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On March 5, 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rises to his feet at Westminister College in Fulton, Missouri and utters the awful truth, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere...”
Communist totalitarianism is not a hollow threat. The unstoppable Soviet armies smashed the Nazi Wehrmacht, pulverized Berlin, and swallowed Eastern Europe whole in 1945, and now threaten to swallow Western Europe as well. In 1949, Mao Tse Tung triumphantly raises the red flag over China, the world’s most populous nation. The old colonial empires totter, exhausted by two European Civil Wars (i.e. World War I and World War II), and are beset by violent nationalist movements encouraged by Moscow.
By 1953 the Soviet Union has both atomic and hydrogen bombs. In 1953 Chinese land forces fight American ground troops to a standstill in Korea. The American President, Harry Truman, trembles at the prospect of using nuclear weapons to end the impasse in Korea. In November, 1956, Premier Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, menacingly utters over his vodka (of which he is very fond), “We will bury you.” Almost every year some new country falls to communism, North Vietnam, North Korea, Mongolia, and in 1959 Cuba. Communism is on the march and poised to spread throughout the unstable countries of Latin America.
Although the Soviet Union has massive ground forces, much of its success on the world stage is due to bluster and bullying. The Soviet nuclear arsenal is relatively small compared to that of the United States. A revolution in nuclear weapons strategy occurs with the introduction of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in 1957 however. No longer does the Soviet Union have to build costly long range bombers to strike at the Americna homeland. A missile is cheaper and harder to destroy than a bomber. The Soviet Union can now achieve nuclear parity with the United States cheaply and quickly. In September 1962, the Soviets begin to build secret bases in Cuba for medium- and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles capable of striking most of the continental United States. Installing medium-range missiles in Cuba, within close range of U.S. targets, has the same effect as a crash buildup of ICBMs. On October 15, a United States U-2 spy plane captures photographic proof of Soviet missile bases under construction in Cuba.