<\/p>
We call it the Cold War, but in October 1962 the world seemed about to incinerate. The Soviet decision to install nuclear missiles in Cuba triggered a crisis with the United States that threatened a global holocaust.<\/p>\n
How had it come to this? Two decades earlier, the USA and the USSR had been allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany. In March 1943, Life magazine lauded the Russians as \u201cone hell of a people\u201d who \u201clook like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans\u201d. As for the NKVD (Stalin\u2019s dreaded secret police), Life declared it was \u201csimilar to the FBI\u201d.<\/p>\n
In reality, though, the wartime alliance had been a marriage of convenience. The \u201cmain bond of the victors\u201d, admitted Winston Churchill<\/a>, had been \u201ctheir common hate\u201d towards Hitler\u2019s Reich, but this no longer held them together after 1945. Three crunch issues lay at the heart of the ensuing Cold War<\/a>: ideology, geopolitics and nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n Ideologically, America\u2019s mantra was \u2018liberty\u2019 \u2013 \u2018free enterprise\u2019, limited government and democratic localism. Socialism and communism were minority movements in the USA, easily stigmatised as \u2018un-American\u2019.<\/p>\n In the USSR, Marxist-Leninist ideology predicted the imminent crisis of imperialist capitalism, leading to a dictatorship of the proletariat \u2013 of which the Soviet communist party constituted the vanguard. Although playing down the rhetoric of world revolution by the 1940s, Josef Stalin remained keen to accelerate the process of historical change. The chaos caused by the Second World War offered plenty of opportunities.<\/p>\n In fact, the conflict transformed the geo\u00adpolitical position of both countries, sucking them into power vacuums created by the defeat of the Axis powers. These in turn became flashpoints of the new Cold War \u2013 above all, in Germany, China and Korea.<\/p>\n The USA and the USSR occupied Germany to defeat Adolf Hitler<\/a> and then stayed to shape the peace. The Soviets had lost perhaps 27 million people from 1941\u201345, around one-seventh of their population, and were now determined to prevent the revival of German military power. But America and Britain were equally determined to get the country on its feet again and off their backs. In 1948, the US, Britain and France cut through the diplomatic deadlock and began to create a West German state out of their zones of occupation. They also introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, which almost overnight got goods into the shops. Stalin hit back by blockading West Berlin, which the western allies could only reach through Soviet-occupied eastern Germany.<\/p>\n President Harry Truman had no doubt that remaining in Berlin had become \u201ca symbol of the American intent\u201d in Europe. And so, in tandem with the RAF, the US Air Force mounted a round-the-clock airlift of food and fuel into the beleaguered city in the winter of 1948\u201349. At its peak, Berlin was handling more air traffic than New York.<\/p>\n The \u2018air-bridge\u2019 not only broke Stalin\u2019s blockade, it also transformed West German attitudes to the Americans and British. Former enemies were now becoming allies, while the wartime allies were turning into adversaries. The blockade also widened the rift between the USSR and the other three victor powers. In April 1949, the US signed the North Atlantic Treaty with Canada and 10 European states, led by Britain and France. Stalin\u2019s gamble in Berlin had boomeranged, drawing the west into an unprecedented transatlantic alliance.<\/p>\n Yet the global \u2018correlation of forces\u2019, as the Soviets called it, shifted again the following year. In October 1949, China\u2019s three decades of civil war ended in total victory for Mao Zedong and the communists. The world\u2019s most populous country had gone \u2018red\u2019 \u2013 arousing alarm and recrimination in America.<\/p>\n An even greater shock followed in Korea. In 1945, Japanese forces had surrendered to the Soviets in the north and the US in the south. As in Germany, neither superpower was willing to withdraw. But their clients were determined to unify the country, and in June 1950 Stalin gave the green light to the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to attack the south, thinking the west would not react. This was Stalin\u2019s second gross miscalculation in two years: as with Berlin, Truman saw Korea as a vital symbol of US will and power. He judged that \u201ccommunism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted 10, 15, 20 years earlier\u201d. The lessons of appease\u00adment seemed clear: \u201cIf this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war.\u201d<\/p>\n Truman committed US forces to Korea, enlisting the support of key allies, including Britain. The Korean War proved a yo-yo affair, with the North Koreans initially driving deep into the south before US counter-attacks pushed them back almost to the Chinese border. They in turn provoked China to enter the war. Fighting finally stabilised around the 38th parallel, which became the basis of an armistice in 1953. This agreement remains in force today in a country that remains divided. Korea was where the Cold War turned hot: the Americans lost 33,000; the Chinese perhaps half a million, including one of Mao\u2019s sons; and the overall Korean death toll was maybe 2.5 million, a 10th of the population.<\/p>\n During the 1950s, other power vacuums opened up as decolonisation accelerated. Although the Japanese surrender in 1945 allowed the Europeans to recover most of their Asian domains, the days of empire were now numbered. The British conceded independence to India and Burma two years later, the Dutch gave up the East Indies (Indonesia) and France failed in its 1946\u201354 struggle to retain Indochina. Unwilling to see the whole region go communist, successive US presidents got sucked into a \u2018quagmire\u2019 war in Vietnam that eventually proved to be America\u2019s greatest humiliation of the whole Cold War.<\/p>\n Hitherto the champion of liberty against the imperial powers, by the 1950s the US had to decide whether colonialism or communism was more distasteful and dangerous. Fearful of the growing reach of the left, Washington concluded that it was better to prop up colonial regimes and new post-colonial clients, resulting in US interventions in places like<\/p>\n Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It was also during the 1950s that the nuclear arms race \u2013 the third hallmark of the early Cold War<\/a> \u2013 became truly existential, with action and reaction its perpetual dynamic. In 1945, the explosion of two American atomic bombs on Japan had helped end the Asian war, but Stalin immediately made an A-bomb his top priority; in August 1949 the USSR successfully tested its first atomic device. Their atomic monopoly at an end, the Americans went all-out for a hydrogen bomb in 1952 \u2013 and the Soviets matched them in 1953.<\/p>\n The race then was to upgrade their \u2018delivery systems\u2019 from the era of air power into the missile age. This time the Soviets beat the Americans. Their launch of a man-made satellite, Sputnik, in November 1957 was both a technological humiliation for the USA and also a sign that the USSR had a sufficiently powerful rocket to launch a nuclear missile all the way to America. Eisenhower\u2019s administration hastily accelerated its own missile programme and implemented a major scheme of civil defence.<\/p>\n Ideology, geopolitics and the bomb all fused together in the crisis over Cuba. Fidel Castro had seized power on the island in 1959, toppling a corrupt regime that was an American economic colony in all but name. Although Castro was not initially a Marxist, Washington\u2019s reaction to his reforms drove him into the arms of Moscow. John F Kennedy inherited a half-baked CIA plan to topple Castro, using Cuban exiles in the US to avoid implicating the White House. But the \u2018Bay of Pigs<\/a>\u2019 operation in April 1961 proved a fiasco \u2013 leaving the president\u2019s macho brother Bobby fuming that JFK would now be \u201cregarded as a paper tiger by the Russians\u201d.<\/p>\n The competition deepened when Nikita Khrushchev, the feisty Soviet leader, got the better of Kennedy at a bruising summit in Vienna in June 1961. Pumped up by success, he introduced medium-range nuclear missiles into Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.<\/p>\n On the podcast | Mark White responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the Cold War nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR:<\/strong><\/p>\nBerlin divided<\/h3>\n
Atomic escalation<\/h3>\n