Cold War Origins, Arms Race, and the Space Age Legacy

Origins of the Cold War

The Cold War really began during the Second World War, when discussions of post-war treaties between the United States, Great Britain, and Russia were deferred until the conflict ended. As Norman Graebner notes, "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" (5). The growth of distrust between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has its roots in Joseph Stalin's pre-World War II behavior. Although the U.S. and Great Britain provided war tactics and military hardware to Moscow, they were met in return with a veil of secrecy. As early as the Tehran Conference in September 1943, Churchill confided to a member of his staff that he considered Germany already finished, adding that "the real problem now is Russia" (Kimball).

By simple definition, the Cold War was two nations' reactions to each other's ambitions for world dominance. After World War II ended, the United States hoped to reach a treaty with Russia, but it gradually became clear that the Soviet Union sought broader global dominance — an outcome the United States could not accept. President Roosevelt was the first to attempt negotiations with Soviet Premier Stalin, and those efforts would continue through several subsequent administrations. As Graebner observes, "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" (4).

However, the Russians did not share these principles and pursued their own agenda. That is not to say their concerns were without foundation: they feared America's nuclear weapons capability and felt compelled to develop their own in response. Each side was wary of the other and of the power each possessed. As Whitcomb and Dobrynin argue, "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" (3).