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During the period of transition, defense spending needed to be maintained in order to avoid returning to depression. The Cold War provided a means for this. The intense rhetoric provided justification to the American people, but the combination of high defense spending and the rhetoric only further inflamed the U.S.S.R.
Inflammation also stemmed from several short-term incidents that occurred in the post-war years. The Soviet Union, for example, attempted a blockade of West Berlin, which ultimately failed. The establishment of the People's Republic of China and the start of the Korean War exacerbated Communist-Capitalist tensions further. The length and depth of the conflict, however, could have been ameliorated. Stalin's paranoia at the time made distrust of the West inevitable - he did not trust anybody in Russia, either. For the U.S.' part, a return to isolationism was not a viable option, and the extension of influence into Europe was key to avoiding a return to war, having just fought World Wars in successive generations. The rhetoric and military buildup made the Cold War worse than it needed to be, as was the involvement in the various anti-Communist campaigns such as the Korea War, but there was too much cause of distrust to have avoided it altogether.
Cold War Q’s: The Soviet Long Game and the Policy of Containment 1 The origins of the Cold War were in the uneasy alliance between the US and the Soviet Union during WW2. The aim of both nations was to destroy Germany, which alone stood in all of Europe to confront the wave of Marxist-Communism washing over the continent. Spain’s Civil War was a prelude to WW2, and there Franco was victorious. Germany
As a matter of fact, by the end of 1980s, Soviet Union ran on these very principles. Kennan criticized the possibilities that Soviets may be involved in invading the pro-Soviet countries with their mind sets and weaken them even if they do not form a higher level of apprehension for them. Pro-Russian countries will be weakened through a designed framework to tackle the mindsets of the people following western ideologies. Fights will be
The same access to formerly secret information from the Cold War era also revealed the extent to which Soviet infiltration of the highest level of American military projects had served to further exhaust the American economy by necessitating continual development of strategic and tactical weapon systems to counter escalating technological improvements in Soviet military systems. The first successful test of a Soviet nuclear weapon in 1949 was directly attributable to
Stalin and the Grand Alliance The Grand Alliance had all but begun to crack by the end of WWII, though it remained intact if only in name up to the end of the 1940s. To some degree, the crumbling of the Alliance by 1949 was due in part by Stalin and his paranoia over what the West was plotting. On the other hand, the Alliance could be said to have been
Cold War and Film Generally speaking, the Cold War has been depicted as an era of spy games and paranoia in popular films from the 1960s to the present day, but the reality of the era was much more complex. The Cold War was a period of military and political tension from 1947 to 1991, or from the end of WW2 to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which
McCarthy and the Cold War One aspect of history is that a country's so-called "friend" one day, can be an enemy the next and visa versa. The United States and Soviet Union during World War II joined ranks against the real threat of Nazi Germany. However, it did not take long after the end of the war for Russia and the United States to once again bully each other. Even before