Brussels. That was quite apart
from the large-scale use of tactical nuclear devices on the battlefield. The 1979
exercise Seven Days to the River Rhine assumed a US nuclear strike on Poland,
which would then be met by a massive Warsaw Pact invasion of Western
Europe. The Soviets would immediately use nuclear weapons against many
Western cities, including Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg, and Padua. The Soviets
were indeed envisioning the use of nuclear weapons in actual war fighting. In
its 1980 home defense exercise Square Leg, the British government envisaged
a likely attack on its territory with 130 nuclear weapons, producing a yield of
200 megatons, but that figure might easily approach a thousand megatons.
Some 30 million would die.
Western concern about Soviet intentions focused on new weapon system
that now became available. Both sides had long used missiles that were
intermediate-­range rather than intercontinental: they were thus IRBMs rather
than ICBMs. In the 1970s, the Soviets began a process of modernization that
in Western eyes, constituted a daring new military challenge. In 1976, the
Soviets deployed their RSD-10 Pioneer missiles, which the West knew as
SS-20s. These were mobile and concealable weapons that could not readily be
located by enemies and which were likely to escape early destruction in a con-
flict. Each fired MIRV missiles, with three nuclear warheads, and a range of
around 3000 miles. In every technical sense, they were an enormous improve-
ment on their predecessors, which were immobile, and notoriously poor in
their aim. As IRBMs, they fell short of the restrictions placed on ICBMs in the
SALT negotiations. But if they could not reach another continent, launchers
based in the western USSR, or Poland, could easily strike anywhere in Europe.
Other controversial Soviet systems included the fast and efficient Tu-22m
bomber, which the West knew as the Backfire, and which became operational
in 1980. The aircraft’s name contained a subterfuge, as it was presented as an
improved variant of the older Tu-22, whereas in fact it was a much more inno-
vative design. Like the SS-20 missile, the Backfire made wonderful sense for
nuclear combat in the European theater, for something like Seven Days to the
River Rhine. If the Soviets were not actually planning such an attack, the fact
that they were capable of mounting one would always be in the minds of
European leaders, who (in this vision) would be reluctant to provoke the
Soviets at the risk of facing destruction.
210  P. JENKINS

The Double Track

European leaders were concerned by the new military balance, and after some
hesitation, the Carter administration shared their fears. Politics in Western
Europe at this time were shifting to the right, with growing fears of Soviet
ambition. Apart from the new Pope, John Paul II, the crucial leaders included
Germany’s Helmut Schmidt (Chancellor 1974–1982), and the vigorously anti-­
Communist Margaret Thatcher, who became the British Prime Minister in
1979. In December 1979, a time of rapidly growing tensions around the
world, the NATO meeting in Brussels reached the Double Track Decision,
which sought to persuade the Soviets to reduce or remove their new weapons.
If that diplomatic course failed, then the West would deploy its own modern-
ized and improved missiles, which were likewise mobile and concealable. These
were the Pershing-2 IRBM, and the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile (GLCV).
Pilotless and maneuverable, Cruise missiles could deploy either conventional or
nuclear weapons, and they represented a significant advance for the US. The
NATO decision would place the new missiles in place by 1983, in Britain, Italy,
the Netherlands, and Belgium.
Ideally, the presence of Western IRBMs offered a potent bargaining chip to
induce the Soviets to remove their missiles, and the West would reciprocate:
the result would be a “zero option” where neither side had such powerful
arms. But the plan involved a substantial expansion in the number of nuclear
weapons arrayed across an already over-militarized European continent. The
new IRBMs posed ruinous threats to any prospect for arms control agree-
ments. The new weapons on both sides were so accurate that they appeared to
be intended for fighting a nuclear war, rather than merely deterring a potential
enemy. The only justification for the new arms race that would inevitably ensue
was that NATO really had no realistic alternatives.
Cold War visions of a very traditional kind became powerful in the West in
these years, including both fears of subversion, and of classic concerns about
nuclear war. In 1978, an imagined vision of a near-future nuclear war in Europe
became an international bestseller as The Third World War. The Soviets actively
built on these fears in order to discredit US policies in Europe. In 1978, the
US proposed to deploy a new enhanced radiation nuclear weapon, which
became known as the neutron bomb. The Soviets leaped on the concept of a
weapon that would reputedly kill people while leaving buildings standing—
“the ultimate capitalist weapon” or “the landlords’ bomb”—and their attacks
sparked massive protests across Western Europe, which revived the dormant
campaigns against nuclear weapons.4 In late 1979, apocalyptic fears became
still more mainstream. That November, a training scenario was accidentally
loaded into an operational computer at NORAD, US air defense headquarters,
resulting in a false warning that the Soviets had launched fleets of ICBMs.

4
 Thomas H.  Maugh, “Samuel T Cohen Dies at 89” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2010,
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-sam-cohen-20101202-story.html.
 13  FOUR MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT: THE WORLD IN 1980  211

Although the error was detected within minutes, the event caused real fear. A
similar mistake recurred the following June. In September 1980, a Titan II
missile silo in Arkansas suffered a liquid fuel fire. Later that year, the Doomsday
Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was moved to a peril-
ous four minutes to midnight, suggesting the nearness of annihilation.

A New Cold War

In the US, Jimmy Carter was by 1980 converted to much more pessimistic
views of Soviet intentions. Often forgotten in later accounts of his presidency,
his administration had already initiated militant anti-Soviet policies that would
usually be associated with the Reagan years, notably in Afghanistan and Central
America, and especially with missile modernization in Europe. Carter’s admin-
istration expanded the use of MIRVed SLBMs, and armed B-52s with Cruise
missiles. Despite some stereotypes, he was anything but a naïve pacifist. Even
so, Carter was badly weakened domestically, above all by economic woes, at
time of severe stagnation and frightening inflation, stagflation, a monstrous
mix that standard economists had thought close to impossible. The Iran hos-
tage affair left Carter as a symbol of a failed and failing America in urgent need
of restoration and rebuilding. So desperate was the perceived situation as to
allow the emergence of Ronald Reagan as the Republican presidential candi-
date, although he had widely been viewed as unacceptably extreme and
militaristic.
Reagan’s election in November 1980 did not of itself mark a clear endorse-
ment of renewed Cold War politics. The economy and Iran were by far the
most significant topics in voters’ minds, and even so, Reagan only won 50.7
percent of the popular vote. But his pledge to rebuild US military power, and
especially its nuclear capabilities, inaugurated a new phase of the global con-
flict. His rhetoric likewise harked back to the simpler ideological divisions of
the late 1950s. The prospect of such an unreconstructed Cold Warrior in the
White House aroused real concern and fear, particularly among the Soviet
leadership. When Reagan took office in January 1981, the range of interna-
tional situations that could potentially spark direct confrontation was alarm-
ingly broad.

Further Reading
The post-1970 era is the subject of several essays in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd
Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War (three volumes,
2010), and also in Richard H.  Immerman and Petra Goedde, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013).
Western attitudes to the Cold War became more determinedly anti-Soviet at
the end of the 1970s. The rightward shift is discussed in Philip Jenkins,
Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties
America (2006); Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and
212  P. JENKINS

the Reshaping of the International Order (2016); and Rick Perlstein,

Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976–1980 (2020). Among many books
on Ronald Reagan, see H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (2015). For chang-
ing British attitudes, see Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher
(three volumes 2013–2019).
Larger global trends are the subject of Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979
and the Birth of the 21st Century (2013).
For specific crises, see for instance Georgy Katsiaficas and Na Kahn-chae, eds.,
South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising (2006); Rodric
Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–1989 (2011); and
Ray Takeyh, The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi
Dynasty (2021).
 CHAPTER 14

The New Struggle

In 1983, the US was engaged in military operations around the world, while
President Reagan was using rhetoric that the Soviets found deeply threatening.
Indeed, the Soviets became increasingly concerned about the possibility of an
imminent and direct Western attack. They intensified their Operation RYAN,
collecting information about a nuclear surprise assault (the term is an acronym
for raketno-yadernoye napadenie, “nuclear missile attack”). Fears came to a
head that November when NATO organized its huge ABLE/ARCHER exer-
cises, which mobilized forces from Norway to Turkey. Soviet forces were
alerted to expect a possible nuclear war within days. They prepared to launch
their own attack as a means of preserving their military capacity before it was
annihilated by a pre-emptive assault. Not until months afterward, when defec-
tors let it be known just how serious the menace had been, did a puzzled
President Reagan ask how the Soviets could have been so misled about Western
intentions. We can debate the seriousness of this episode, but beyond argu-
ment, tensions between the superpowers reverted to levels not seen since the
time of Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Reagan and Rearmament
As the leader in a renewed Cold War era, Reagan presented certain paradoxes,
in that he was personally opposed to the use of nuclear weapons and rejected
the concept of MAD. He believed in radical solutions that would not just bal-
ance the nuclear arsenals of both sides but would seriously shrink numbers. He
wanted to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.”1 At the same
time, his ideological approach was stark, and arguably simplistic, in its utter
condemnation of Communism. In a 1983 speech delivered to the US National

1
 “The Star Wars Speech,” Air Force Magazine February 2004, https://www.airforcemag.com/
article/0204keeperfile/.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 213

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_14
214  P. JENKINS

Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, he not only referred to the

Soviets in terms of “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,” but he did so
alongside references to Satan and absolute spiritual evil (and he quoted
Whittaker Chambers to this end). The world was engaged in a “struggle
between right and wrong and good and evil.”2 Against that background, it was
wrong to imagine coexistence with the Soviets, any more than it might have
been with the Nazis before them. Even simple containment was inadequate.
Communism could indeed be removed or destroyed by sufficiently determined
Western action. As he had stated in 1977, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold
War. We win, they lose.”3
That vision had immediate policy consequences. Between 1981 and 1984,
Reagan launched a costly program of military modernization and revitaliza-
tion. For years, the US had depended upon its strategic triad of land-based
ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and manned bombers. The
Reagan administration proposed to modernize each aspect of this system. The
MX or Peacekeeper was an ICBM designed to replace the aging Minuteman,
and when deployed in 1985, each was intended to carry 12 MIRVed missiles.
The Peacekeeper offered a crucial element of survivability so that it would be
available to retaliate even if the Soviets succeeded in achieving a surprise first
strike against the US.  The B-1 bomber was intended as the mainstay of the
manned bomber component of the triad, but it had been canceled in 1977.
The Reagan administration renewed the program, and a hundred aircraft were
in service by 1988. The US developed a new generation of nuclear submarines.
Although the new Ohio-class submarines were laid down in the late 1970s,
under Carter, the first nine were officially delivered in the Reagan years.
Originally intended to carry MIRVed Trident I SLBMs, from the mid-decade
they were repurposed for larger Trident-IIs, with more warheads.
The US pressed forward with the introduction of its intermediate-range
weapons in Western Europe, as had been agreed in 1979 and which was sched-
uled for the Fall of 1983. As Reagan presented the case, the US intention was
to introduce new missiles as a bargaining tool, leading to a deal in which both
sides would remove all intermediate missiles, the “zero option.” In this cause
as in so much else, Reagan received the enthusiastic support of British Prime
Minister Thatcher, who was almost as visible a voice for uncompromising anti-­
Communism. The new systems spurred a massive anti-war movement in
Britain, West Germany, Italy, and other nations, which had no wish to serve as
the European theater in a potential cataclysm. The anti-war movement attracted
a broad range of supporters, motivated by sincere and realistic fears about the
growing likelihood of annihilation. But the Soviets devoted their full propa-
ganda resources to stirring and influencing the movement and directing its

2
 Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire Speech” March 8 1983, https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/
reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/.
3
 Hal Brands, “The Vision Thing,” Miller Center, January 14, 2016, https://millercenter.org/
issues-policy/foreign-policy/the-vision-thing.
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  215

attention to US rather than Eastern Bloc weaponry. Despite enormous pres-

sure, the European allies accepted the new missiles. Whatever doubts Europeans
harbored about Reaganism, aggressive Soviet conduct through the 1970s had
been genuinely frightening, and there was no doubt about the need for a
response. European governments would not stray too far from the Western
alliance.
Despite the near-total attention paid to nuclear weaponry, the US in these
years was using its technological advantages to develop other sophisticated new
weaponry. Through the 1970s, US researchers had worked on stealth technol-
ogy, which would allow aircraft or ships to avoid detection by enemy radar. The
first US “Stealth fighter,” the F-117, became operational in 1981, and the B-2
bomber took its first flight in 1989. From 1984, stealth ships were being devel-
oped on an experimental basis. Meanwhile, the US developed the Global
Positioning System (GPS), which used a network of satellites to allow ground
forces to establish their precise location: the first spacecraft was launched
in 1978.
Precision weapons transformed concepts of warfare. Experiences in Vietnam
had advanced the development of highly accurate laser-guided bombs, “smart
bombs,” and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War showed how effective precision-guided
weapons could be in stopping enemy armor. The US revised its military doc-
trine to favor Active Defense, which would channel attacking Warsaw Pact
armor into killing zones where they could be wrecked by precision weapons. In
the 1980s, that approach shifted to incorporate mobility and maneuver, rather
than static defense. From 1982, the new doctrine of AirLand Battle imagined
the US army, navy, and air force collaborating to attack deep within Soviet
positions and territories, spreading chaos. These ideas neatly reproduced the
older Soviet methods of Deep Battle, although augmented by new precision-­
guided arms. Although the new Western approaches could, in theory, be used
on a nuclear battlefield, they opened the option of wreaking havoc on an enemy
without crossing the nuclear threshold. They also reduced the disadvantage the
West faced in the numerical size of its forces. NATO forces became increasingly
confident that they could win a conventional war in Europe.
Growing disaffection within the Soviet Bloc encouraged the turning or
defection of some important figures who offered real intelligence advantages to
the West. Among the most significant was Polish army officer Ryszard Kuklinski,
who between 1972 and 1981 kept the CIA well informed on Soviet military
plans and intentions. Among the prizes he delivered were the highly secret loca-
tions of the three main Soviet command centers for use during a European war.
Based on his information, all would have been snuffed out at the start of any
actual combat. Soviet engineer Adolf Tolkachev kept the CIA informed about
his country’s key developments in missiles and combat aircraft until he was
executed in 1986. Also in the early 1980s, the French had their own well-placed
agent in KGB ranks, code-named FAREWELL, who supplied much informa-
tion about Soviet activities in the West. Other agents offered precious informa-
tion about the inner workings of the Soviet political leadership. Oleg Gordievsky
216  P. JENKINS

was a well-placed KGB officer who in 1982 became the KGB’s Rezident in
London. From 1974 through 1985, Gordievsky was working for the British
Secret Intelligence Service. Gordievsky supplied much valuable information
about Soviet intentions and policies and was for instance the first to alert the
West to the Soviet panic over ABLE/ARCHER. That encouraged the West to
allay those fears through words and actions, to defuse potential crises. No less
valuable for Western policymaking, Gordievsky identified Mikhail Gorbachev as
a rising figure in the Soviet elite.

Rolling Back Communism

European debates over the new missiles came at a time of real tension on the
Continent, on a scale not seen since the successive Berlin crises. The most dan-
gerous pressure point was Poland, where the Solidarity Movement by 1981
stood at the height of its power. The movement received covert support from
the CIA, mainly to fund its propaganda and publicity activities. The US walked
a delicate line in this matter, supplying aid but not so overtly as to allow the
Soviets to claim that Solidarity was a CIA front. Throughout 1981, it was
feared that the Soviets would invade Poland, provoking a national revolution-
ary war. In fact, the Soviets were properly nervous about any such scheme,
although they faced pressure from both the East German and Czechoslovak
leadership, who wanted to prevent a spread of the Polish contagion. Even short
of war, the Soviets placed heavy economic pressure on Poland, cutting oil sup-
plies. Fearing a Soviet assault, in December 1981, the Polish army tried to stave
off disaster by launching an internal coup aimed at suppressing the Solidarity
movement, and by imposing martial law.
The US was in no position to intervene directly in this situation, any more
than it had been in Hungary or Czechoslovakia in previous decades. But the
Reagan administration did initiate aggressive counter-measures. In a series of
National Security Directives in 1982–1983, the administration outlined plans
not just to contain the Soviet empire but to disrupt and destabilize it. NSDD
32 proposed to neutralize Soviet control over Eastern Europe through various
forms of clandestine action and planned aid to dissident groups, above all in
Poland. In November 1982, NSDD 66 envisaged the disruption of the USSR
itself through a “strategic triad,” limiting Soviet access to financial credit, high
technology, and natural gas. Most ambitiously, in January 1983, NSDD 75
renounced the aim of coexisting with the Soviet Union in anything like its
existing form, seeking rather to change it fundamentally, to defeat “Soviet
imperialism.” Far from just ending détente, such plans offered a return to the
older Western vision of “rolling back Communism.” In November 1983, such
visions were reinforced by the work of CIA analyst Herb Meyer, who in an
influential memo outlined the economic and demographic calamities facing the
Soviets if they did not undertake immediate reform. He acutely pointed to the
country’s ethnic divisions. He saw no realistic way in which the Soviet Union
could survive until the end of the twentieth century.
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  217

The War Scare

Coming so shortly after the détente era, both the US rhetoric and the actions
disturbed and confused the Soviets, who responded with hard rhetoric of their
own. That was all the more true after 1982 when Brezhnev was replaced as
leader by former KGB chief Yuri Andropov. Following Reagan’s evil empire
speech, the Soviet news agency, TASS, described the president as inspired by
“bellicose lunatic anti-communism.”4 Tensions grew in March 1983 when
President Reagan made a speech advocating his Strategic Defense Initiative, a
space-based program to defend the US and its allies from missile attack. Critics
promptly christened the program “Star Wars,” for its fanciful and science-­
fiction quality. It was at best visionary and at worst ridiculous as a practical
system, and even if it could work theoretically, it was many years from imple-
mentation. But Star Wars had immediate real-world consequences. If built,
such a US space-based system would dominate the entire planet, while the
challenge of countering it would force the Soviets to spend incalculable sums,
which their failing economy could not afford. The Star Wars speech came just
two weeks after Reagan’s “Evil Empire” remarks.
Putting that evidence together with the imminent arrival of US missiles in
Europe, the Soviet leadership began to suspect a threat far more immediate and
lethal than anything yet imagined. In this view, the US, inspired by religious
and apocalyptic ideas, was preparing a nuclear first strike on the USSR, a dan-
ger that the Soviets understood as parallel to Hitler’s surprise attack on their
nation in 1941. In their different ways, both the US and Soviet leaderships
were using the Nazi framework as a means of conceptualizing their Cold War
enemies, a pattern that boded poorly for peace. Andropov warned that the US
had fallen prey to “outrageous military psychosis.”5
Tensions grew that September when the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner
that penetrated its Far Eastern airspace, close to sensitive strategic sites. Two
hundred sixty-nine civilians were killed, including a right-wing US congress-
man. The incident provoked popular outrage and patriotic fervor in the US,
creating anti-Soviet demonstrations and boycotts. Although it is no defense of
the crime to point this out, the shootdown illustrated the extreme fear then
prevailing among the Soviet leadership and the worry that Western forces were
probing Soviet defenses preparatory to an open attack. Both sides remained
perilously sensitive to a possible surprise assault. On September 26, Soviet early
warning systems announced a US missile launch, demanding an urgent deci-
sion about initiating a retaliatory strike. The officer in command at the early
warning facility, Stanislav Petrov, correctly decided that the alert was an error
so that he disobeyed orders and refused to begin the procedure that would

4
 Serge Schmemann, “Soviet Says Reagan Has ‘Pathological Hatred’,” New York Times, March
10, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/10/world/soviet-says-reagan-has-pathological-­­
hatred.html.
5
 Quoted in Gordon Martel, American Foreign Relations Reconsidered: 1890–1993 (London:
Routledge, 2002), 203.
218  P. JENKINS

have launched the Soviet missiles. His decision—for which he was repri-
manded—prevented a nuclear exchange.
That incident was not known at the time, but other episodes were very clear.
In October, North Korean agents in Rangoon, Burma (Myanmar), attempted
to assassinate the President of South Korea by a bomb attack during a state
visit. The president survived, but the resulting explosion killed over 20, includ-
ing South Korean ministers. As in the previous two decades, such violence can
only be seen as a deliberate attempt by the North Koreans to provoke a super-
power clash, which was especially dangerous given existing strains. At the start
of November, the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists was moved to just three minutes to midnight, the most perilous posi-
tion since 1953. The ABLE/ARCHER war scare that followed so shortly
afterward fitted naturally in what seemed like an unstoppable trajectory to
open war.

The New Cold War Culture

War fears revived many of the cultural themes that had been so prominent in
earlier years and placed them unavoidably in the mainstream. We have already
seen the upsurge of peace movements across Europe, but the US too was pro-
foundly affected, with major involvement by religious groups, especially
Catholics. By 1982, anti-nuclear demonstrations were attracting the largest
protests recorded in the nation’s history. Anti-war and anti-nuclear rhetoric
was expressed in a series of strongly liberal films and popular culture produc-
tions. The television miniseries The Day After (1983) depicted the horrors of a
nuclear attack on the US heartland and attracted the largest audience ever
recorded for a television movie. Unknown to the audience, the miniseries was
shown only a few days after the ABLE/ARCHER exercise actually had come
close to detonating such a clash. The effects of nuclear warfare on American
soil were again depicted in Testament (1983). Anti-nuclear themes reached the
musical hit parade, with songs such as “Safety Dance,” “Enola Gay,” and “99
Red Balloons,” each with its popular music video. The great Dutch hit song of
1982 was “De Bom” (The Bomb), a declaration of futility in the face of immi-
nent destruction. Britain produced a harrowing vision of apocalypse in the film
Threads, which depicted a nuclear attack on a British city.
Particularly infuriating critics in both North America and Europe was the
rhetoric used by the Americans to justify their new weapons. The US adminis-
tration drew heavily on the language of the Old West, with its heavy symbolism
of gender and masculinity. The proposed MX missile was the Peacekeeper,
recalling the legendary Colt revolver of the West; cruise missiles were
Tomahawks. Critics mocked the Western overtones, describing the Tomahawks
as suitable for a childish fantasy of cowboys and Indians rather than a danger-
ous and well-armed real world.
In light of the obvious fears of nuclear war, it is remarkable how much of
American popular culture demonstrated support for the military and national
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  219

defense, while portraying Communism in quite as villainous a way as President

Reagan could have wished. A patriotic revival first became apparent in 1980
following a US hockey victory over the Soviets at the Winter Olympics in Lake
Placid, the “miracle on ice.” In a renaissance of flag-waving patriotism, sup-
porters shouted patriotic chants that had not been commonly heard since the
early days of the Vietnam War. In film, military and patriotic themes were
strongly in evidence, for instance, in successive films by Clint Eastwood. One
of the bestselling books of the decade was Tom Clancy’s 1984 submarine saga,
The Hunt for Red October, which inspired many imitators (President Reagan
was a particular fan). Clancy followed his triumph with Red Storm Rising
(1986), a fictional account of a US-Soviet war in Europe.
By mid-decade, Hollywood films were depicting Communist villains little
different from the most grotesque Nazi caricatures of the Second World War
years. This new Cold War spirit was manifested in films such as Red Dawn,
showing a Soviet-Cuban invasion of the American heartland. The very popular
1986 film Top Gun was an uncritical hymn to the heroism and skill of US
fighter pilots, who combat the advanced MiG fighters of an unspecified enemy
that is not exactly the USSR. The expensive 1987 miniseries Amerika recalled
the hard right-wing visions of the early 1950s in depicting the US under Soviet
occupation. The Soviets, of course, had their own propagandistic military films,
notably the impressive depiction of a US-Soviet air/sea standoff in Incident at
Map Grid 36-80 (1982), although this was less strident than its Hollywood
counterparts.
Policy debates in these years often cited the influence of memories of
Vietnam, and the “Vietnam Syndrome” that made the American public so
anxious about any potential military involvement overseas. At the same time,
there was widespread concern about the sufferings of US soldiers in the war,
especially the Prisoners of War and those Missing in Action (POW-MIAs), who
became the source of a lively mythology claiming that many still survived in
captivity in Southeast Asia. In the mid-1980s, a whole genre of films depicted
heroic Americans venturing to rescue those forsaken prisoners: the 1985 film
Rambo (1985) was the most successful of these revisionist and viscerally anti-­
Communist productions. Although they had no explicit military component,
the Olympic Games held in Los Angeles in 1984 offered another platform for
exuberant US flag-waving patriotism.

The Reagan Doctrine

The Reagan administration initiated an ambitious policy to subvert pro-Soviet
states in the Global South. The idea of using proxy forces to wage guerrilla
wars was nothing new to either side, but it received a boost from recent Soviet
sponsorship of terrorist and urban guerrilla movements. As we have seen, right-­
wing theorists in the West presented these as a conspiracy to wage the Cold
War by clandestine means. That theory received a further boost following the
assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in May 1981, which some
220  P. JENKINS

attributed to Soviet plotting. If such views were correct, then the West was fully
justified in responding with its own proxies and guerrillas. Such a vision fitted
well with Reagan’s view of reversing Communist expansion. It offered the rich
prize of drawing the Soviets and their allies into costly guerrilla wars: to present
the Communists themselves with “many Vietnams.” Although not formally
stated as a Reagan Doctrine until 1985, these principles guided US actions
from the first days of the administration. These policies were successful in many
ways, but they offered the potential danger of unintended consequences for
the Western nations.
The CIA bolstered the anti-Cuban efforts already in progress across Africa.
Angola was the primary theater of combat, as the civil war expanded, and the
US offered support to the resistance movement UNITA, both directly and
through South African channels. This committed the Soviets and Cubans more
heavily into preserving the MPLA regime, and its military arm FAPLA.  In
1987–1988, a prolonged campaign centered around Cuito Cuanavale pitted
UNITA and South Africans against FAPLA and Cubans, in the largest battle
on African soil since the Second World War. In 1988, a peace agreement
resulted in the withdrawal of both Cuban and South African forces, although
domestic strife continued for a decade. The MPLA eventually triumphed, but
it no longer did so as a direct proxy for Communist powers.
In Mozambique likewise, the CIA cooperated with the South Africans in
support of a rebel army, RENAMO, the Mozambican National Resistance,
which fought the Marxist government of FRELIMO. By 1990, the two sides
agreed to negotiations, which led to the creation of a multi-party government.
In Ethiopia, the pro-Soviet regime was gravely weakened by multiple rebellions
and secession movements, which coalesced into a general civil war that proba-
bly killed over a million. The US promoted and armed resistance forces, and
offered propaganda support until the leftist government collapsed in 1991.
The new democratic regime increasingly tilted toward the West.
These wars were extremely costly in their effects, with a combined death toll
running into the millions. Even so, in terms of the larger Cold War vision, US
efforts in these African conflicts were highly successful. By the end of the
decade, Soviet and Cuban influence had largely been removed from three large
and potentially powerful nations. In each case, the diplomatic successes were
achieved without direct US military involvement.

Afghanistan Continued
The most intense Western effort was in Afghanistan, where a fragile
Communist Democratic Republic survived because of Soviet armed strength,
ruling a deeply resentful population. Although resistance drew on multiple
ideological currents, the most significant groups were Islamist jihadis, the
mujahideen, who enjoyed the enormous advantage of a virtual open border
with Pakistan. This recalled the fatal difficulty the US had faced with North
Vietnam. The US drew on a wide and diverse network to support the
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  221

insurgencies, including Britain and China, as well as the conservative Islamic

nations of Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Afghanistan became a magnet for inter-
national Islamists who wished to wage jihad, and in the process that popular-
ized radical Islamist doctrines around the world. Middle Eastern nations
themselves were happy to see their own radicals drawn off to fight Communism
on distant battlefields.
In the early 1980s, jihadi resistance escalated into a full-scale revolutionary
war, controlling much of the territory outside the cities, and sporadically domi-
nating 80 percent of the territory. By mid-decade, Soviet forces in the country
stood at over 100,000, but victory was still nowhere in sight, and analogies to
the US situation in Vietnam around 1968 were all too obvious. On occasion,
mujahideen attacks spilled over into the eastern republics of the USSR itself.
From 1986, US-supplied Stinger surface-to-air missiles reduced the advantage
the Soviets held through helicopters and air power; although Western media
exaggerated the role of the “Stinger effect” in the war’s outcome. The US
scheme to support the mujahideen, Operation Cyclone, was lavishly funded.
By 1987, the US was directing over US$600 million to the cause.
By 1987, the Soviet Union announced a military withdrawal, which was
complete by 1989. The war had been cataclysmic for both the Soviet and
Afghan sides. The Soviets lost 20,000 lives, besides 80,000 Afghans, both reb-
els and loyalists. Estimates of the number of civilian dead range above a million,
with 5 million refugees, and all from a pre-war population of just 13 million.

Saving Central America

The other cockpit of East-West rivalry was in Central America, where the situ-
ation had in Carter’s final months become dangerous for the West. Besides the
Marxist regime in Nicaragua, leftist insurgencies had become powerful in El
Salvador and Guatemala. That raised the prospect of a domino effect that could
spread Soviet and Cuban influence across the region, to the borders of Mexico,
and potentially into that nation as well.
With US support, government forces were already waging counter-­
insurgency efforts through the region, but in the process, they were commit-
ting notorious atrocities and human rights violations. Little publicized, even
the Mexican government had through the 1970s waged a dirty war against
leftist insurgents. On a much larger scale, Guatemala was the setting for a bru-
tal counter-insurgency campaign against the mainly Mayan native peoples, and
violence became still more extensive from the later 1970s. From 1981, the
military carried out ruthless scorched earth policies in the countryside, accom-
panied by the massacres of whole villages. In El Salvador, the leftist challenge
came from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). From the
late 1970s, revolutionary warfare was being suppressed by means of death
squads and disappearances. In 1980, rightist forces murdered the beloved
Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, and military forces killed four US
churchwomen. Those actions horrified American liberals, and especially the
222  P. JENKINS

Catholic church, which became a potent source of criticism for the

administration.
US liberals were already hostile to the prospect of any intervention in the
region and commonly cited the twin precedents of the disastrous Vietnam
quagmire and the bungled intervention at the Bay of Pigs. While the right saw
Central America in terms of a spreading contagion of Red Communism, liber-
als and leftists viewed insurgents as strictly local movements, struggling to
combat authentic injustices. That political context severely constrained the
administration’s efforts. In its first two years, severe economic difficulties
aroused much discontent, which was expressed in significant Democratic victo-
ries in the 1982 midterm elections. Administration policies faced stubborn
domestic opposition. Even so, US intelligence agents and advisers remained
deeply involved in all these struggles.

Contras
With invasion not a realistic option, the US weakened the Nicaraguan regime
by developing and arming counter-revolutionary forces, the Contras. The
Contras first emerged in 1981, under CIA guidance. They drew both on for-
mer loyalists of the old Somoza regime, including members of the widely feared
National Guard, as well as democratically oriented groups fearful of Communist
advances. Several competing groups emerged, most operating from bases in
Honduras. From 1982, Contra forces carried out guerrilla attacks, including
the assassination of Sandinista officials. At first, the groups were not too effec-
tive, and they faced charges of corruption as well as human rights abuses. Even
so, the greater the pressure they placed on the Sandinistas, the more repressive
and unpopular the government became, and a military draft proved very con-
troversial. The military commitment consumed an unsustainable share of the
country’s meager budget. That pressure became intolerable after 1986, as
Contra forces came to pose a real military challenge, and grew in numbers and
influence. At their height, the combined Contra armies probably amounted to
25,000 fighters. The resulting wars claimed a terrible human toll. Combining
the three nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the civil wars in
the 1980s alone claimed at least a quarter million lives, and generated yet
another refugee crisis.
President Reagan offered his full rhetorical support. The Sandinista regime,
he said, was “a Communist reign of terror,” while the Contras were freedom
fighters, “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”6 Despite this,
Congress fought hard to limit or end the Contra war. In 1982, the Boland
Amendment prohibited the use of US funds to promote the overthrow of the
Nicaraguan regime, while a congressional spending cap was intended to shut

6
 Gerald M Boyd, “Reagan Terms Nicaraguan Rebels ‘Moral Equal Of Founding Fathers’,” New
York Times, March 2, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/02/world/reagan-terms-­
nicaraguan-­rebels-moral-equal-of-founding-fathers.html.
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  223

down the Contras altogether. US Congress was further provoked by a 1983

CIA-sponsored operation that mined Nicaraguan harbors intended to prevent
arms supplies, but which risked confrontation with the Soviets. A second and
more comprehensive Boland Amendment prohibited any US support whatever
for the Contras. Even after his 1984 election triumph, Reagan could only grad-
ually induce Congress to restore any kind of funding, even when that was
strictly earmarked for non-military uses. That funding cutoff put the adminis-
tration in the situation of seeking to raise funds by unconventional means, as
the US sought surrogate aid and training from Israel, Saudi Arabia, South
Africa, and many private sources. Such desperate measures flouted the law,
especially when administration officials lied directly about the extent of US
support: the resulting scandal would endanger the presidency.

Weakening Communism
Favoring Reagan’s position was the dramatic economic boom that began in
1983, and which would continue with few checks through 2007. In the new
mood, Americans were distinctly more sympathetic to military ventures, pro-
vided they were not costly or long-lasting. A historic opportunity emerged in
October 1983, when a hardline leftist coup had displaced the already radical
regime on the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. Citing the danger to US citi-
zens, the US ordered a military intervention, which led to direct combat with
Cuban forces and advisers. Grenada enjoyed a symbolic significance far beyond
its military importance, as a deliberate attempt to cure Vietnam Syndrome and
to accustom the American people once more to the prospect of direct confron-
tation with Communist forces, even if that meant US casualties. Far less cele-
brated was the US diplomatic success in Suriname, where a mixture of aid and
threats prevented the regime from lurching left and cooperating closely with
the Cubans. Following these successes, Nicaragua and Cuba remained as the
only leftist havens in the hemisphere, and conservatives pressed for one of
those nations to be the next item on the US military agenda. While disappoint-
ing those hopes, Reagan intensified US pressure through a new propaganda
service directed at the island, Radio Marti. He tightened the sanctions that had
strangled the Cuban economy.
Ideologically too, leftist causes in Latin America suffered crippling setbacks
in the Reagan years. Since 1968, the Catholic church in the region had been
profoundly influenced by liberation theology, which had drawn many priests to
left-wing positions. Some clergy not only supported the Sandinista regime but
actually formed part of the government. Even if they fell far short of overt
commitment, many other prelates and clergy spoke strongly on human rights
issues and were anything but dependable supporters of reactionary regimes.
The Polish background of the new Pope John Paul II made him hostile to
Marxism in any form, and over the next decade, he systematically reduced the
influence of liberation theology. That new policy was reflected in episcopal
appointments, and in the content of teaching at seminaries and colleges. The
224  P. JENKINS

strongly centralized nature of the church meant that such policies were effec-
tive, and liberationist ideas were soon in full retreat.
Quite separately from this top-down policy, during the 1980s, the tradi-
tional Catholic hegemony in many parts of the region was challenged by thriv-
ing new Pentecostal and evangelical churches, which were strongly opposed to
Marxist and liberationist ideas. Particularly in Central American nations like
Guatemala, Protestant numbers grew to challenge Catholics. Leftist critics
have complained that this success owed much to support by conservative
regimes and ultimately the CIA, but such claims are simplistic. The new
Protestantism had many sources and was usually rooted in strictly local realities
and needs. But this religious change did indeed weaken leftist causes.

My Enemy’s Enemy
As so often in the past, the US domestic debate over Central America hinged
on whether local insurgencies were actually attached to the Soviet-Cuban
cause: was this authentically part of the larger Cold War? Similar debates raged
elsewhere in the world, where observers differed greatly on the motivation of
movements and struggles, and the possible role of Communism. Such differ-
ences of interpretation shaped understandings of the conflict in South Africa
where, as we have seen, a white minority government ruled harshly over a dis-
contented population of black Africans. Since 1976, the revolutionary struggle
had found new vigor, with mass urban protests and a growing guerrilla resis-
tance, led by the African National Congress, or ANC. Supporters of the South
African regime at home and abroad complained that they were fighting a
Communist insurgency, and that view received sympathy among conservatives
in the US and Britain. That was especially true when the South African forces
were proving such valuable allies in CIA-sponsored wars in Angola and
Mozambique. By the mid-1980s, criticisms of the South African regime influ-
enced mainstream and moderate opinion in the US, leading the US Congress
to pass comprehensive sanctions legislation. Reagan vetoed this, but Congress
overruled his veto, offering the then very popular president a major pub-
lic defeat.
The most significant debate over interpretation occurred in the Middle East,
specifically in the tiny nation of Lebanon, where the Cold War lens gravely
distorted US policy. The situation originally had nothing to do with US-Soviet
rivalries. Lebanon was acutely divided between Muslim and Christian popula-
tions, and a brutal civil war had been in progress since 1975. In 1982, an Israeli
invasion of Lebanon sparked a humanitarian disaster, as large numbers of
Palestinians were besieged in Beirut. The US sent military forces to assist the
evacuation of Palestinian fighters, which duly took place. However, Christian
militias then massacred many Palestinian civilians, causing the US to dispatch
new military forces to protect survivors and to maintain its international obli-
gations. US Marines remained in Beirut, supported by British, French, and
Italian contingents. During 1983, Western forces came into increasing heavy
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  225

combat with local fighters, especially the Hizbollah, the powerful Shi’ite militia
affiliated to Iran. US aircraft engaged in battles with Syrian fighters.
However lethal that struggle became, this conflict in itself had nothing obvi-
ous to do with the Cold War or the Soviets, except to the extent that Syria was
a close Soviet ally. During 1983, however, the US administration contextual-
ized Lebanon alongside the other struggles in Afghanistan and Central
America. In this view, strongly favored by Israel and pro-Israel media, Shi’ites
and other leftist forces in Lebanon were proxies of the Soviets just as much as
the Sandinistas were. Even in Lebanon, US forces increasingly saw their mis-
sion defending “the government” (which scarcely existed) against pro-Soviet
“rebels” (who generally loathed Communism). The US was further hampered
by a severe intelligence crisis, following the destruction of key embassies and
facilities in previous years, and a Beirut terrorist attack in April 1983 killed
many of the CIA’s most knowledgeable analysts of the region. Confused and
distorted interpretations of the struggle made the US unable to interpret
enemy intentions. In October 1983, a suicide truck bomber destroyed a US
barracks in Beirut, killing 240 Marines and effectively ending the US mission.
US forces were soon withdrawn from combat and pulled out of the country in
a humiliating withdrawal. The attack caused by far the largest number of com-
bat deaths of US forces since the Vietnam War.
The timing of the disaster served to reinforce the Cold War context in the
popular mind. The Beirut attack occurred on October 23, several weeks after
the destruction of KAL flight 007, two days before the Grenada invasion, and
at a time when protests over new medium missiles in Europe were reaching
their height. Reagan declared that the situations in Lebanon and Grenada,
“though oceans apart, are closely related. Not only has Moscow assisted and
encouraged the violence in both countries, but it provides direct support
through a network of surrogates and terrorists.”7
The Lebanese war contributed in other ways to undermining the US posi-
tion worldwide. Between 1984 and 1986, the Iranian-linked Hizbollah carried
out many terrorist attacks worldwide, often striking US targets, and in Lebanon,
they kidnapped Western hostages. Despite denials that it was paying ransom,
the US agreed to supply Iran with weaponry that it urgently needed for its
bruising war with Iraq (1980–1988). Again, nothing in these dealings of itself
had any Cold War dimension, until the administration decided to channel funds
received in these arms transactions to support the Contra forces in Nicaragua.
The policy proved ruinous at every turn. Not only were most hostages not
freed until years afterward, but the deal generated a political furor in the
US. The main Iran transaction violated the law, and so did the subsidiary deal
to support the Contras. In its pursuit of anti-Communist causes, the executive
branch was thus in the position of setting up both a private alternative fiscal

7
 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Events in Lebanon and Grenada,” October 27, 1983,
at https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-events-lebanon-and-grena.
226  P. JENKINS

system and an intelligence network to carry on its policies, and illegality was
piled upon illegality. After the resulting Iran-Contra scandal came to light in
November 1986, it dominated the headlines for the following two years and
came close to causing Reagan’s impeachment.

Victory?
Reagan-era policies were controversial, and the many attacks on the president
depicted him variously as idiotic, insane, or senile. Liberals delighted in noting
that his name, Ronald Wilson Reagan was an anagram of “Insane Anglo
Warlord.” Many feared that his administration was paving the way to nuclear
holocaust. In retrospect, then, it is striking how far this “warlord” achieved
what he sought. After the Soviets withdrew their forces from Afghanistan in
1989, the local regime could not long survive, any more than South Vietnam
could long have outlasted the US withdrawal in the 1970s. Afghanistan’s
Communist government collapsed in 1992. At the turn of the decade, pro-US
and pro-Western forces secured a series of unquestioned victories in the long
proxy struggles across Africa and Central America. International talks in
Nicaragua led to free elections in 1990, which ended the Sandinista regime,
and peace came to El Salvador in 1992. Ernesto Cardenal, a radical Catholic
priest who served as the Sandinista Minister of Culture, offered his obituary for
the movement: “liberation theology is in crisis. Capitalism won. Period. What
more can be said?”8
US-Soviet tensions cooled following the panic atmosphere of 1983. The
longer US missiles were deployed in Europe, the more obvious it became that
a pre-emptive attack was not a prospect, and the Soviets were increasingly dis-
tracted by their own internal crises. As we will see in the next chapter, relation-
ships improved enormously as the US and Soviets began a series of fruitful
negotiations. Obviously, the improved mood of those years owed as much to
new Soviet attitudes as to Reagan himself, but conditions were ripe for the kind
of reductions in strategic weapons that Reagan had long sought. Incredible as
it might have appeared at the start of the decade, Reagan lived to see his ambi-
tion of the removal of Communist power from Eastern Europe, where 1989
marked one of the great turning points in the continent’s modern history.

Further Reading
I have previously mentioned the very substantial collections of essays to be
found in Melvyn P.  Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge
History of the Cold War (three volumes, 2010), and Richard H. Immerman
and Petra Goedde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013). In

8
 Juan O. Tamayo, “The Echo of Liberation Theology; Only Traces Remain of Revolt Within
the Church,” Baltimore Sun, January 31, 1999, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-
xpm-1999-01-31-9902010474-story.html.
 14  THE NEW STRUGGLE  227

The Cambridge History of the Cold War, see especially the third volume,
which is subtitled “Endings.”
The nuclear confrontations of the 1980s are described in Eckart Conze, Martin
Klimke, and Jeremy Varon eds., Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold
War of the 1980s (2020), and see Henrik G. Bastiansen, Martin Klimke, and
Rolf Werenskjold, eds., Media and the Cold War in the 1980s: Between Star
Wars and Glasnost (2018).
The seriousness of the war scare in 1983 is the subject of some debate, but see
Nate Jones, ed., ABLE ARCHER 83 The Secret History of the NATO Exercise
That Almost Triggered Nuclear War (2016); Marc Ambinder The Brink:
President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (2018); and Taylor
Downing 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink (2018).
For particular fronts in the renewed Cold War, see Edward A. Lynch, The Cold
War’s Last Battlefield: Reagan, the Soviets, and Central America (2011);
Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the
Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (2013); Seth G.  Jones, A Covert
Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland (2018). The
role of Western “private enterprise” in the various struggles is the subject of
Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism
and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (2018).
 CHAPTER 15

Endgame

In 1989, November 9 marked the culmination of several tumultuous weeks of

mass protests across East Germany. After both Hungary and Czechoslovakia
opened their borders to the West, many thousands of East Germans fled their
country, as the Iron Curtain suddenly became very porous. The spokesman for
the DDR government was Günter Schabowski, who during a press conference
had to read a document announcing new rules for travel to the West. Through
genuine confusion, he presented the new policy as if it meant granting immedi-
ate permission to travel West, including through crossings in the Berlin Wall.
At a stroke, he seemed to be announcing freedom of travel. (It is still debated
whether he understood the implications of his words.)
Vast crowds gathered on the eastern side of the Wall, demanding to pass
through. Eventually, a Stasi officer opened the gates at one crossing, on
Bornholmer Strasse. In scenes viewed with amazement around the world,
elated crowds poured through the Wall, and Berlin residents from East and
West gazed directly at each other in a way that had not been possible for almost
three decades. East and West Germans celebrated together, many standing on
top of the Wall. An epic street party followed. Unofficial efforts punched mul-
tiple new holes in the Wall, as the border effectively ceased to exist. So did the
state of East Germany, in any sense that it had been known since its foundation
in 1949.

Will the Soviet Union Survive Until …?

In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union faced a pervasive national crisis. The
Soviets did indeed produce splendid achievements in military technology, and
just to take an example, the Su-27 fighter of the 1980s was arguably the best
aircraft of its kind in the world. Sales of advanced weapons became a vital com-
ponent of Soviet financial survival. But the economy was stagnant or shrinking,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 229

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_15
230  P. JENKINS

marked by abysmal productivity and very low product quality. Even when the
economy was working effectively, it placed a huge emphasis on heavy industrial
production and armaments at the expense of consumer goods. Shortages of all
kinds were so frequent as to become an unremarkable part of life. The central
planning regime made matters much worse, as inefficient older industries faced
no incentive to improve. From being a large exporter of grain, by the 1970s it
was a major importer and maintained its food supply only by its ability to sell
oil and natural gas. (Since finding huge oil resources at Samotlor in Siberia in
the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union had become a key energy state.) The enor-
mous military investments since the mid-1960s consumed an unsustainable
share of Soviet economic capacity. So did the continuing quagmire in
Afghanistan.
Paradoxically, even some of the forms of modernization that actually did
occur raised real issues for the survival of the established order. The Soviet
Union created a very lively world of popular culture, especially in television and
film, and to that extent became a media society almost comparable to Western
nations. But the new media worlds created a whole society with expansive aspi-
rations for greater freedom, prosperity, and even experiment, even if these were
not immediately expressed in overt politics. Meanwhile, the network of institu-
tions that the state created to provide leisure and instruction for Soviet teenag-
ers and young adults coexisted with unofficial forms of social organization,
which were often deeply interested in Western forms of entertainment and
consumption. Acute dissatisfaction with the system was by no means confined
to dissident intellectuals. The gulf separating East and West gaped ever wider
after 1982 with the beginning of the long boom in the capitalist world, and the
impact of new information technologies.
Within the USSR, social indicators, such as life expectancy and alcohol
abuse, demonstrated a growing sense of popular despair. Very low birth rates
raised fears of demographic disaster to come, and old-stock Slavic populations
worried about the steep growth of Islamic minorities. Beyond the economic
realm, the Soviets faced growing unrest not just in the East Bloc, but also in its
own regions, where separatist pressures were mounting.
The stagnation found a good illustration in the very aged quality of the
Soviet leadership itself. In all, 19 men served on the 25th Politburo, which
served from 1976 through 1981 (all of course were men). Only four were born
after the 1917 Revolution. Ten had been born before 1910, making them
older than Ronald Reagan. Besides the issues of age and health, this meant that
over half the members had formed their world views entirely in the three
decades of Stalin’s rule, with little or no direct exposure to the situation in
other countries. If Western liberals despaired about the aged Reagan, that pres-
ident was at least forward-looking and optimistic about growth and techno-
logical advances.
But if the problems were apparent, there was no consensus about solutions.
There were no signs of any willingness to consider reforms, even on something
like the scale proposed by Khrushchev 20 years before. The main obstacle to
 15 ENDGAME  231

improvement was that any kind of liberalization would challenge the entrenched
authority of party elites, and ultimately of the Communist system itself. To
reform the system was to kill it. This dilemma had been well formulated by the
dissident Andrei Amalrik, who in 1970 published an essay entitled Will the
Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? This near-prophetic essay was of course pub-
lished in Western outlets, but its arguments became widely known in the
USSR. As prophecy, Amalrik’s work was not perfect, as he envisaged the Soviets
suffering a ruinous war with the Chinese. But his larger analysis of Soviet eco-
nomic realities was acute. In a famous passage, he argued, “If … one views the
present ‘liberalization’ as the growing decrepitude of the regime rather than its
regeneration, then the logical result will be its death, which will be followed by
anarchy.”1 Amalrik himself died in 1980, but his vision unfolded with fair accu-
racy over the following decade.

Gorbachev
In his final years, Leonid Brezhnev was suffering from so many accumulated
health issues and mental failings that he could exercise little direct authority.
The country was ruled by a collective team, a troika, comprising KGB Chairman
Yuri Andropov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and Defense Minister
Dmitry Ustinov. Brezhnev died in November 1982, as East-West tensions were
plumbing new depths, and was succeeded as General Secretary of the
Communist Party by Andropov, who had since 1967 served as Chairman of the
KGB. It is a bitter commentary on Western intelligence analysis that his acces-
sion to power, one of the most important developments in global affairs, should
have come as a shock to the CIA, which expected a continuation of collective
leadership.
Andropov’s KGB background inspired reasonable concern about a new ide-
ological hardline at home and abroad, but in fact, the consequences were more
nuanced. While Andropov yielded to no one in his defense of the Soviet sys-
tem, he was uniquely equipped to recognize its failings, and he actually had
accurate data about the dismal economic realities. He was thoroughly aware of
the pervasive corruption prevailing at all levels of officialdom. As much as any
Soviet agency, the KGB had an excellent sense of the West and its technological
capacities. Andropov in fact began a modest reform program, focused on purg-
ing the least effective individuals rather than initiating serious institutional
change. Even more valuably, he encouraged the emergence of a cohort of ris-
ing younger leaders committed to reform and efficiency.
Most important among that favored group was Mikhail Gorbachev, the
Secretary of the Central Committee, who was a natural successor when
Andropov himself died in February 1984. However, other leaders regarded
him as too young and lacking experience: at 53, he was a generation younger
than his counterparts. The new leader was Konstantin Chernenko, who

1
 Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
232  P. JENKINS

represented the party mainstream at its most hidebound and decrepit. He was
73 at the time of taking power, and persistent illnesses meant that he only sur-
vived a year in office. In March 1985, Gorbachev became General Secretary
and effective leader of the Soviet Union.
Desperately worried by economic disparities with the West, Gorbachev initi-
ated a period of extensive reform at home and new relations abroad. At its
simplest, this new approach meant discouraging anything like a cult of person-
ality centered on him, so that he prevented displays of his portrait at public
events. His reform program was termed Perestroika (restructuring). At first,
this was intended to reinforce and streamline the planned economy, but by
1986, he was proposing the introduction of new market-oriented elements. He
followed Andropov in his anti-corruption activism. No less significant was the
new policy of Glasnost (openness), a symbolic opening of national windows
that went far beyond Khrushchev’s more timid precedent. As it developed, the
new approach meant greater freedom of the press, an opening of archives to
researchers, and a greater diversity of voices in media. Most daring, it implied
a reassessment of Soviet history. In a powerful symbolic move, the Soviets
stopped jamming foreign radio stations, such as BBC and VOA.  Religious
organizations gained greater freedom. By 1989, the country was moving to
real democratization, with an elected Congress of People’s Deputies. This was
nothing like an open election, and most deputies were Communist Party mem-
bers, but previous dissidents were much in evidence, and there was real debate.
When Gorbachev’s spokesman was asked what the difference was between the
new leader and Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubček, the reply was “Nineteen
years.”2

Negotiations
Gorbachev’s reforms depended on good relations with the West. Like many
others, he had been appalled by the apparent spiral to war since the start of the
decade, and the country had to find an effective way to respond to US eco-
nomic and military pressure. In 1986, Gorbachev warned the Politburo against
being “pulled into another round of the arms race that is beyond our capabili-
ties, and we will lose it, because we are already at the limit of our capabilities.”3
The Star Wars plan created the potential for a lavish new competition in space-­
based weapons.
Gorbachev’s initiatives to improve relationships found a ready ear in the
West, initially with the implacably anti-Red Margaret Thatcher. In November
1985, Reagan and Gorbachev met at a summit in Geneva and delighted observ-
ers by their apparently warm relationship and their willingness to engage in

2
 Michael T. Kaufman, “Gorbachev Alludes to Czech Invasion,” New York Times, April 12, 1987.
3
 Quoted in Vladislav M. Zubok, “Gorbachev’s Nuclear Learning: How the Soviet leader became
a nuclear abolitionist,” Boston Review, April 2000, https://bostonreview.net/archives/BR25.2/
zubok.html
 15 ENDGAME  233

serious discussions. Although no formal agreement was concluded, this was the
point at which the worst nuclear terrors lifted, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The two even had visions of an extraordinary global deal that would abolish the
nuclear arsenals of both sides, and these sweeping proposals surfaced briefly at
the summit meeting held in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. In the short
term, Gorbachev proposed a 50 percent reduction in Soviet missiles. The
Reykjavik meeting failed to reach formal agreement, significantly because
Reagan refused to accept any deal that renounced Star Wars. Even so, the inter-
national political mood shifted substantially and became much more optimistic.
Despite these new gestures, the West maintained its pressure, particularly on
the economic front. The US worked with the Saudis to keep oil prices at his-
torically low levels, which removed one of the few remaining strong points in
the Soviet economy. In late 1985, the oil price was $30 a barrel, but that
plunged to $12 in March 1986, and it remained around $10 over the next two
years. Reagan ensured that improved superpower relations would not ignore
the continuing situation in Eastern Europe. In June 1987, he visited West
Berlin, recalling Kennedy’s presence there in June 1963. Like Kennedy, he
gave a memorable speech, but offering optimism rather than defiance. While
welcoming prospects for peace, Reagan stressed the need for freedom, and
directly challenged the Soviet leader in an effective soundbite when he urged,
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”4
In September 1987, the US and the USSR agreed the historic Intermediate-­
Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which was signed that December, and
which ordered the dismantling of long- and short-range missiles in Europe.
This was the first US-Soviet treaty actually to provide for the destruction of
nuclear weapons, and the first arms control agreement to receive Senate
approval since SALT I in 1972. Though the American right denounced the
treaty, it represented an enormous US diplomatic victory, granting Reagan his
long-mocked zero option. In December 1987, Gorbachev visited Washington,
where he received a genuinely enthusiastic welcome as something like a popu-
lar hero. After the US Senate ratified the INF Treaty, Reagan visited Moscow
for a summit meeting in May 1988, and declared that he no longer considered
the Soviets an “evil empire.” That May also, the Soviets began their military
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
At last, both sides could free spending previously devoted to military needs,
and to enjoy what in the West would be known as a peace dividend. But in the
Soviet context, any such prospect would take years to mature, and the domestic
pressures were becoming severe. The Soviets suffered a dreadful blow in April
1986 with the disaster at a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, in Ukraine. This
caused catastrophic contamination in the immediate area, but also spread a
radioactive cloud detectable across much of Europe. The event epitomized so
many problems in the larger economy, including the incompetence of planners

4
 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate,” June 12, 1987, https://www.american-
rhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganbrandenburggate.htm
234  P. JENKINS

and managers. But this was also a political disaster. Aggravating the situation
were the failures of local officials to admit the severity of the situation, which
delayed any effective responses, while the national government was issuing
clearly false statements about the dangers posed. The resulting scandal sug-
gested that even under a leadership as admired as Gorbachev’s, the Soviet state
was gravely flawed, and lacked international credibility.
Besides the Soviet Union, the PRC was undergoing political and cultural
turmoil in these years, and that experience would have its impact in the Soviet
Bloc. Through the decade, the country was growing economically and relaxing
many of the repressive restraints of the Mao era. But that rapid change created
widespread expectations for still more dramatic reforms, and for full democra-
tization. That culminated in a surging national protest movement in 1989.
From April, vast crowds occupied Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, until in June,
the government used the army to suppress the movement. Several hundred
were killed. The lesson was that if economic reform were to proceed unchecked,
then it could not be in any form that challenged party authority, or Communist
ideology. That offered a potent message to hardline Soviet and East European
Communists deeply suspicious of Gorbachev’s reforms and worried that
Gorbachev was making too many concessions to the West.

A New Eastern Europe

Communist domination faced critical threats in Eastern Europe. People across
the region were keenly aware of Western successes and prosperity, partly
through Western radio services. As Communist governments paid attention to
anti-Communist leaders to demonize them, so they unintentionally dissemi-
nated their words and images and contributed to popular admiration for
Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II. Economic discontent became severe in
the worldwide recessions of the early 1980s, but the Eastern countries lacked
the Western capacity to rebuild and prosper in subsequent years.
Communist power in the People’s Democracies progressively weakened.
The fact of shortages and protests was nothing new, but the new situation in
the Soviet Union after 1985 fundamentally changed matters. Since the
mid-­1940s, the regular and predictable nature of crises in East European
nations suggested profound instability and discontent, with actual or near-­
revolutions erupting every decade or so in at least one country, and often more
than one at the same time. All that prevented those nations careening away
from the Communist bloc, or from Communism as such, was the constant
threat of Soviet military force. Once that was removed, revolutionary change
was all but certain. As early as 1985, Gorbachev apparently told East European
leaders that the Brezhnev Doctrine was finished and that no tanks would be
available to help them in future. If any such clampdown did occur, that would
poison improving relations with the West, and reignite the Cold War. Nor
could the Soviets afford the expense of permanently maintaining semi-colonial
systems in Eastern Europe, leave alone the cost of a military occupation.
 15 ENDGAME  235

With Gorbachev in power, protesters could be reasonably sure that they

could operate without the fear of Soviet intervention. The question then was
how far change would be permitted to proceed. East European regimes would
certainly have to grant varying degrees of reform and liberalization within a
socialist framework, on the lines that Gorbachev hoped to see in the USSR, but
could the Soviets permit the wholesale destruction or reversal of Communism?
Would a state be permitted to become not just non-Communist, but actively
pro-Western? As those questions became acute from 1988 onward, the Soviet
leadership, and especially Gorbachev himself, had to make agonizing decisions.
The threat was most pressing in Poland, which remained under martial law
until 1983. Even when that was lifted, there was no question that the vast
majority of the people were utterly disaffected with Communism. The extent
of disaffection became obvious in 1984 when three security service agents
murdered a popular pro-Solidarity Catholic priest, Jerzy Popiełuszko. The case
galvanized national resistance, forcing the government to put the killers on
trial, in a move that would have been inconceivable in earlier years. Some
250,000 attended the priest’s funeral. Meanwhile, Solidarity survived and
flourished underground, and by 1988, new strikes forced the government into
negotiations. Elections followed in June 1989, in the immediate (and omi-
nous) aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. Even under the restricted condi-
tions imposed by the government, Solidarity won a mighty victory over the
Polish United Workers Party, the main Communist organization. The presi-
dent was forced to accept a Solidarity Prime Minister, who headed a non-­
Communist government. The pace of reform accelerated over the next two
years, culminating in fully free elections in 1991, and the formation of a non-­
Communist Third Republic, with Lech Walesa as president.
Hungary’s revolution was less dramatic, in that the country had for two
decades enjoyed economic liberalization and some degree of personal free-
doms. The long rule of Communist leader János Kádár, who maintained his
position from 1956 to 1988, provided stability and continuity and assured the
Soviets that they had nothing to fear from changes here. From the mid-1980s,
economic implosion made pressures for reform irresistible, and that reality was
widely recognized within the ruling party itself. In June 1989, the remains of
Imre Nagy, the country’s leader during the 1956 revolution, were reburied in
what became a vast symbolic rejection of Communism.
Different parties and pressure groups undertook negotiations with the
Communists, culminating in parliament’s passage of a “democracy package” of
reforms, including a multi-party system and free labor unions. Free elections
followed in 1990, and the last Soviet occupying forces withdrew the follow-
ing year.
By mid-1989, reforms in Poland and Hungary made the survival of the
Eastern Bloc in anything like its previous state impossible. That July, Gorbachev
allowed Warsaw Pact nations to carry out reforms, and in October, he declared
that the “Soviet Union has no moral or political right to interfere in the affairs
of its East European neighbors.” A spokesman termed this the “Sinatra
236  P. JENKINS

Doctrine,” as it recalled that singer’s popular recording of “My Way.”5 Poland

and Hungary had indeed done it their way, and the remaining hardline
Communist governments the DDR and Czechoslovakia were soon to follow.

Germany’s Turning Point

East Germany’s terminal crisis began when Hungary removed its fortified bor-
der with Austria and allowed people to travel freely to the West. Many East
Germans took advantage of this opportunity to use Hungary as a means of
fleeing westward, effectively opening East-West borders. The Czechoslovak
borders opened soon afterward. Meanwhile, popular protests and demonstra-
tions were surging across East German cities, particularly following rigged elec-
tions, and the ruling party, the SED, suffered a mass exodus of members.
Protests climaxed that October during the fortieth anniversary of the East
German state.
In this country, more than any other, there was a real prospect that the gov-
ernment would resort to violent suppression, and dissidents feared a solution
on the lines of the Tiananmen massacre. The Soviets still had half a million
soldiers in the country, who in theory could have crushed opposition, bat of
course they did not. That Fall, the government was indeed proposing the mass
arrest and internment of tens of thousands of resisters through their draconian
Plan X. But the crisis proved overwhelming. The long-standing party leader
Erich Honecker, who had served since 1971, resigned, and party rule crum-
bled. The whole Cabinet of Ministers then resigned, and the fall of the Wall left
the state in disarray. The country had reached die Wende, the turning point. In
March 1990, the DDR had its first free elections, in which the successor to the
old ruling Communist SED suffered a severe defeat.
The fact that the regime could not continue did not of itself present an obvi-
ous political solution, and German reunification faced many obstacles. Even
those Western leaders who hated Communism were nervous about recreating
a unified German state with a population and economic resources that would
give it unquestioned European dominance. This was Margaret Thatcher’s
nightmare. However prepared they might be to see a new regime in East
Berlin, the Soviets likewise had grave doubts about seeing a restored Germany
so close to their western borders, especially one incorporated into NATO. So
much of Soviet history and national identity was bound up with the historic
victory over Nazism. Reunifying Germany would potentially represent a terri-
ble blow to Soviet prestige, vaunting the Communist collapse in Europe. From
the Soviet point of view, accepting German reunification was a step still more
significant than tolerating the evaporation of Communism across Eastern
Europe. Even many Germans were concerned about the astronomical cost of
integrating the radically different economies of West and East.

5
 “Sinatra Doctrine’ at Work in Warsaw Pact, Soviet Says,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1989,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-25-mn-745-story.html
 15 ENDGAME  237

For a while, the option of maintaining a reformed and independent East

German state seemed attractive. But matters changed quickly, owing much to
the vision and determination of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who
won widespread (if grudging) international support for his policies. He was
aided by the swift disintegration of the East German economy, which had for
decades been regarded as the strongest in Eastern Europe, and the East German
currency collapsed. A Reunification Treaty was ratified in September 1990. It
was clear that the new arrangement involved the West German state absorbing
the East, rather than the two combining to form some new entity. Symbolically
important, the reunified state flew what had been the West German flag, and
on October 3, that flag was flown over Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, marking the
moment of unification.
Of the older Soviet-linked leaders, only one withstood the wind of change.
As the Cuban economy staggered through the 1980s, General Arnaldo Ochoa
was often seen as a likely successor to Castro. His experiences in the country’s
African wars had given him excellent connections with Soviet commanders and
officials, making him a natural successor to implement Gorbachev-style reforms.
But any hopes of radical change ended in 1989, when Ochoa was tried on out-
rageous charges of drug dealing and treason and executed. An extensive purge
of the security agencies followed. Almost certainly, this was a pre-emptive strike
by Castro against any potential reform effort, and it succeeded. His regime
survived the crisis.

Year of Revolutions
By late 1989, Eastern Europe was experiencing a wave of revolutions recalling
other transformative years of European history, such as 1830, 1848, or 1919.
In the second half of November, students demonstrations in Czechoslovakia
detonated vast protests and strikes that soon became frankly anti-Communist.
The events of the following months came to be called the Velvet Revolution.
The Communist Party abandoned its monopoly of power, and the country
acquitted its first non-Communist government since 1948. The new president
was Václav Havel, a celebrated author, dissident, and human rights campaigner.
Alexander Dubček, the hero of the Prague Spring in 1968, re-emerged into
public life as Chairman of the Federal Parliament.
The only serious bloodshed in the wave of revolutions occurred in Romania,
where Nicolae Ceaușescu had since the 1960s ruled as a classic Stalinist dicta-
tor, although sturdily opposed to the Soviet Union. Facing democracy protests
in December 1989, Ceaușescu’s regime resorted to military force, but repres-
sion stirred new resistance. Leading members of the military and the security
establishment switched their allegiance, and the regime was overturned.
Ceaușescu and his wife were executed. Over a thousand perished during the
revolutionary struggle.
By the start of 1990, Communist regimes were dead or dying cross Eastern
Europe, but attitudes to Communism as such varied. Some on the left favored
238  P. JENKINS

a reformed system that would maintain Communist principles. In Bulgaria, the

Communist Party successfully reconstituted itself as a democratic party, which
won power in free elections. But in most countries, Communism was too
tainted by abuses and too closely associated with Soviet occupation. In
Czechoslovakia, even the enormously popular Alexander Dubček could arouse
little enthusiasm for his vision of humane and democratic reforms within a
Communist framework.
Across the region, the total rejection of Communism was manifested in a
furious campaign against statues and memorials erected under Soviet domi-
nance. In Poland, crowds tore down the statue of the Cheka’s founder Felix
Dzerzhinsky, and statues of Lenin were returned to the Soviets. Particularly
sensitive were memorials to Soviet soldiers who had liberated the countries
from the Nazis. But as everyone knew, those soldiers had often engaged in
atrocities of their own, especially mass rape, and they had replaced one occupa-
tion with another. Across the region, the new or restored states faced a familiar
range of issues in confronting their more recent history. Those matters became
acute following the exposure of the activities of internal security agencies, with
all their surveillance operations and networks of informers. States had to decide
how much to reveal, and how far to penalize the guilty. In place of statues glo-
rifying Soviet heroes, Budapest’s House of Terror (2002) was a museum com-
memorating Communist atrocities alongside those of the Nazis. It is located in
a former headquarters of the nation’s secret police, the ÁVH.

Soviet Crisis (1988–1991)

Through all those historic revolutions, one critical event did not occur, namely
that Soviet forces never intervened to support Communism, or to rescue long
faithful allies and their crumbling regimes. That decision, that refusal to act,
effectively killed Communism beyond the western borders of the USSR. As
the Soviet Union itself faced deepening threats in these same years, those
experiences offered alarming precedents for the survival of Communism
as such.
Quite apart from debates over Gorbachev’s reforms, the slackening of
repression within the Soviet Union opened the way to explosions of nationalist
sentiment, and to rivalries that had long been suppressed. Ethnic and national-
ist tensions surged in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and some acquired a
religious edge. By 1988, disputes over control of the Armenian-majority
Nagorno-Karabakh region led to violence between mainly Christian Armenians
and Muslim Azerbaijanis. Also restive were the Baltic republics, which had long
looked to the West, and which paid close attention to events in neighboring
Poland. From 1987, dissident and separatist groups gained mass support, in
reassertions of national pride collectively recalled as the region’s Singing
Revolution. Formal declarations of independence could not be long
 15 ENDGAME  239

postponed, despite Soviet threats. Lithuanian and Latvian attempts to secede

resulted in bloody clashes in January 1991, but together with Estonia, those
nations were de facto independent that year, well before the collapse of the
USSR.  Meanwhile, other republics—even Russia itself—were seeking a new
relationship with central Soviet authority. It was an open question how much
further secession movements might spread, endangering the “Union” of Soviet
Socialist Republics.
Believers in the Soviet Communist model as traditionally defined were hor-
rified. The economy continued to implode as inflation mounted and the coun-
try’s budget deficit soared, and Gorbachev turned to Western sources for
financial aid. Gorbachev’s refusal to fight German reunification was particularly
resented. Facing bitter opposition within the party, Gorbachev acquired a new
role as President of the Soviet Union, from which position he would be more
difficult to remove. For old-style Communists, the new office sent a disturbing
message that the national government, rather than the party, was the principal
seat of authority.
The country’s military received a new shock in 1991, when a broad US-led
coalition attacked Iraq to end its recent occupation of Kuwait. Only a few
years earlier, the US would have been very cautious indeed about engaging
militarily with a close Soviet ally, even as rash a one as Saddam’s Iraq. The war
was a total Western triumph, with just 100 hours of ground combat. Beyond
the defeat of their long-standing ally, which possessed the world’s fourth larg-
est army, the Soviets were appalled to witness the humiliation of a country
that used advanced Soviet weaponry and armor and followed Warsaw Pact
military tactics. Western forces, meanwhile, were equipped with the full pano-
ply of sophisticated modern warfare, all the precision and stealth weaponry.
The Western coalition suffered fewer than 150 military fatalities, compared to
at least 25,000 Iraqis. The war signified the almost instant obsolescence of
most existing Soviet (and Chinese) military orthodoxies. For the Americans,
Soviet acquiescence in the action against Saddam meant that that country was
joining an idealistic arrangement that President George H. W. Bush termed a
new world order (a phrase originally coined by Gorbachev himself). The war
signaled the arrival of a new European order, as Poland, Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia all participated in the US-led coalition. In July 1991, the
Warsaw Pact disbanded.
Hardline opposition to Gorbachev focused on his attempt to decentralize
power to the Soviet republics, and a coup d’etat followed in August 1991.
Gorbachev was arrested, and eight highly placed political leaders formed a
State Committee on the State of Emergency. This was semi-mockingly termed
the “Gang of Eight,” following the precedent of China’s radical Maoists of
the 1970s. The Soviet junta included the Vice President, the Premier, as well
as the Defense Minister, and probably most important of all, KGB Director
Vladimir Kryuchkov. It was a telling sign of Soviet global isolation that the
240  P. JENKINS

main expressions of international support for the plotters came from two
notoriously brutal dictators, Libya’s Qaddafi and Iraq’s Saddam. Within the
Soviet Union, coup leaders failed to arouse enough support in the military
and the political establishment, which recognized just how broad support for
reform was in the nation as a whole, and particularly in the cities. Resistance
to the coup found a public face in Boris Yeltsin, a long-standing ally of
Gorbachev’s who had nevertheless denounced his reforms as too timid. That
June, Yeltsin had been elected President of Russia—that is, officially, of the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic—defeating Gorbachev’s favored
candidate. In memorable images, Yeltsin stood on a tank in the Moscow
streets to resist the coup. Within a few days, the movement had collapsed, as
Gorbachev was released.
If the plotters received little sympathy from outsiders, they were exactly cor-
rect in their analysis of the dangers facing the Soviet Union, and their actions
accelerated the process of disintegration.
In the following weeks, the republics declared their independence, creating
16 new nations. Under Yeltsin, Russia itself re-emerged as a name on the
European map, with a new flag that abandoned the hammer and sickle emblem
of Communism. In November, Yeltsin prohibited Communist Party activities
within Russia. The following month, 92 percent of Ukrainians voted for sover-
eign independence. Like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, crowds in the
Soviet Union tore down the symbols of Communist power and history, includ-
ing that of Felix Dzerzhinsky in front of KGB headquarters, the notorious
Lubianka. Following a referendum in June 1991, Leningrad reverted to its
imperial name of St Petersburg. Other cities resumed their former imperial
names, renouncing the titles that commemorated Communist functionaries.
Sverdlovsk once more became Ekaterinburg, recalling the Empress Catherine
the Great.
In December 1991, most of the successor nations combined to form the
loosely linked Confederation of Independent States, CIS, although the three
Baltic states refused even to adhere to such a symbolic association. At least in
theory, the CIS coexisted with the Soviet Union until December 26, 1991,
when Gorbachev resigned the Presidency and entered private life. The Soviet
Union ceased to exist, and with it, the Cold War ended. Political observers
worldwide had to become accustomed to a new acronym, FSU, for the “Former
Soviet Union.”

A New World Order

As in the matter of German reunification, Western leaders were divided over
their visions of a post-Soviet world. Just how far should they press their clear
victory over Soviet power? At least, some policymakers held that a reformed
and democratized Soviet Union would be preferable to the kind of dissolution
that was in progress by early 1991. It would be damaging if a rump Soviet or
 15 ENDGAME  241

Russian state survived to seek revenge against the various regions and nations
that had forsaken it, opening the way to years of plotting and warfare. In
August 1991, just days before the coup attempt, President Bush addressed
these issues in Kiev, where he praised Gorbachev’s reforms, and warned against
“a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” The Ukrainians bitterly
resented the speech, and American conservatives complained about the refusal
to press for a Soviet breakup. Some accused Bush of being cowardly or chicken
and referred to the “Chicken Kiev” speech.6 Ironically, Bush, a former head of
the CIA, was one of the last international figures to oppose the collapse of
the USSR.
Matters moved too fast for even the Americans to slow the process. In the
following decade, Western nations agreed to the incorporation of most of the
former Eastern Bloc into its key institutions, including both NATO and the
European Union. As a part of an enlarged Germany, the former East Germany
automatically became part of NATO from 1990, but other nations soon fol-
lowed. In 1997, NATO invitations were extended to Poland, Hungary, and
the Czech Republic, one of the two states to succeed former Czechoslovakia.
A new NATO enlargement in 2004 incorporated Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia,
and Slovenia, and—most sensitive of all—the three Baltic nations that had
recently been Soviet republics. Even Ukraine was a candidate for further expan-
sion, but Russian military efforts against that nation in the new century made
the issue too risky. In 2004, the European Union expanded to include Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the three Baltics.
Romania and Bulgaria followed in 2007. Except in the Baltics, the borders of
“the West” marched along the western borders of the old USSR, and of the
Tsarist Empire that had preceded it.
The reformed West even sought to incorporate Russia itself, as part of a new
democratic and liberal economic order. Since 1975, the world’s largest Western
economies had formed the Group of Seven, or G-7. In 1997, the inclusion of
Russia created the G-8. There was even talk of bringing Russia into NATO,
which would have constituted an ultimate irony.
Just how thoroughly Russian influence had evaporated was suggested by
several conflicts in the 1990s, where Western powers intervened freely in
areas that the Soviet Union would have unequivocally recognized as its own
preserve—what Americans would have called its backyard. The Gulf War of
1991 was a glaring example, but in the 1990s, ethnic and political violence
overcame the former nation of Yugoslavia, which devolved into several new
states. Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia had been an extremely sensitive
pressure point of East-West tension, but from 1992, NATO intervened to
bring order and reduce violence. That intervention became forceful and

6
 “After the Summit; Excerpts From Bush’s Ukraine Speech: Working ‘for the Good of Both of
Us,’” New York Times, August 2, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/02/world/after-­
summit-­excerpts-bush-s-ukraine-speech-working-for-good-both-us.html
242  P. JENKINS

military in character in 1995 and again in 1999, when the US led airstrikes
against Serbia and its forces. Russia played only a marginal role in the peace-
keeping operation. With the exception of one tense moment in 1999, when
US-Russian conflict briefly seemed possible, Russia could raise few objections
to the Western hegemony over what had been an East European Socialist
Republic

The End of History

Tracing the origins of the Cold War, I have described the seminal work of
George Kennan, who wrote the Long Telegram analyzing Soviet intentions
and goals. In 1947, he adapted that document as a magazine article in Foreign
Affairs entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym
X. That precedent was recalled in 1989 when Francis Fukuyama published an
essay in the National Interest on “The End of History.”7 For Fukuyama, ide-
ologies and social systems struggled through history, but modern events left no
doubt of the victory of the free market, and of liberal democracy. To that
extent, the endemic conflicts that drove so much of history were finished, and
Western values had won. History had ended. The events of the following three
decades have cast some doubts on that analysis.

Further Reading
For the final years of the Soviet Union, see Artemy M.  Kalinovsky, A Long
Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (2011); Serhii Plokhy, The
Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2015). Plokhy is also the
author of Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (2018). William
Taubman offers a major study of Gorbachev: His Life and Times (2017). See
also Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev
and the Collapse of the USSR (2016).
For issues of consumption and aspiration in the Soviet Union’s later years, see
Kristin Roth-Ey. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media
Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (2011); Gleb Tsipursky, Socialist
Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet
Union, 1945–1970 (2016); and Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The
Soviet Lives of Western Culture (2018)
The closing phase of the Cold War is described in James Graham Wilson, The
Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement,
and the End of the Cold War (2014); Ken Adelman, Reagan at Reykjavik
(2014); Robert Service, The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991 (2015); Simon
Miles, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of
the End of the Cold War (2020); Archie Brown, The Human Factor: Gorbachev,

7
 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” National Interest 16(1989), 3–18.
 15 ENDGAME  243

Reagan, and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War (2020). Christopher
Mallaby’s Living the Cold War (2017) offers the informative memoir of a
British diplomat through the whole arc of the era, from the 1960s
through 1991.
For revolutions in the Soviet Bloc, see Jeffrey A.  Engel, ed., The Fall of the
Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (2009); Joachim von
Puttkamer, Włodzimierz Borodziej and Stanislav Holubec, eds., From
Revolution To Uncertainty: The Year 1990  in Central and Eastern Europe
(2020). ­Post-­Cold War politics are analyzed in Kristina Spohr, Post Wall, Post
Square: How Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl, and Deng Shaped the World After
1989 (2020).
 CHAPTER 16

Conclusion: Winners, Losers, and Inheritors

This book began with a description of Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska, the
long-standing home of the SAC. Although Offutt lost its key role with the
formal end of Cold War tensions, it was once again on the front lines of his-
tory on September 11, 2001, following the Islamist terrorist attacks on
New  York and Washington. President George W.  Bush arrived here on the
presidential aircraft, Air Force One, to take advantage of the excellent com-
munication facilities of the Strategic Command that had replaced SAC, which
were believed capable of withstanding a nuclear strike. It was here that he
learned details of the attacks, and the presumed role of al-Qaeda, under its
leader Osama bin Laden. Bush and his advisers made the initial decisions that
would ultimately lead to decades of US involvement in wars in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and elsewhere.
The Cold War, evidently, was not the prelude to global peace, or indeed for
an end of ideological struggle, still less of history as such. Arguably, some of
those new forms of struggle evolved from the Cold War conflict itself. Three
decades after the Cold War’s end, we can address central questions of the con-
flict’s meaning, and specifically of issues of victory and defeat.

Winning the War
In 1929, a character in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury protested,
“No battle is ever won… Victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”1 In
the context of the Cold War, such a view may sound ridiculous, in that the US
and its Western allies so clearly triumphed. The Soviet Union not only aban-
doned the battlefield, it also ceased to exist. From that perspective, many
historians scorn the opinion of Mikhail Gorbachev himself that the struggle
ended without winners or losers. But victory in the Cold War did not lead to

1
 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 83.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 245

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6_16
246  P. JENKINS

straightforward US hegemony, or at least not for more than a few years. If the
US in 1991 was the last superpower standing, it would not long retain that
distinction.
Even in the headiest days of US triumph in 1991, some voices were protest-
ing that the prohibitive economic costs of the struggle had undermined the
West and opened the door to other rival powers. The nation initially cited as a
de facto global victor was Japan, which avoided direct military involvement, yet
had used its economic opportunities to build immense prosperity based on
advanced technology. When Japan’s economy encountered serious setbacks
during the 1990s, a similar analysis was applied to China. Following its deci-
sion to liberalize in 1978, China’s single-minded devotion to growth and pros-
perity made it a superpower which by 2015 matched the US itself. In dollar
terms, China’s GDP grew from $300 billion in 1980 to $1 trillion in 1998, to
$15 trillion today. That wealth is expressed in ever-growing political influence
and military power, giving it a position far greater than the Soviets ever had
during the height of their power during the Cold War. (Presently, China’s
economy is eight times larger than that of modern-day Russia.) The rise of
China is a central fact of modern world history. The relative decline of the US
was not of itself a consequence of the Cold War, as China owed its growth to
other unrelated factors, including its vast domestic market. But it does offer a
context for considering the outcome of the long US-Soviet rivalry.
For other countries too, the end of the Cold War marked a transition to
explosive growth. From its creation in 1947, the state of India had been ham-
pered by a tightly controlled economy based on both socialist principles and
visions of national autonomy. Partly due to the utter discrediting of Soviet and
socialist examples, India in 1991 began a sweeping liberalization that initiated
dramatic growth. Today, India stands among the world’s five largest economies
and is a serious contender for global influence. Opposition to further Chinese
expansion is led by the Quad—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—which
includes the US, India, Japan, and Australia.
In strategic terms too, the end of the Cold War looks like less of a clear
dividing line than it might have done at the time. A map of the world’s leading
political powers would begin with the US and China, but it would certainly
include Russia. Even with its diminished territory and shriveled economy, the
modern Russian state still commands serious military force. Russia deploys
over 1500 nuclear warheads, 40 percent of the active global total, and quite
sufficient to destroy large portions of the world. Politically too, the Russian
state dominated by Vladimir Putin throughout the present century has exer-
cised influence far beyond what its economic strength might suggest and has
worked to restore a role in former Soviet territories. If Russia is no longer
Communist, then a US-Russian rivalry is still a central fact in international
affairs. As in the 1980s, the US has to balance its relations with both Russia and
China. Older fears of Communist subversion and espionage have transmuted
into concern about Russian disinformation and dirty tricks, commonly using
the Internet, to the point of shaping the outcome of elections in many
 16  CONCLUSION: WINNERS, LOSERS, AND INHERITORS  247

countries, allegedly including the US itself. In the US, Cold War memories
revived startlingly in 2016 with unfounded but widely credited charges that
President Donald Trump was a Russian agent of influence, even a latter-day
Manchurian Candidate.

Who Won the War?

The means by which the Cold War ended are open to debate, which is often
partisan. For many conservative-minded Americans, the story is simple. For
decades, they believe, the world was locked in a superpower standoff, which
ended when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet bluff, and placed overwhelming
pressure on the Evil Empire, which duly collapsed. Such a vision casts its
shadow on earlier policies which had been based on coexistence or détente. In
hindsight, such policies look like appeasement.
The historical reality is more complex. Reagan was no more uncompromis-
ing in his anti-Communism that Western leaders of the 1950s, say, who were
equally prepared to take every opportunity to subvert Communist movements
or Soviet allies. What made Reagan successful was the gaping and ever-­widening
gulf that separated East and West economically and technologically by the
1980s. Western determination only made sense, and only stood a chance of
success, after the Soviets had been sufficiently weakened by the failings of their
own system. Communism had to fail internally before it could be rolled back
by external forces. Approaches that worked in 1983 would not have done so in
1963. Equally, even the most charismatic and determined Western anti-­
Communist would have stood little chance of success in the context of the early
and mid-1970s, when US self-confidence stood at a low ebb, and when eco-
nomic disasters were accumulating. Against that background, seeking coexis-
tence and détente made excellent sense. Of themselves, neither détente nor a
rollback policy were good or bad: everything depended on the circumstances
in which they were applied. It is an interesting speculation how much Reagan
could have achieved internationally if he had won the presidency in 1976, as he
sought, rather than in 1980.
But to give Reagan proper credit, we should stress just how few credible
experts envisaged anything like the collapse of Soviet Communism, except in
the context of global war. In retrospect, many scholars and analysts have
stressed the weaknesses of the Soviet system and pointed to its likely demise.
Such views were very rare before the mid-1980s, and expressing them was
likely to provoke charges of ignorance, or of extreme right ideological fantasies.
Besides Reagan, very few indeed held out prospects of victory or defeat.
That historical analysis has significant implications if we apply it to the new
Cold War that has emerged between the US and China. Should we likewise
today believe that stark confrontation is the obvious path to victory? But as I
have suggested, context is critical, and especially in the economic sphere, so
that any tactic of “calling bluffs” in this particular standoff should be used very
sparingly indeed. If we are seeking lessons from the Cold War experience, we
248  P. JENKINS

might equally well recall George Kennan’s warning against “outward histrion-
ics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward ‘toughness.’”2

Individuals Making History

The stress on individual decisions—and not just on Reagan himself—demands
attention. Recent accounts of the final years of the Cold War place enormous
stress on the role of four key individuals, namely Reagan himself, Thatcher,
Pope John Paul II, and Gorbachev. However much historians distrust an
emphasis on great individuals, that view has much to commend it in this case.
The election of Pope John Paul II did not of itself create a terminal crisis for
Communism in Poland and neighboring nations, but it accelerated the process
by several years, and that is over and above the vast influence of the conserva-
tive papacy in Latin America. We might in fact add Helmut Schmidt to this list
of key individuals, for his role in promoting the stern NATO response to the
Soviet buildup of intermediate-range weaponry. It would be easy to imagine an
alternative world in which, in 1980, more pliable and accommodating indi-
viduals were in power in London, Bonn, or the Vatican, and where the West
could never have sustained anything like the pressure that actually was placed
on the Soviets. Reagan, Thatcher, and Schmidt held fast to their policies in the
face of enormous public opposition.
But of all the key individuals, it is difficult to avoid the pivotal role of
Gorbachev. In the circumstances of the 1980s, it was all but certain that a
reformist administration would have come to power—whether individual or
collective in nature—and any such domestic reforms demanded the creation of
a stable and peaceful relationship with the West. But it was not obvious that any
such new regime would have held fast to those principles in the teeth of such
powerful setbacks. As threats to the country’s national integrity grew, and as
the whole structure of Communism was challenged, it would have been easy
and tempting to revert to more traditional ways, even to Stalinist dictatorship.
At the least, we might imagine the kind of emergency rule for which Soviet
hardliners were clamoring in 1990. The decision not to apply repression in
Eastern Europe was scarcely less epochal. It is very debatable how long such an
oppressive system might have been sustained, at home or beyond the borders,
but a lesser figure than Gorbachev might have thought it a desperate risk worth
taking. Perhaps the Soviet Union could not have been saved in anything like its
previous form, but Gorbachev made the best possible effort to salvage it. Most
important, he did so in a way that avoided the risk of international conflict. The
graffiti artists who painted “Danke Gorbi!” on the ruins of the Berlin Wall were
offering a perceptive historical analysis.

2
 “X” (George Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947, at
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-
conduct.
 16  CONCLUSION: WINNERS, LOSERS, AND INHERITORS  249

That emphasis in personalities is relevant to another perennial question

about interpreting the Cold War, namely whether the outcome have been dif-
ferent from what actually occurred. At several key moments, President Truman
might have made decisions other than he did, in ways that would have given
the Soviets decisive advantages. In 1947 especially, he could hypothetically
have refused to engage in confrontation and led the US into renewed isolation-
ism. Most of Western Europe would almost certainly have followed
Czechoslovakia into Communist allegiance, with Italy leading the way.
Truman’s decision to support the Berlin Airlift was another turning point.
Other historical moments were scarcely less threatening. Briefly in the
mid-­1970s, when the US was so thoroughly disenchanted with international
commitments of any kind, it is just possible to imagine an alternative scenario
in which Europe was so intimidated by Soviet threats that it accepted a kind of
neutrality or Finlandization, but of course that is wildly speculative. Otherwise,
it is difficult to imagine conditions in which the Soviets could have won the
global struggle, politically or militarily.
But we can easily contemplate scenarios in which crises would have escalated
to open warfare, and even to the total meltdown of a new world war. Given the
political circumstances in both superpowers through these years, the fact that
such a cataclysm was averted owes much to the decisions and attitudes of par-
ticular individuals. The fact that the Cuban missile crisis followed the trajectory
it did owed everything to decisions taken by Kennedy and Khrushchev, often
overriding advice from trusted advisers. In the 1980s again, the attitudes and
decisions of Reagan and Gorbachev determined the course of arms control.
Another key individual was in a sense conspicuous by his absence from the
Washington-Moscow duel. Once China became Communist, it was natural
that it would eventually gravitate away from close adherence to the Soviet
Union, but Mao Zedong’s idiosyncratic revolutionary politics made such a
break much more rapid and more bitter than it might otherwise have been. In
the hands of a different leader, China could have remained a fundamental and
potent member of the Sino-Soviet world front, to the great disadvantage of
the West.
Of course, the Cold War was not a series of contests or duels between indi-
viduals, but those individuals did matter enormously to achieving victory—
and, more important, of ensuring survival.

Consequences of Victory
As a vast struggle spanning decade and continents, the Cold War left a very
diverse range of impacts. Some were very clear, including the removal of
Communist rule over Eastern Europe and the prevention of that system spread-
ing West. The creation and restoration of democracy genuinely did mark a
victory, even for countries like Russia itself where new democratic systems were
flawed. For countries like Poland or Lithuania, the question of whether the
Cold War was worth fighting is too absurd to be worth asking.
250  P. JENKINS

Some of the social effects are difficult to assess. Clearly, the Cold War years
marked technological progress on an almost inconceivable scale, and as so
often in history, war proved a powerful driver and accelerator of change. That
was especially true in matters of information technology and computing, which
were so vital to military systems, from missile guidance to decrypting enemy
codes. To take one example of many, GPS originated strictly as a US military
project in the 1970s, until President Reagan extended it to civilian use in 1983
as a direct consequence of the Soviet shootdown of KAL flight 007. In 2000,
President Clinton made it generally available at its most sophisticated and pre-
cise. In modern times, GPS has had truly revolutionary effects on commerce,
planning, social policy, politics, and academic research and is the basis of many
of the most valuable functions of cellphones.
The problem is that we cannot know how technology might have developed
without the enormous boost of international conflict, initially between the
Allies and the Nazis, and almost immediately afterward between Eastern and
Western blocs. We can speculate how far science might have advanced in a
hypothetical post-1945 era of peace and harmony, but such a venture scarcely
seems profitable. What we can reasonably say is that at every stage of modern
technological development as it actually did occur, we find the traces of the
Cold War.

The Price of Victory

But victories did not come without a price, which was extravagant. After the
Second World War, the US confidently expected that it would never again need
anything like the military expenditure that it had recently incurred. Accordingly,
the government planned to devote the Pentagon building to new civilian uses,
probably the Agriculture Department, strongly reinforcing its floors and walls
to accommodate the vast weight of the file cabinets that it would need. That
restructuring explains why the building was able to withstand the impact of the
attack on September 11, 2001.
But the pacific approach suggested by repurposing the Pentagon then
reversed suddenly and totally. Taking the figure according to the worth of the
dollar in 1982, US military spending grew from $45  billion in 1947 to
$189 billion in 1953, in the later phases of the Korean War. Military spending
demonstrated a ratchet effect, repeatedly moving to new highs, but seldom
moving back significantly. Over the next decade, expenditure never shrank
below $140 billion, and then soared again in the Vietnam years to $200 billion
in 1967–1968. Even during post-Vietnam retrenchment, spending fell only to
a low of around $150 billion in the mid-1970s. Sums then mounted again in
the Reagan years, again cresting $200 billion in 1981, and peaking at $250 bil-
lion in 1987. In that year, Reagan crossed a symbolic threshold by submitting
to Congress the country’s first ever trillion-dollar budget. Incidentally, figures
for military spending are somewhat understated because they do not count
items closely related to military needs but technically included in the budgets
 16  CONCLUSION: WINNERS, LOSERS, AND INHERITORS  251

of other units, such as the Department of Energy. Of course, the US was only
one player in the Cold War, and those figures take no account of expenditures
by the Soviets, not to mention Britain, France, and other nations.
If the total financial cost of the Cold War is difficult to gauge precisely,
nobody would deny that it was vast. In the US alone, military spending ensured
extraordinarily high government expenditure, with all that meant for national
indebtedness, and for federal employment. The state occupied a share of the
economy that would have astonished policymakers of the 1920s, and social
spending expanded that role still further, creating a classic welfare-warfare
state. Without the patriotic impetus and the obvious need to ensure national
survival, it is very questionable whether Americans or citizens of other demo-
cratic nations would have been willing to bear the increasing taxations burdens
that became so apparent from the 1950s onward. Once the state developed an
enormous military capacity, a natural dynamic tended to find reasons to main-
tain and expand it.
Beyond any single impact of the military spending, we can ask the obvious
question of what might have been achieved if these sums, or even a small pro-
portion of them, could have been spent on peaceful causes. We can never know
the answer.

Unintended Consequences
The Cold War had its moral costs, and these too could prove exorbitant.
Throughout the long struggle, each side had an opportunistic approach to
finding allies and supporters. The Western nations, notionally pledged to dem-
ocratic principles, often compromised their values by allying with regimes or
movements that were violent, corrupt, or repressive, and those actions often
left lasting and bitter memories. In the aftermath of the Second World War,
some of the most active and dedicated European opponents of Communism
and the Soviets were irrevocably tainted with their former alliance with Nazi
regimes or military forces. As the East-West confrontation grew, the Western
powers inevitably found themselves allied with groups and individuals with
pro-Nazi and collaborationist histories, including some actual war criminals.
In later years, the US, Britain, and France supported Third World regimes
that yielded little to Communists in their excesses, and that support left long
and bitter memories. As “September 11” became so indelibly marked in US
historical memory after 2001, Latin American leftists pointed out that for
them, the date properly commemorated the bloody ouster of Salvador Allende’s
regime on that day in 1973. Memories of the US/British coup in Iran in 1953
provided abundant rhetorical ammunition for the Islamic movements in that
country, which triumphed in 1979. Below the level of formal movements or
parties, intelligence agencies often formed tactical alliances with organized
criminals or drug dealers, who were and are expert at achieving goals through
illicit means.
252  P. JENKINS

But over and above the moral compromises, such alliances posed a real risk
of strengthening groups that were almost as implacably opposed to the West as
to the Soviets. We have already traced the US support for Islamists against dif-
ferent nationalist and socialist movements in the Middle East, for in Egypt and
Iran. That alliance became intimate with the Afghanistan war of the 1980s,
which was a centerpiece of Western attempts to weaken the Soviets, and which
triumphed mightily. But the war provided a crucible for Islamist movements
that were passionately anti-Western, and which were supported by such key US
allies as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. During the 1980s, new forms of radical
Salafi jihadism became increasingly involved in violent activism against Israel
and the West. Al-Qaeda was founded in 1988, by volunteers in the mujahedeen
war in Afghanistan. The group assassinated an extremist rabbi in New York in
1990, and in 1993 Qaeda sponsored the first attempt to bring down that city’s
World Trade Center. Many other terrorist attacks against Western targets fol-
lowed over the next decade. Qaeda found refuge in Afghanistan following the
creation of the Taliban regime in that country in 1996, setting the stage for the
September 11 attacks.
It would be absurd to describe either Qaeda or the Taliban as creations of
the West or the CIA. But neither would have existed in anything like the form
they did without the war in Afghanistan, which was a primary focus of US and
British policy during the Cold War. Beyond the immediate harm inflicted by
the 9/11 attacks, those events sparked a new war in Afghanistan, which would
become by far America’s longest conflict, and contributed substantially to the
2003 invasion of Iraq. These wars caused enormous death and suffering, and
imposed a severe financial burden on the US. All Western countries suffered
from Islamist terror attacks. In the Middle East, the intervention opened the
way to the ISIS movement, and the atrocious rule of the Islamic State. The
Russians suffered their own confrontation with Islamist forces growing out of
their prolonged wars in the Caucasus, and terrorism likewise ensued. Between
1994 and 2009, successive wars in Chechnya alone claimed a hundred thou-
sand lives. As the “End of History” idea lost popularity, analysts turned to the
views of Samuel Huntington, who posited a fundamental and enduring Clash
of Civilizations.
This is not to say that the modern wave of Islamist extremism was wholly a
consequence of the Cold War. Often forgotten today, the decade or so follow-
ing the First World War was marked by Islamic risings and activism, often let by
religious figures, and the resulting struggles spread widely from North Africa
into Central and South Asia, very much the regions the West would later con-
sider an Arc of Crisis. Often, we can trace lines of continuity between those
movements and the seemingly novel upsurge at the end of the century. But if
the Cold War did not cause or birth Islamist movements, it certainly affected
the behavior of the Western powers, which looked favorably on movements
and individuals they might otherwise have regarded with much more caution.
That was reflected in the deployment of resources, political, military, and espe-
cially intelligence. Only at the end of the century did Western nations wonder
 16  CONCLUSION: WINNERS, LOSERS, AND INHERITORS  253

seriously whether their conservative Islamic allies might in fact harbor ideolo-
gies just as hostile as the Communist states themselves.

The Human Cost

Similarly, the Cold War itself cannot entirely be blamed for the violence that
erupted in so many parts of the world, ranging from direct wars to smaller-scale
revolutions and low-intensity conflicts, to domestic repression and massacres.
In some cases, such as the Korean or Vietnamese wars, or the Indonesian
purges of 1965, the East-West theme was absolutely dominant, but many other
struggles would have occurred anyway even without that larger East-West
rivalry. To take one example of many, it is all but certain that the end of colo-
nialism would have resulted in bloody civil wars in the Congo in the 1960s or
Angola a decade later. In Central America, similarly, we can easily imagine cir-
cumstances in which the US would have intervened to suppress local revolu-
tions, even without concerns about the Soviets or Cubans. But drawing those
struggles into the larger Cold War context assuredly aggravated and prolonged
them, not least by supplying deadlier weaponry. The Angolan civil war alone
dragged on from 1975 through 2002, killing half a million.
The integration of local struggles into the larger East-West imbroglio finds
a useful material symbol in the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle that became so
common a tool of warfare in this era: the 47 indicates the year of its introduc-
tion (it was improved from a wartime German precursor). Time and again,
AK-47s were the trademark of weapon of guerrillas and irregulars. The fact
that it was a Soviet-built weapon does not mean that the East was wholly or
primarily to blame for the global spread of wars and insurgencies, but rather
that this particular rifle was preferred because of its excellent quality and stub-
born reliability. As such, Soviet and Communist nations exported the rifle
throughout the world. By the end of the century, some 75 million AK-47s had
been manufactured, and the weapon was familiar in every part of the world.
The weapon even appears on the flag of Mozambique.
Taking all those different wars together from the 1940s through the early
1990s, the death toll runs into the tens of millions. They would thus exceed
those of the First World War, with its ten million military fatalities. Such figures
take no account of the many millions of political refugees, who became a major
feature of the mass migrations that have shaped global affairs in modern times.
Demographically, as well as culturally and technologically, the Cold War made
the modern world.
Nor do such figures include the casualties of the internal violence under-
taken by the Communist regimes themselves. All the Communist regimes
established after 1945 killed a number of their citizens, but two nations above
all, China and Cambodia, are conspicuous for the tens of millions of deaths
they deliberately inflicted on their own people between 1949 and 1980. Should
we count these as part of the Cold War? They did not result directly from ten-
sions between the superpowers of East and West. From a Communist point of
254  P. JENKINS

view, however, the elimination of reactionary or hostile class elements was only
part of a larger revolutionary struggle, which found expression in international
rivalries. From a Stalinist or Maoist viewpoint, such acts formed a common
spectrum of revolution and class wars, which acknowledged no national
boundaries.
Viewed from the stance of the US or the Soviets, or of such major players as
Britain or Germany or Canada, we might marvel that the decades-long conflict
remained “cold,” without escalating into a full-scale hot war. Margaret Thatcher
even remarked that the Cold War was won without a shot being fired. For
many other nations, chiefly in the Global South, such a view seems parochial
and callous. Even without nuclear weapons, the Cold War genuinely was a war,
and it often became very hot indeed. It killed and maimed, and in appalling
numbers.

Conclusion
The world survived the Cold War, and a Third World War never took place.
But the costs of that victory should never be forgotten, nor should the sense of
fear that so pervaded ordinary lives through those decades. However we con-
sider the history of those years, whatever aspect of life, thought, or culture we
are contemplating, we can never forget the reality that hung over how ordinary
people lived and thought. Sometimes highly visible, often in the background,
the Cold War was a critical fact of life.

Further Reading
Retrospective interpretations of the Cold War are a major feature of Melvyn
P.  Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold
War (three volumes, 2010), and Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde,
eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (2013). See also Odd Arne
Westad, The Cold War: A World History (2017).
Since the end of the Cold War, much scholarly writing has addressed the
remains of the struggle, both material and cultural. The extensive material
inheritance is the subject of Todd A.  Hanson, ed., The Archaeology of the
Cold War (2016). Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, memories of
the fast-receding old order are the subject of much writing. See Jonathan
P.  G. Bach, What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in
Germany (2017).
 Index

A Berlin, 23, 44–46, 50, 51, 54, 65, 66,

ABLE/ARCHER, 213, 216, 218 107, 110–112, 115, 116, 138, 141,
Afghanistan, 5, 8, 203, 205–208, 211, 143, 196, 203, 229, 237
220–221, 225, 226, 230, 233, Berlin crises (1961), 216
245, 252 Bevin, Ernest, 39
African-Americans, 154, 159 Biological warfare, 69, 79, 159
Albania, 31, 38, 143, 180, 197 Bolshevik Revolution, 6, 20, 157, 162
Algeria, 94, 95, 97, 128, 177 Bomber aircraft, 57, 111
Andropov, Yuri, 217, 231, 232 Brazil, 103, 128
Angleton, James J., 146, 147 Brezhnev, Leonid, 180, 197, 217, 231
Angola, 11, 99, 193, 220, 224, 253 Brezhnev Doctrine, 205, 234
Anti-ballistic missile systems (ABM), 64 British Empire, 3, 30, 86, 95
Apocalypse, language of, 60–61 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 207
Appeasement, 199, 247 Bulgaria, 26, 27, 31, 39, 41, 179,
Arab-Israeli wars, 149, 193, 207 238, 241
Argentina, 100, 103, 182 Bunkers, anti-nuclear, 57, 66, 67
Armored warfare, 82
Arts, visual, 160, 167
“Atom Spies,” 144 C
Australia, 3, 29, 30, 46, 86, 134, 152, Cambodia, 84, 87, 190, 191, 199,
158, 246 205, 253
Austria, 23, 24, 44, 236 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND), 164, 165, 178
Canada, 3, 30, 46, 51, 64, 113, 127,
B 134, 163–165, 176, 194, 197, 254
Ba’ath (Renaissance) Party, 95 Carter, Jimmy, 194, 203, 205, 206, 208,
Baby Boom, 153, 167 210, 211, 214, 221
Bagration, Operation, 23, 51 Castro, Fidel, 3–5, 14, 91, 99, 101–103,
Balkans, 19, 31, 39 108–111, 113, 116, 177, 192,
Beria, Lavrenti, 48, 126 204, 237

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 255

Switzerland AG 2021
P. Jenkins, A Global History of the Cold War, 1945–1991,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81366-6
256  INDEX

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 5, D

40, 45, 53, 59, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86, Decolonization, 7, 11, 91–105
91, 94, 96–99, 101, 103, 104, 108, Defectors, 137–150, 159, 213
109, 116, 146, 147, 160, 162, 189, Deng Xiaoping, 204
191, 192, 199, 200, 206, 208, 215, Détente, 141, 187–189, 196–197, 199,
216, 220, 222, 224, 225, 231, 203, 216, 217, 247
241, 252 Disarmament, nuclear, 70
Central Treaty Organization Dissidents, Soviet, 198
(CENTO), 46, 94 Dominican Republic, 104, 174, 206
Chemical warfare, 69 Domino theory, 76
Chile, 103, 189, 195 Dulles, Allen, 94
China, People’s Republic of, 3, 4, 34, 46, Dulles, John Foster, 94, 155
65, 68, 69, 73–78, 80–81, 84, 86,
87, 92, 99, 141, 146, 155, 157,
175, 184, 188, 204, 205, 221, 239, E
246, 247, 249, 253 Egypt, 31, 94–97, 189, 194, 252
Churchill, Winston, 7, 19, 20, 23, Eisenhower, Dwight, 51, 60, 61, 79, 80,
25–27, 29, 31, 32, 43, 118 83, 93–95, 108, 110, 140, 154,
Cinema and film, 148, 162 155, 165
Civil defense, 6, 152 Espionage, 6, 32, 47, 58, 130, 137, 138,
Cold War, chronology of, 14 141–145, 147–149, 156, 188, 246
Cold War, concept of, 2 Estonia, 27, 53, 239
Collaboration, 26, 27, 38, 168 Ethiopia, 76, 193, 194, 220
Communism, ideology of, 7
Communist Party, France, 3, 41, 195
Communist Party, Indonesia, 81 F
Communist Party, Italian, 37 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Computers, 184, 210 132, 133, 146, 147, 191, 192
Concentration camps, 126, 127, 159 Finland, 40, 44, 197, 199
Conference on Security and Ford, Gerald, 197
Co-operation in Europe, 197 France, 3, 6, 8, 11, 20, 23, 28–30,
Congo, Democratic Republic of (Zaire), 39, 41–44, 46, 48, 51–53, 67,
11, 98, 100, 103, 128, 253 68, 70, 82, 93–95, 99, 100,
Congress for Cultural Freedom 127, 157, 251
(CCF), 160
Containment, 34, 47, 59, 74, 214
Counter Intelligence Program G
(COINTELPRO), 132, 192 Geneva conference, 83
Cuba, 3, 4, 8, 10, 88, 91, 101–104, Germany, East, 38, 39, 47, 48, 179, 229,
107–109, 111–114, 116, 139, 140, 236, 241
177, 189, 192, 193, 203, 204, Germany, West, 30, 40, 45, 47, 48, 127,
207, 223 133, 142, 158, 177, 195, 214
Cuban missile crisis, 84, 249 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 48, 216, 231–235,
Cultural Cold War, 158–160, 173 238–241, 245, 248, 249
Cultural Revolution (China), 73, 175, Gordievsky, Oleg, 215, 216
177, 204 Government Communication
Czechoslovakia, 19, 27, 39–41, 125, Headquarters (GCHQ), 139
126, 128, 149, 163, 168, 179–181, Greece, 3, 26, 31, 32, 38, 39, 46, 53,
189, 196, 198, 216, 229, 232, 129, 195
236–239, 241, 249 Grenada, 207, 223, 225
  INDEX  257

Guatemala, 100, 101, 103, 151, 221, Jews and Judaism, 183
222, 224 John Paul II, Pope, 204, 210, 219, 223,
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 88, 101–103, 234, 248
113, 177, 193 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 85–87, 104,
Gulag Archipelago, 22, 198 110, 117, 174, 175
Guyana, 103

K
H Katanga, 98, 116
Haiti, 104 Kennan, George F., 33–34, 92,
Helsinki Accords, 197, 199 242, 248
Holocaust, 27, 57, 125, 167, 226 Kennedy, John F., 67, 84, 85, 91,
Homosexuality, 154 107–119, 147, 192
House Committee on Un-American KGB, 53, 98, 124, 139, 146, 148,
Activities (HUAC), 7, 131–132, 215–217, 231, 239, 240
144, 156 Khmer Rouge, 194, 205
Huks, Hukbalahap (Hukbong Bayan Khrushchev, Nikita, 48–50, 60, 61, 92,
Laban sa Hapon), 81 97, 98, 107–119, 126, 140, 161,
Hungarian revolution, 160 213, 230, 232, 249
Hungary, 26, 38, 39, 49–51, 125–127, Secret Speech by, 49, 126, 160
161, 163, 179, 198, 216, 229, 235, Kissinger, Henry, 146, 188–190, 197
236, 239, 241 Korean War, 13, 59–61, 73, 87, 141,
149, 250
Korea, North, 68, 73, 78, 175
I Korea, Republic of (ROK), 2, 6, 34, 73,
Imperialism, 9, 11, 75, 95, 109, 126, 74, 76–79, 84, 86, 131, 143, 144,
176, 183 149, 159, 175
India, 11, 68, 81, 84, 92, 246
Indo-China, 32, 42, 73, 81–83, 85,
139, 151 L
Indonesia, 11, 32, 81, 92, 97, 128, 174 Lansdale, Edward, 91, 109
Intelligence agencies, 13, 40, 42, 53, 94, Laos, 11, 83, 84, 87, 107, 191
98, 109, 145, 147, 182, 191, Latvia, 27, 53
196, 251 Lebanon, 5, 95, 96, 224, 225
Iran (Persia), 5, 8, 19, 32, 34, 93, 94, LeMay, Curtis, 59, 60, 65, 112, 178
97, 128, 194, 205, 207, 208, 211, Libya, 97
225, 251, 252 Lithuania, 27, 249
Iraq, 94–97, 225, 239, 240, 245, 252
Islam, 94, 95, 97, 189, 205
Israel, 4, 68, 95, 97, 179, 182, 183, 189, M
194, 198, 223, 225, 252 MacArthur, Douglas, 77, 80
Italy, 3, 8, 11, 19, 23, 28–33, 37, 41–43, Malaya, 73, 81, 93, 128
46, 53, 111, 114, 127, 129, 153, 158, Mao Zedong, 3, 75, 76, 80–82,
162, 177, 195, 196, 210, 214, 249 84, 87, 91, 92, 177, 188,
191, 234, 249
Mass media, 67, 147, 151, 156
J McCarthy, Joseph, 6, 131–133, 144,
James Bond novels and films, 168 151, 167
Japan, 3, 4, 6, 24, 29, 40, 58, 60, 74–75, Military–industrial complex, 165,
77, 84, 87, 155, 165, 177, 197, 246 167, 192
258  INDEX

Missiles Philippines, 73, 81, 83, 86, 91, 158

cruise, 210, 211, 218 Phoenix Program, 86, 91, 182
intercontinental ballistic (ICBMs), 6, Poland, 5, 7, 8, 23–27, 33, 35, 38–40,
10, 62–64, 107, 111, 114, 188, 47, 49, 65, 125, 127, 163, 179,
209, 210, 214 183, 196, 198, 204, 207, 209,
intermediate-range (IRBMs), 111, 216, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241,
209, 210 248, 249
land-based, 214 Popular culture, 1, 7, 59, 133, 142, 143,
submarine launched ballistic (SLBMs), 148, 160, 164–167, 169, 173, 178,
63, 64, 188, 211, 214 192, 218, 230
Mozambique, 99, 103, 193, 220, Popular music, 167, 218
224, 253 Portugal, 3, 11, 129, 157, 193, 195
Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicles Potsdam conference, 25
(MIRV), 187, 209 Prague Spring, 179, 195, 237
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), Prisoners of war, 78, 87, 219
57, 165, 189, 200, 208, 213 Propaganda, 3, 9, 24, 34, 42, 43, 45,
47, 48, 50, 60, 69, 76, 78, 79, 91,
94, 95, 101, 103, 108, 109, 123,
N 125, 137, 141–143, 147, 151,
National Reconnaissance Office, 140 155–157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167,
National Security Agency, 138 173, 203, 204, 207, 214, 216,
Navies, 30, 61, 63, 107, 187, 188, 220, 223
193, 215 Putin, Vladimir, 148, 246
Nazism, 21, 22, 24, 117, 148, 158, 236
Nelson, Steve, 131, 132
Netherlands, 8, 11, 52, 210 Q
New Left, 4, 165, 176, 177, 181, 183 Quemoy and Matsu (Kinmen
New Look (defense policy), 60, 94 Islands), 80
Nicaragua, 8, 11, 206, 207, 221–223,
225, 226
Nixon, Richard, 141, 145, 178, R
188–191, 197, 200 Racism, 164
NKVD, 21, 26, 38, 48, 124–126, Radio stations and propaganda, 48
131, 148 Reagan, Ronald, 117, 183, 199, 200,
North Atlantic Treaty organization 211–214, 216, 217, 219, 220,
(NATO), 3, 39, 43, 46–48, 51, 52, 222–226, 230, 232–234,
55, 68, 115, 118, 129, 138, 195, 247–250
196, 209, 210, 213, 215, 236, Reagan Doctrine, 219–220
241, 248 Red Scare, 7, 13, 39, 129–131,
133, 137
Religion, 5, 94, 97, 125, 157,
O 203, 208
Oil, 11, 93, 94, 96, 102, 193, 199, 203, Resistance movements, 23, 31, 40, 53,
207, 216, 230, 233 125, 220
Reykjavik meeting, 233
Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 99
P Rock and pop music, 173
Palestinians, 97, 183, 195, 224 Roman Catholic church,
Partisans, 43, 51, 53–54, 80, 247 33, 157, 198
  INDEX  259

Romania, 26, 38, 41, 53, 125, 180, T

237, 241 Taiwan, 4, 75, 76, 80, 128, 151, 155
Rosenberg, Ethel, 137, 144, 145 Terrorism, state sponsorship of, 196
Rosenberg, Julius, 137, 144, 145 Test Ban Treaty, 115, 116
Thatcher, Margaret, 200, 210, 214, 232,
234, 236, 248, 254
S Third World, 4, 13, 91–105, 108, 118,
Saddam Hussein, 96, 97, 239, 240 123, 156, 177, 183, 197, 251
Satellite, 4, 51, 63, 140, 160, Tito, Josip Broz, 23, 24, 31, 38,
163, 215 43, 204
Schmidt, Helmut, 210, 248 Togliatti, Palmiro, 37, 42, 43
Science fiction, 133, 162, 163, Torture, 21, 78, 86, 103, 126,
166–168, 217 128, 182
Secret police forces, 26, 125 Truman, Harry S., 19, 32, 35, 39,
September 11 terrorist attacks, 245, 45, 59, 60, 76, 77, 130, 200,
250, 252 206, 249
Sexuality, 154 Truman Doctrine, 39, 40
Signals intelligence (SIGINT), 138–140, Turkey, 8, 19, 31, 32, 34, 39, 46, 76, 94,
142, 149, 207 95, 111, 114, 213
Solidarity movement, 216
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 22, 162, 198
Somalia, 193 U
South Africa, 68, 98, 99, 223, 224 U-2 aircraft, 112
South East Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO), 46
Space program, 63, 161, 163 V
Spain, 3, 34, 68, 128, 131, 195 VENONA, 145
Sport, 163, 169 Vietnam, North, 5, 82–84, 86, 87, 118,
Spy fiction, 148 177, 220
Stalin, Joseph, 8, 13, 20–22, 24–26, Vietnam, Republic of, 83
31–33, 38, 44, 48, 49, 75, 76, 80, Vietnam War, 3, 84–88, 152, 187, 191,
110, 124, 126–127, 148, 157, 219, 225
160–162, 191, 230
Stalinism, 161
Strategic Air Command, 1, 59 W
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), Wallace, Henry, 19, 20, 34, 35, 145
64, 188, 189, 199, 203, 209, 233 Warsaw Pact, 4, 47, 49, 51, 115, 138,
Strategic Defense Initiative (Star 179, 180, 209, 215, 235, 239
Wars), 217 Watergate affair, 191
Strategic triad, 63, 68, 214, 216 Weapons, nuclear, 9–12, 19–20, 29, 45,
Student protests, 49, 176 52, 53, 58, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70,
Submarines, 61, 63, 64, 68, 107, 111, 71, 77, 79, 80, 83, 107, 108, 111,
139–141, 188, 214, 219 114, 115, 117, 139, 143, 158, 159,
Suez crisis, 110 164, 174, 175, 188, 189, 200,
Superpowers, concept of, 29 208–210, 213, 233, 254
Surveillance, 10, 11, 13, 67, 70, 74, Weapons, thermonuclear, 66,
127, 132, 133, 138–140, 150, 67, 71, 181
187, 238 “West,” concept of, 3, 4, 174
Syria, 95–97, 189, 225 Witch hunts, 13, 129, 132–133
260  INDEX

World Peace Council, 159 Yugoslavia, 4, 23, 26, 27, 31, 32,
World War II, 79, 219 38, 43, 99, 126, 127, 180,
204, 241

Y
Yalta conference, 145 Z
Yemen, 97 Zhukov, Georgy, 23, 49, 51, 110