Indholdsfortegnelse for Cold War i History Extra

People often date themselves by important events. Successive generations can recall where they were when they heard about the declaration of war in 1939, almost certainly crowded around a radio in their living room. Others can recall where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, when they learned of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, or when the Twin Towers were struck in 2001. Some people use other metrics – mine tend to be either football World Cups or significant wars. For many people alive today, one of their most defining memories was the end of the Cold War, signified most famously by the millions of people who congregated in November 1989 to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War was many…

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 US that threatened a global holocaust. How had it come to this? Two decades earlier, the US and the USSR had been allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany. In March 1943, Life magazine lauded the Russians as “one hell of a people” who “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans”. As for the NKVD (Josef Stalin's dreaded secret police), Life declared it was “similar to the FBI”. In reality, though, the wartime alliance had been a marriage of convenience. The “main bond of the victors”, admitted Winston Churchill, had been “their common hate” towards Hitler's Reich,…

Today, not many people know the names Hewlett Johnson or Monica Felton. But during the Korean War (1950–53), these two figures were well known, even notorious, for their opposition to British involvement in Korea. Their stories tell us an alternative history of the Korean War, of the social response to the conf lict back in Britain. Even though the fighting raged many thousands of miles away, Felton and Johnson show us the complex impact it had in Britain, the legacies of which we continue to live with today. To grasp why these two Britons opposed the Korean War so passionately, we need first to understand why the conflict erupted in the first place – and, to do that, we must return to the climax of the Second World War. When…

On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. This reinforced concrete edif ice, the arch-symbol of the Cold War, had been toppled from within, by a mixture of people power on the streets and mistakes at the top by the East German communist party. Although the wall's days were probably already numbered, the speed with which it fell seemed to confirm the cock-up theory of history. Günter Schabowski, the party's press spokesman, turned what was supposed to be an orderly queue at police stations for passports into a stampede for the border checkpoints after mistakenly declaring that all restrictions on travelling abroad were lifted with immediate effect. The party seemed to have finally fallen victim to its own mismanagement, unequal to the challenge of reform from above started by Soviet…

In 1983, in the middle of a very ordinary London housing estate, a van driver called Ben Hayden unloaded his shopping from Sainsbury's and started building his own fallout shelter. As he did so, Armageddon seemed closer than ever. Following the relatively peaceful period of detente in the 1970s, during which diplomatic relations between east and west eased, tensions had again been stirred up by revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Western politics had shifted to the right, with Margaret Thatcher's rise to power in the UK being quickly followed by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in the US. The pressure was rising to a point that hadn't been felt since the Cuban missile crisis two decades earlier; for an anxious British public, nuclear confrontation…

The moment has been immortalised in a breathtaking piece of stagecraft. In the opening scene of the 1987 opera Nixon in China the presidential plane, named “The Spirit of '76”, lands onstage. The door opens and out steps the singer playing US president Richard Nixon, greeted by another as Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. When John Adams and Alice Goodman wrote Nixon in China they recognised that the meeting it recreated was the stuff of grand opera. Rather than merely two politicians coming face to face, it marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new one – the moment when two great societies with very different systems finally engaged with each other after decades of silence. Between 21 and 28 February 1972, Nixon met the ageing Mao Zedong,…

1 What was the Cold War and why do we refer to it as such? To put it simply, the Cold War was a political, ideological and economic conflict that broke out in the years after the Second World War and lasted up until 1991. The two main protagonists were the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies (the western and eastern blocs). Of course, it was much more complex than that. As to the name: a war will turn ‘hot’ when it involves open fighting, whereas a ‘cold war’ is a battle of ideology. The Cold War of the second half of the 20th century did, in various instances, become a physical conflict as there were lots of wars by proxy, such as in Korea…

In 2013, a short royal family home-movie came to light. Dating from early October 1952, it shows Queen Elizabeth II, eight months into her reign, enjoying a family fishing expedition at Balmoral. Also prominent is the unmistakable figure of Winston Churchill, returned as prime minister a year earlier and now, a month shy of his 78th birthday, the Queen's honoured guest. Churchill sits at the water's edge, chatting amiably to a young Prince Charles. He is relaxed but he is not off-duty. His thoughts, we now know, regularly drifted from autumnal Scotland to a barren, windswept outpost of the Commonwealth called the Montebello Islands. There, 80 miles of fthe coast of north-west Australia, Britain's first atomic bomb was about to be tested. For Churchill, a great deal rested on the…

Rob Attar America became entangled in Vietnam following a disastrous French attempt to prevent Indochina gaining its independence. Was the French campaign doomed from the outset? Max Hastings One of the most extraordinary aspects of postwar French history was the fact that they fought these ferocious battles in Indochina [the area of south-east Asia that contains Vietnam] – and then in Algeria – to try to hang on to an empire that it was obvious to most people was doomed. You could only sustain these European empires in faraway places with some degree of popular acquiescence and this was completely destroyed by the experience of the Second World War [where Vietnam had been administered by Vichy France at the behest of Japan]. George Orwell memorably said the quickest way to…

First and foremost, the wall stabilised the GDR's domestic crisis. Whereas from 1949–61 around three million citizens had fled, this fell between 1961 and 1989 to 35,000 (but at the cost of at least 140 lives at the wall). Economic planners no longer had to factor in ‘natural wastage’, and by the mid-Sixties supply did improve, although not overnight as party propaganda suggested. The border closure was also used to grasp other nettles: military service was introduced for young men; the recently collectivised farms were consolidated; there was an attempt to improve productivity on shop-floors with a Production Drive; and, more surreally, television aerials capable of receiving western programmes were targeted by bands of young communists, sometimes saw in hand. Rather soon, however, the party realised that it could not…

MIRROR IMAGE 1 As nuclear tensions soared, a series of massive protests at Greenham Common made front-page news A new and potentially ruinous nuclear arms race was firmly back on the international agenda at the dawn of the 1980s. This was the decade of Ronald Reagan's “evil empire” speech about the Soviet Union, of America's ‘star wars’ defence project, and of Olympic boycotts. It was also the decade in which US Cruise missiles were stationed at Greenham Common in Berkshire. By the early 1980s, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had amassed more than 100,000 members, and peace camps had sprung up near military bases such as Faslane in Argyll and Bute, and Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. But, in terms of size, none rivalled the women's peace camp at Greenham…

The immediate reaction in the US was highly favourable. Nixon had hoped to make a major gesture of statesmanship ahead of the 1972 presidential election (about which the Chinese were very aware), and his visit to China fulfilled that aim to the letter. Nixon won by a landslide and, though the China visit was not the only reason, it certainly burnished his image. Nixon and his national security adviser (later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger took advantage of the new warmth with China to introduce other strategies to lessen tension in the Cold War – notably, the ending of the draft of US soldiers for the war in Vietnam, and a policy of detente with the Soviet Union. Protracted negotiation Nixon's China mission is often regarded as the culmination of…

Karl Marx opened his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto of 1848, with a chilling prophecy. “A spectre is haunting Europe,” he declared. “T he spectre of communism.” This was a great exaggeration: there were few communists anywhere, and the revolutions erupting across France, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire and elsewhere that year were not led by them. By 1917, however, with the overthrow of the Russian tsar Nicholas II and the subsequent coup of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Marxist communism truly was a force to be contended with. And after Mao Zedong's 1949 revolution in China, for a time more than half the world's population was ruled by principles notionally derived from Marx. In paintings, on banners and statues, the fierce grey-bearded face looked out upon the world as if…

On 3 August 1978, the central council of the Islamic Society of Afghanistan (Jamiat-i-Islami) wrote an impassioned plea to Kurt Waldheim, secretary-general of the United Nations. In their letter, they decried Afghanistan's political leaders, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), as a “power-thirsty gang” intent on destroying Afghanistan's political and social fabric and lacking any respect for humanitarian norms or human rights. The Council demanded UN intercession, warning that “the continued survival of this group will endanger the peace of this region of the world”. This warning soon came true. On 24 December 1979, the Soviet Politburo issued a public directive justifying the deployment of Soviet troops into Afghanistan to support their allies, the same PDPA. The Soviets, the Politburo claimed, sought “to give international aid to the friendly…

SNAPSHOTS OF THE COLD WAR In 1961, the Berlin Wall sealed offthe last exit from east to west. It also insulated the most dangerous flashpoint in the European Cold War. Gradually both sides of the Iron Curtain settled into the reality of division. No one born in the 1950s and 1960s could imagine anything different. On the periphery, however, the Cold War was hot and violent. The 1960s saw an escalating conflict in Vietnam, divided after 1945 between the communist north (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam – DRV) and a corrupt southern regime in Saigon (the Republic of Vietnam). The ROV was dominated by the military and became increasingly dependent on the USA after the French abandoned their empire in Indochina in 1954. In itself, South Vietnam was of no…

Nixon's visit did not take place at a quiet time for Chinese politics. In 1972, China was still firmly in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and there were clear divisions about the significance of the Nixon visit. One faction, led by premier Zhou Enlai, had come to realise that China's inward-looking take on economics and culture was not sustainable; they believed that the country would have to reform if the CCP was to stay in power. A world in which China was isolated both from the Soviet bloc and the western world was unsustainable and, since relations with Moscow continued to be scratchy following China's denunciation of Soviet policy from the late 1950s, a pivot towards the huge market that the US offered was a logical step for an…

The warm summer air hummed with music and energy. Drums sent rhythmic undercurrents through the streets as young people danced, debated, sang and kissed. Alcohol flowed freely. Ideas were exchanged in dozens of languages as concerts, marches, floats, talks and spontaneous jam sessions combined to give the sense of a bustling festival. This gathering of idealists and dreamers was held not at Woodstock or Glastonbury but in East Berlin, where 8 million people flocked between 28 July and 5 August 1973 to attend the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students. Its tagline: For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship. More than two decades had passed since East Germany, formally known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), had been established on 7 October 1949 as a socialist counterpoint to its capitalist…