American Containment Strategy and The End of The Cold War

Introduction

In May of 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered, thus marking the beginning of the end of World War II. The already uneasy wartime alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union began to unravel. By 1948, the Soviets had established left-wing governments in the countries liberated by the Red Army. The Americans and British both feared permanent Soviet control of Eastern Europe and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties rising to power in the democracies of Western Europe. However, the Soviets were determined to maintain control of Eastern Europe as a safety net to guard against any new threat from Germany. The Soviets wanted to spread communism worldwide, primarily for ideological reasons, while the United States opposed this expansion. Thus, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan brought Western Europe under American influence, and the Soviets installed openly communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the two world superpowers began to clash. By 1947-48, the Cold War was solidified and became a very real conflict (Gaddis, 2005).

American Containment Strategy and the Arms Race

"Containment" was the strategy the Americans set in motion to counter the Soviets. In the famous "Long Telegram," diplomat George Kennan explained the policy: "the Soviet Union is a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi." As a result, America decided on the "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies" (Kennan, 1946). He stated before Congress in 1947, "It must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by outside pressures." This method of thinking, this policy, would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council report known as NSC-68 echoed Truman's recommendation that the United States would use military power to control and contain communist expansionism wherever necessary. As a result, the U.S. military budget increased four-fold in defense spending. American officials at the time encouraged the development of nuclear weapons like those that had ended World War II, thus beginning the infamous "arms race." In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atom bomb, codenamed "RDS-1," commonly referred to as "Joe-1" in the United States. In response, President Truman announced that the U.S. would build an even bigger and better bomb: the hydrogen bomb or "superbomb." Stalin followed close behind. As a result, the stakes of the Cold War became dangerously high.

The first H-bomb test was conducted in the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The bomb, named "Mike," demonstrated the fearsome and deadly potential of nuclear technology. It created a 25-square mile fireball that vaporized an island and blew a 6,300 ft. diameter and 130 ft. deep crater into the ocean floor. At that point in 1952, it was the largest nuclear explosion to date. Today, it still ranks fourth among all U.S. nuclear tests. "Mike" had the power to destroy half of Manhattan, and as the arms race continued, subsequent American and Soviet tests would send radioactive waste flying into the atmosphere (Rhodes, 1995).

The Space Race

On October 4th, 1957, the Cold War extended to space with the launch of a Soviet-made R-7 missile carrying "Sputnik" (Russian for "traveling companion"), the world's first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed in Earth's orbit. Sputnik's launch was a surprise to most Americans and not a pleasant one. The idea that the Soviets had beaten the Americans to space was unsettling, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground. Additionally, the idea of the Soviets possessing an intercontinental missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. airspace meant that gathering intelligence was now of utmost priority.

In 1958, the United States launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, thus kicking off the "space race." In May of that year, after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, John F. Kennedy made the bold public claim that by the end of the decade, the United States would land a man on the moon. As history records, his claim came true. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo 11 mission became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the space race (Launius, 2019).

Military Conflicts and Diplomatic Efforts

In June of 1950, the first military action of the Cold War took place when the Soviet-backed North Korean People's Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. American officials feared this was the beginning of a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed nonintervention no longer an option. Truman sent American troops into Korea, but ultimately the war dragged on to a stalemate and ended in 1953. In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and allowed them to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, setting the ground for a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union (Leffler, 2007).

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy faced numerous troubling situations in his own hemisphere, including the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. Both events seemed to prove that the real communist threat now stemmed from the unstable, postcolonial "Third World." Nowhere was this more evident than in Vietnam, where, after the collapse of the French colonial regime, the country was cast into 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 United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s, it seemed clear to American leaders that if they wanted to "contain" communist expansion in Vietnam, they would have to intervene themselves. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year long disaster (Herring, 2002).

As soon as President Richard Nixon took office, he began to implement a different approach to international relations. After encouraging the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government, and after taking a trip there in 1972, he began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of détente towards the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear weapons on both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war. Despite Nixon's best efforts, the Cold War escalated again under President Ronald Reagan. Like many others, he believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he provided aid to anticommunist governments and insurgents around the world. This policy was known as the Reagan Doctrine. While Reagan fought communism in Central America, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and under new rule from Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, set forth two new policies: "glasnost," or political openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform (FitzGerald, 2000).

The End of the Cold War

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe subsided. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War crumbled: the Berlin Wall. By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was finally over (Zubok, 2007).

References

• FitzGerald, F. (2000). Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War. Simon & Schuster.
• Gaddis, J. L. (2005). The Cold War: A New History. Penguin Press.
• Herring, G. C. (2002). America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. McGraw-Hill.
• Kennan, G. F. (1946). The Long Telegram. National Security Archive.
• Launius, R. D. (2019). Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race. Yale University Press.
• Leffler, M. P. (2007). For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Hill and Wang.
• Rhodes, R. (1995). Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Simon & Schuster.
• Zubok, V. M. (2007). A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. University of North Carolina Press.