Middle School Reading on Cold War Spies
During World War Two, the United States and the Soviet Matrimony fought together every bit allies confronting the Axis powers. However, the relationship betwixt the 2 nations was a tense one. Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and concerned nearly Russian leader Joseph Stalin's tyrannical rule of his own country. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans' decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate role of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians. Later on the war ended, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity.
Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled many Americans' fears of a Russian programme to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials' bellicose rhetoric, artillery buildup and interventionist arroyo to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no unmarried political party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.
The Cold State of war: Containment
By the time World State of war II ended, near American officials agreed that the all-time defense force confronting the Soviet threat was a strategy called "containment." In his famous "Long Telegram," the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was "a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.Southward. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]." As a issue, America'southward only choice was the "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." "Information technology must exist the policy of the United States," he declared before Congress in 1947, "to support complimentary peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures." This way of thinking would shape American strange policy for the next 4 decades.
The Common cold War: The Atomic Age
The containment strategy as well provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Quango Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman's recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that finish, the study chosen for a iv-fold increase in defense spending.
In particular, American officials encouraged the evolution of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World State of war Ii. Thus began a deadly "arms race." In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.
As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear historic period could be. Information technology created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
The e'er-present threat of nuclear anything had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They good assail drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear destruction and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans' everyday lives.
The Common cold War Extends to Space
Space exploration served as some other dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for "traveling companion"), the world's start artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth'due south orbit. Sputnik'southward launch came every bit a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to almost Americans. In the United States, infinite was seen every bit the adjacent borderland, a logical extension of the m American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose also much footing to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–fabricated gathering intelligence virtually Soviet military activities particularly urgent.
In 1958, the U.Due south. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed past the U.S. Regular army nether the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known every bit the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Infinite Administration (NASA), a federal bureau dedicated to space exploration, as well every bit several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were 1 step ahead, launching the offset man into infinite in April 1961.
READ MORE: How the Cold War Space Race Led to U.S. Students Doing Tons of Homework
That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the assuming public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon past the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo eleven mission, became the first man to fix foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.
U.Due south. astronauts came to exist seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and testify the power of the communist system.
The Common cold State of war: The Cerise Scare
Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the Business firm Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) brought the Common cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to bear witness that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.
In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political behavior and evidence against one some other. More than than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to piece of work once more for more than a decade. HUAC as well defendant State Section workers of engaging in destructive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government.
Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and fifty-fifty prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify confronting colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.
The Cold War Abroad
The fight against subversion at abode mirrored a growing business concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first war machine activity of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People'due south Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, merely the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.
In 1955, The United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) fabricated W Federal republic of germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense arrangement between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Deutschland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that prepare a unified military command under Align Ivan Southward. Konev of the Soviet Union.
Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to show that the existent communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Tertiary World."
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial authorities had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the The states had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist regime in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully "comprise" communist expansionism in that location, they would take to arbitrate more actively on Diem's behalf. However, what was intended to exist a brief armed forces action spiraled into a 10-yr conflict.
The Close of the Cold State of war
About as soon as he took role, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new arroyo to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use affairs instead of armed forces activity to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, afterwards a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"–"relaxation"–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Artillery Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear state of war.
Despite Nixon's efforts, the Cold War heated up once again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military machine aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the earth. This policy, particularly as information technology was applied in the developing earth in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.
Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Marriage was disintegrating. In response to severe economic issues and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia's relationship to the residual of the earth: "glasnost," or political openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform.
Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall–the almost visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years subsequently Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Past 1991, the Soviet Marriage itself had fallen apart. The Common cold War was over.
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Middle School Reading on Cold War Spies
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cold-war-history
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