Honors World History Unit 9 Review: Superpower Rivalry

After World War II, Europe split into a Soviet-controlled East and a US-aligned West, and that split shaped the Cold War for about 45 years. Soviet troops had pushed the Nazis out of Eastern Europe, and Stalin used that presence to install communist governments in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and, by 1948, Czechoslovakia. These became satellite states, officially independent but run in line with Moscow.

Germany was the flashpoint. The Allies divided both Germany and its capital, Berlin, into four occupation zones. The US and Britain combined their zones economically in 1947, and in June 1948 the Western Allies introduced a new currency in their zones. Stalin answered by cutting off land access to West Berlin. The US and Britain responded with the Berlin Airlift, flying in food and fuel for about 11 months until Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949. That same year Germany became two countries, West Germany and East Germany.

The two sides then built rival alliances. NATO formed in April 1949 with 12 members who pledged that an attack on one was an attack on all. The Soviets created the Warsaw Pact in 1955, right after West Germany joined NATO. Churchill's 1946 Iron Curtain speech named the divide, and the Berlin Wall, built in August 1961 to stop East Germans from escaping west, made it physical.

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were two parts of one US strategy called containment. Containment meant stopping communism from spreading to new countries rather than trying to overthrow it where it already ruled. Diplomat George Kennan laid out the logic in his 1946 Long Telegram, arguing that firm, patient pressure would hold Soviet expansion in check.

The Truman Doctrine applied containment by promising political, military and economic support to countries facing communist pressure. In early 1947, Britain announced it could no longer afford to back Greece, where communist guerrillas were trying to overthrow the government, or Turkey, which faced Soviet pressure over access to its straits. In March 1947, Truman asked Congress for $400 million in aid for both countries. The Greek government won its civil war by 1949, and Turkey stayed in the Western camp.

The Marshall Plan applied containment through a large economic recovery program for postwar Europe. Secretary of State George Marshall argued in June 1947 that hunger and unemployment made communism attractive. From 1948 to 1952, the US sent about $13 billion to 16 Western European countries to rebuild factories, farms and transportation. The offer was technically open to the Soviet bloc, but Stalin refused and pressured satellites like Poland and Czechoslovakia to refuse too, then set up Comecon in 1949 as a rival.

Together, these policies marked a major shift away from the relative isolationism of the interwar period and set a pattern for sustained US involvement in the Cold War.

The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first major Cold War conflict in which US-led UN troops fought communist forces, and it ended close to where it began. After Japan's defeat in 1945, the US and USSR split Korea at the 38th parallel. By 1948 there were two states, a communist North under Kim Il-sung and an anti-communist South under Syngman Rhee, each claiming the whole peninsula.

On June 25, 1950, with Stalin's approval, North Korea invaded and pushed Southern forces into a small pocket around Pusan. The UN Security Council authorized a response while the Soviet delegate was boycotting the council over who held China's seat, so no Soviet veto blocked it. US-led UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur landed behind enemy lines at Inchon in September 1950, retook Seoul and drove north toward the Chinese border at the Yalu River.

That advance brought China in. In late 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed the border and pushed UN forces back south. The war settled into a stalemate near the 38th parallel, and Truman fired MacArthur in April 1951 for publicly pushing to expand the war into China. The armistice of July 27, 1953 created the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), but no peace treaty was ever signed. Roughly 2.5 million people died, including about 36,000 Americans.

The arms race was a cycle where each superpower built more and better nuclear weapons because it feared the other would get ahead. The US held a monopoly after dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but the Soviets tested their own bomb in August 1949, years earlier than Western analysts expected. The US then developed the hydrogen bomb, which uses fusion instead of fission. Its first test in 1952 yielded 10.4 megatons, about 700 times the roughly 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb. The Soviets tested an H-bomb of their own in 1953.

Delivery systems mattered as much as the bombs. Long-range bombers came first, then intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The Soviets tested one in 1957 and the US deployed its Atlas in 1959, and these missiles could cross between the two countries in about 30 minutes. Ballistic-missile submarines at sea were difficult to locate, and an enemy could not count on destroying all of them in a first strike. This survivability helped guarantee that each side could retaliate.

That guaranteed second strike produced mutually assured destruction, or MAD. Neither side could attack first without being destroyed in return, so nuclear war became irrational. MAD kept the superpowers out of direct war with each other but did nothing to stop proxy wars.

Arms control came slowly, through the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), SALT I (1972), the INF Treaty (1987) and START I (1991). Combined arsenals peaked at more than 60,000 warheads in the mid-1980s.

The space race was the public face of the arms race. Each superpower used spaceflight to show the world that its system produced better science, and the rockets that reached orbit were the same technology that could carry nuclear warheads.

The Soviets took the early lead. Sputnik 1, launched October 4, 1957, was the first artificial satellite. It only sent out radio beeps, but Americans realized that a rocket able to reach orbit could also reach US cities. This Sputnik shock led to the creation of NASA in 1958 and the National Defense Education Act, which funded science, math and language education. The US launched Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, and it discovered the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth.

The Soviets kept scoring firsts. Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space on April 12, 1961, and Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in 1965. In May 1961, President Kennedy committed the US to landing a man on the Moon before the decade ended. NASA moved through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon during Apollo 11.

The competition cooled during détente. In 1975, an American Apollo capsule docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit, a symbolic handshake between rivals.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war, and it ended with a compromise that was partly kept secret. Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959 and moved toward the Soviet Union. In April 1961, the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion by about 1,400 Cuban exiles failed within three days, which convinced Castro and Khrushchev that the US would try again. Khrushchev also wanted to offset American missiles near Soviet borders, including Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In 1962 he secretly sent nuclear missiles to Cuba, about 90 miles from Florida.

A US U-2 spy plane photographed the missile sites on October 14. Kennedy's advisers, a group called ExComm, debated airstrikes and an invasion, but Kennedy chose a naval quarantine and announced it on television on October 22. On October 24 and 25, several Soviet ships carrying military supplies stopped or turned back before reaching the quarantine line, while other Soviet vessels were allowed through. On October 27, a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, and on a Soviet submarine, officer Vasili Arkhipov refused to approve firing a nuclear torpedo.

On October 28, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. In return, Kennedy publicly promised not to invade Cuba and privately agreed to pull the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey. Shaken by how close they had come, the two sides set up a direct Washington-Moscow hotline in 1963 and signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty that same year.

The Vietnam War began as an anti-colonial war and became a Cold War proxy war that ended in a communist victory. Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, a nationalist and communist movement, defeated France at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The 1954 Geneva settlement temporarily separated opposing military forces at the 17th parallel and called for reunification elections in 1956. The US and the State of Vietnam did not endorse the Final Declaration, and Diem's US-backed southern government refused to participate, partly because Ho Chi Minh was expected to win.

US leaders saw Vietnam through the domino theory. In August 1964, officials reported attacks on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, though later evidence showed the second reported attack probably never happened. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Johnson broad authority to use force without a declaration of war. US combat ground troops arrived in 1965 and peaked at about 543,000 personnel in 1969, while the USSR and China armed North Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

The Tet Offensive of January 1968 cost the communists heavily but shook US confidence, because officials had claimed the war was nearly won. Johnson chose not to run again. Nixon's Vietnamization shifted the ground war to South Vietnamese troops, and the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 pulled US forces out. North Vietnam took Saigon on April 30, 1975. About 58,000 Americans and an estimated 2 to 3 million Vietnamese died.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 mostly from internal weakness, and Gorbachev's reforms sped up the crisis they were meant to fix. By the 1980s, the planned economy was stagnant, with chronic shortages of consumer goods, while military spending took an estimated 15 to 25 percent of GDP. The war in Afghanistan (1979-1989) and Reagan's military buildup added to the strain.

Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 and launched glasnost (openness), which loosened censorship, and perestroika (restructuring), which allowed limited private business. Glasnost let people openly criticize the system, including its handling of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Perestroika disrupted the old command economy without building a working market to replace it.

Gorbachev also dropped the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Soviet claim of a right to intervene militarily in satellite states, as it had in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Without the threat of Soviet tanks, communist governments across Eastern Europe fell in 1989. The Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989, and Germany reunified in October 1990.

Inside the USSR, nationalist movements grew. Lithuania declared independence in March 1990, Georgia followed in April 1991, and several other republics asserted sovereignty. In August 1991, communist hardliners tried a coup against Gorbachev, but Boris Yeltsin rallied resistance in Moscow and it failed within three days. Most of the remaining republics then declared independence. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991, and the USSR formally ceased to exist the next day, leaving 15 independent countries.