History of the Cold War

¶ … causes that led to and accentuated the Cold War, and look at its affect on modern scientific developments in arms and the space race. The Cold War led to developments in rocketry and science that have given rise to new technologies that the world uses every day.

The Cold War really began during the Second World War, when talk of post-war treaties between the United States, Great Britain, and Russia were put on hold until the war ended. "From early in 1942 the American Government had repeatedly proclaimed the principle that no final decisions on matters of postwar frontiers or systems of government should be made until the end of the war" (Graebner 5). "The growth of distrust and opposition between the United States (U.S.) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) begins with Joseph Stalin's pre-World War II behavior. The U.S. And Great Britain provided war tactics and military hardware to Moscow but in return were rewarded with a veil of secrecy. As early as the Tehran conference (September 1943), Churchill confided to one of his staff that he considered Germany already finished; 'the real problem now is Russia" (Kimball).

By simply definition, the Cold War was two country's reactions to each other's hope for world dominance. After World War II ended, the United States hoped to make a treaty with Russia, but it gradually became clear that the Russians wanted to dominate the world, and the United States could not approve of those expectations. President Roosevelt was the first to try to negotiate with Soviet Premier Stalin, and the attempts would continue through several administrations. "Roosevelt's approach to the Soviet Union appears fundamentally similar to that of Wilson and to that of Eisenhower: personalities fall away, and the thread of a shared tradition stands forth. All three Presidents attempted to eschew diplomatic settlements based on a balance of power. Like Wilson at Versailles, and indeed in conscious recoil from Wilson's entanglement in secret wartime agreements, Roosevelt and Hull during World War II sought to brush aside concrete, immediate points of difference in order to establish agreement on general principles of world organization" (Graebner 4).

However, the Russians did not agree with these principles, and had their own agenda. That is not to say that the Russians did not have cause, they were afraid of our nuclear weapons, and felt they needed their own to defend themselves against our nuclear advantage. Each side was afraid of the other, and afraid of the power they possessed. "Perhaps most crucially of all, there is the overwhelming importance of cultural tradition, born of actual experience, that inevitably conditioned the approaches of each country toward the other and toward the rest of the world. The main contention of the revisionist reinterpretation remains valid, namely, that America bears a heavy burden of responsibility for both the onset and continuation of the Cold War" (Whitcomb and Dobrynin 3).

The Cold War was not a war in the sense of armies fighting each other; it was two countries building up defenses against each other, because they did not trust each other's motives. Americans did not trust the Russians because they had taken over Bulgaria and Romania, and had not allowed free elections, as they had promised in previous treaties, among several other reasons. "In September 1945, 54% said we could trust the Russians to cooperate with us in the postwar world. By November it was 44%; by the end of February 1946, 35%" (Whitcomb and Dobrynin 70).

Each side built up an arsenal of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. It was a "war of weapons," not of battles, a war of words, and not bullets. It was a war that lasted decades, and finally ended with nuclear disarmament, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a Cold War in every sense. It did not include killing, but the consequences of either side "winning" would have been as deadly as any war fought on the battlefield.

Near the end of the 1950s, the Cold War had escalated to frightening proportions. Both countries maintained enormous stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons. The United States developed its deterrence based on long-range bombers. By 1955 the U.S. Air Force had "580 B52s, and 1500 B-47s,"(Authors) all 2080 aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons. In 1955, the United States Navy launched the world's first nuclear submarine. By 1960, the U.S. had over 18,000 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and developed the liquid fueled Atlas and Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM).

This escalation in nuclear and other arms also led to a great race to be the first in space. The Russians were the first into space with a manned spacecraft when Yuri Gagarin was launched into space. On May 5, 1961, Major Alan Shepard, a Naval academy graduate and test pilot, climbed aboard the Freedom 7 capsule atop a Redstone rocket and became the first American in space. The space race finally culminated in America's putting men on the moon in 1969, the Russians never matched the feat, and the space race slowly deescalated. The race into space created lasting impacts on America and the world. Out of the science necessary to put men in space came such technologies as Velcro, advanced lubricants, aircraft ducting, night vision cameras, jetliner propulsion, cardiac monitors, protective coatings, and ceramics, among many, many others. (Haggerty). These technologies have changed the way we work, travel, and live, and they all came as a direct result of the technologies necessary to put men into space.