World War II was a terrible war that brought many countries together and many countries against each other. Two of those countries were the US and the USSR (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). At that time the USSR was made up of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Estonia, Lativia and Lithuania. But even though they fought against Nazi Germany together doesn’t mean that they were the best of friends after the war was over. Almost right after WW2 the USSR and the US engaged into a war, not a full on war like WW2, but a Cold War. There are many different types of war. There is a Hot War which is like the Vietnam War or the Civil War. There is also a Warm War which is where the countries are still trying to figure things out but countries are preparing their armies and getting them ready for battle. The other term is a Cold War. A Cold War is where there is no violence but are fighting for what they believe without violence, but through speeches or talking to the other country. This is what the US and the USSR were sucked into and involved in from 1947 to 1991.
This was a war that was started because both of the countries believed in different things. The US promoted capitalism and democracy which is a system that encourages ‘Survival of the Fittest’, there are open elections and you get the freedom to do your own thing. USSR on the other hand believed in communism. Communism is almost the exact opposite, they believe that everyone helps everyone, the society is controlled by the secret police and there are no elections because there is only one leader. There were also a few other reasons that this war started. One was that President Harry Truman started an anti-communism policy in the US. Why this was enforced was because many people thought that there would be a sort of domino affect to communism and that it would spread world-wide. Another that could have helped start the Cold War was the Nuclear Arms Race, which was a competition between the US and the USSR were trying to see who could have the strongest army, and, mostly the largest collection of nuclear bombs and missiles. Another objective that the countries were trying to achieve in the Nuclear Arms Race was trying to almost create a shield by shooting down any missiles that are coming at their country. These pretty much started the whole Cold War but there was some other reasons that helped, like, Americas fear of a Communist attack; President Harry Truman’s dislike for the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin; Russia’s fear of the US atomic bomb; Russia’s dislike of capitalism; America keeping its nuclear secrets itself; Russia’s expansion into Eastern Europe while breaking election promises; the Russian fear of an American attack; and Russia’s aim for spreading world communism. The reason that the US was afraid of world spread communism was that it started in Russia and they moved their way through Eastern Europe. They made their way through many of the small countries but when they came to countries that were allied with the US, the US talked to the different countries trying to convince them that communism wasn’t a good way to run your government and then those other countries talked to other countries about communism.
Many of the leaders for the US at the time were most of the presidents where the Russian leaders were all dictators. The presidents at that time were Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The people that did the most were probably Harry S. Truman. He was the one that passed the anti-communism policy which upset the USSR. Another President that did a lot was President Kennedy. Even though he was assassinated after being president for two years, he lead the US in the Bay of Pigs invasion, involved the US in Vietnam and led the US through the Cuban Missile Crisis. As you can see there were a lot of different presidents at the time because of the different terms, whereas the USSR leaders at the time had very long terms because they were dictators and only really stopped leading when they died or retired. The different leaders of the Soviet were Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Nikita Khrushchev was the Soviet leader who brought the missiles into Cuba and started the Cuban Missile Crisis and one of the most influential leaders of the Soviets at the time.
Even though the Cold War was a war between the USSR and the US, many other countries got involved in events that were caused by the Nuclear Arms Race and the Cold War. One event that was almost completely started by the Nuclear Arms Race was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis was what some people call ‘The closest the world ever came to a nuclear war’. It started in 1962 because the Soviet Union was way behind the US in the Nuclear Arms Race. At that time, the USSR could only only hit the countries around them with nuclear missiles where as the US was capable of striking any location in the Soviet Union. What the USSR wanted to do was place some missiles closer to the US. The one place they could use was Cuba. The reasons Cuba allowed the USSR to put their missiles there was because, Cuba was also a communist country, and, because Cuba was afraid that another invasion like the Bay of Pigs might happen so they needed some sort of defense. After Fidel Castro (the Cuban dictator at the time in Cuba) agreed with Nikita Khrushchev to allow the USSR to set up missiles on the island. Once the USSR got the okay they worked quietly and quickly to put the missiles up.
The crisis started on October 15 1962, when the US received reconnaissance photos on the missiles that were set up. Once US President John F. Kennedy heard about this, he created the group EX-COMM. EX-COMM was made up of his twelve most important advisors to handle the crisis. After a few days of debating how to handle the situation, President Kennedy decided that it would be a good idea to set up a naval blockade around Cuba so that the Soviet Union couldn’t transport more arms to the island. After he had already set the naval blockade up he told the public on October 22 1962 that he had set up the naval quarantine and about the discovery of the missiles on Cuba. As the crisis went on and the tensions got bigger on both sides, Kennedy ordered that there should be low-level reconnaissance sent in once every two hours. The planes that they used were planes called RF-101C (a Voodoo), and Vought F-8 Cruisers. Theses planes had attached KA-18A Stereo Strip Cameras which took pictures of the missile set-up, so these planes never used fire arms they just went by going the speed of sound and took pictures.
After a few days of in low-level reconnaissance being sent in to Cuba, on October 25th President Kennedy raised the Strategic Air Command to DEFCON 2 but kept the rest of the military at DEFCON 3. (DEFCON 5 is the least severe and DEFCON 1 is where war is imminent and the US is preparing for battle.) On October 26 the EX-COMM group heard from the Soviet leader Khrushchev saying that he would pull the missiles out of Cuba if the US guaranteed not to invade Cuba. The 27 was the worse day of the crisis, a Lockheed U-2 was shot down over Cuba and Khrushchev sent another letter to the EX-COMM group demanding that the US take their missiles out of Turkey and the Soviets would take their missiles out of Cuba. When EX-COMM received this letter, Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested that they agree to the first request and ignore the second request, so he contacted the Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to tell him that the US agreed with the first request. Finally, on October 28, the tensions began to ease when Khrushchev announced that he was going to remove all troops from Cuba and dismantle all of the missile stations and take them back to the USSR, expressing his trust that the US wouldn’t invade Cuba. Further discussions went on about the October 28 agreement, including that the US demand that the Soviets remove all Soviet light bombers from Cuba and specifying exact form and conditions of the US agreement to not invade the island of Cuba. Even though the Cuban Missile crisis went on for only fourteen days it was one of the scariest two weeks during the Cold War.
Another important event that went on during the Cold War was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin, which was in Eastern Germany, was split into two different parts. There was the West German side and the East German side. The West German side had a wall that went all the way around it so that the East Germans couldn’t come in and so that the West Germans couldn’t get to East Germany. The main reason for the wall was that East Germany was communist and the Western Side was a democracy and capitalist. Almost the same problem that was going on with the Soviet Union and the United States. The reason the Eastern side became a Communist country was because after World War II the leaders from France, United States, Britain and the Soviet Union all came together and each took charge of administrating a part of Germany. France had the far west area, the British managed the north-west area, Americans oversaw the southern area and the Soviets led the eastern part. The reason it split was because when the USSR led the eastern area they turned it to communism and the rest introduced their sectors to capitalist and democratic.
Even though World War II ended in 1945, the actual wall didn’t go up until 1961. At first the four countries that managed Germany had a pretty solid relationship, but when the US and the USSR started the Cold War the US and its allies started disliking the Soviets. Nobody really knew about the wall till it actually went up in the dead of night on August 13, 1961. The reason only Berlin had the wall around it was because just like how Germany was split up into four parts the same was done with the capital, Berlin. Thus, the wall went around the area that wasn’t communist.
Shortly after the country split, the conditions in each country changed dramatically. The Western part of Germany was assisted by some of its allies. It set up a capitalist society and experienced a very quick growth of its economy that many referred to as the ‘economic miracle’. With hard work, the people in West Germany were able to have a good life and do what they wanted. In East Germany, it was almost the exact opposite. The Soviet Union started to take things like factory equipment and other valuables from the zone in Germany and then ship them back to the Soviet Union. When East Germany became its own country, the Soviet Union had influenced it so much that it established a communist society. Eventually the economy stuttered and the freedom of each person became more and more restricted. By the 1950’s, a majority of the people living in East Germany didn’t like how things were going, so they wanted out. People were also fed up with the living conditions in, so they wanted to pack up their stuff and leave to West Berlin. Many people made it across but some people were stopped. Once the people made it to West Berlin, they would stay in warehouses and then fly to West Germany. By the early 1960’s, East Germany was very quickly losing its population and its labor force.
To keep more people from leaving the East Germany government decided that they would build the Berlin Wall. Just past midnight on August 12-13, 1961, trucks that were filled with soldiers and construction workers sped through East Berlin. While many people slept, the crews began to rip up the street and dug holes in the ground so that they could put in posts. They also put barbed wire along the whole West and East Berlin border, and all of the telephone lines that were strung across were also cut. This meant that if you were just visiting West Germany for a night it meant that you couldn’t get back to your home and you pretty much had nothing and you were stuck for decades. When people found out that they were stuck many escape attempts were attempted. Some were successful but, there were plenty that weren’t very successful. Some attempts were just throwing a rope over the wall so that they could climb over where some were as dangerous as ramming a large truck or a bus into the wall so that they could run through to the other side. Some attempts were even suicidal where they would jump from the not-yet-boarded-up upper-story windows of apartments where they would jump to the other side, but the fall would kill them. As time passed the wall became stronger and larger and the escape attempts became more complex. Some escape attempts were people digging under the Berlin Wall from a warehouse in East Germany to West Berlin. One escape attempt involved people gathering a lot of cloth and eventually flying over the wall in a hot air ballon and landing in West Germany. One of the most infamous escape attempts happened in August 12, 1962. In the early part of the afternoon, two 18 year old men tried to scale the wall. One of them scaled the wall successfully, but the other one, Peter Fechter, was not as successful. As he started to scale the wall an East German guard open fired on him, he didn’t die right away but fell of the wall and landed in the East German side. Shockingly, nobody came to his aid and the guard didn’t shoot him either. They just let him lay on the ground as he bled to death. Once he died though the East German guards moved him from where he was and took him away.
The fall of the Berlin Wall happened much like how it was built, abruptly. There was talk that the Communist bloc was weakening but the Eastern German Communist leaders kept on saying that East Germany just needed a small change rather than some big change. As communism started to hit some bumps in Poland, Hungry and Czechoslovakia. Then all of a sudden on November 9, 1989, an announcement that was brought by the East German government saying, “Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between East Germany and into West Berlin.” In other words, people were free to go across the border at any time. People were surprised. They couldn’t believe what they had just heard, the people in East Germany carefully approached the wall, where they did find that the border guards were letting people cross. Many people came from both sides. Some people began hitting away at the wall with hammers and chisels. Many people were very happy to see their family and friends, who they hadn’t seen in a few decades. Eventually, the hole Berlin Wall was demolished and some of the pieces have become collectables and are in some museums. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East and West Germany finally reunited and became a single German state on October 3, 1990.
Many other smaller events that occured because of the Cold War were that when the US hosted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles the USSR didn’t go. And same when Communist Russia hosted the 1980 Olympics which were held in Russia’s capital, Moscow, the US boycoted the Olympics and didn’t go. These were both signs that tensions were very high in both countries.
Many people believe that once the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War was pretty much over, but many other events could have also been a sign that the Cold War was over. There was the signing of the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty in 1987 stating that neither the Soviets nor the US could launch intermediate-range nuclear weapons at each other. Possibly the final event that meant the Cold War was over was when the USSR fell apart. This happened slowly. The Soviet economy was not really going anywhere but they were spending a large amount of money to support their military in reaction to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. The SDI was seen as a dangerous force and the USSR started spending more money. The US was spending about 15 to 18% of their total earnings, whereas the Soviets were spending around 35% of their income and bankrupting themselves with their military. What ended it completely was in August 1991when the people wanted Mikhail Gorbachev to come out of the office. The people wanted the USSR to be more of a Stalinist country, and on December 25th 1991 the Soviet Union was gone
