The partnership among the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union during World War II was uneasy in the best of times. But as victory neared and the three powers began planning in earnest for a new world order, ideological differences and conflicting agendas frayed the bonds that had held the coalition together for four years.
In February 1945, the U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin mapped out their vision of a postwar world. The Soviets claimed a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe and joined the British, Americans, and French in a joint occupation of Germany.
Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, so when the victors next convened in the German city of Potsdam in July 1945, Harry Truman had replaced Franklin Roosevelt while Britain had changed prime ministers in the middle of the proceedings, with Clement Attlee taking over from Churchill. Only Stalin remained from the original Big Three, giving him a stronger hand at the negotiating table. Anglo-American concerns over the future of a democratic Poland strained relations with Stalin, who opposed the Polish government-in-exile based in London. After the Soviets installed a pro-Soviet Communist government in Poland, Churchill, now leader of the opposition in the House of Commons, traveled to the United States to deliver a speech in which he declared that an “iron curtain” had fallen in Europe, dividing east from west. The speech, given in March 1946, could be viewed as the formal declaration of what became known as the “Cold War.”
Maps all over the globe were adjusted to account for geopolitical realities of the new conflict. The Korean peninsula was divided into a Communist north and a pro-Western, democratic south. The occupation of Germany hardened into what appeared to be a permanent division of the country into an American-aligned West Germany (formally known as the Federal Republic of Germany) and pro-Soviet East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic). The former capital of Germany, Berlin, was split into east and west, serving as a lonely pro-Western outpost in the heart of Communist East Germany.
As East–West relations grew more tense, a young American diplomat in Moscow, George Kennan, dispatched an 8,000-word telegram arguing that the Soviets were intent on expansion. The United States and the West, he wrote, could outlast the Soviets by containing it within its already established sphere of influence. Kennan’s influential telegram provided the framework for President Truman’s announcement, in early 1947, that Washington would oppose the spread of communism throughout the world. The strategy, known as the Truman Doctrine, was put into place immediately in Greece and Turkey, both of which were battling Communist insurgencies.
The first close encounter between the two superpowers took place in Germany in 1948, when the Soviets closed roads leading to West Berlin, thus denying vital supplies to civilians and Allied soldiers in that portion of the city. The United States responded by resupplying the city by air until the Soviets backed down and reopened access. The success of the Berlin airlift was a huge propaganda victory for the U.S., but it also hardened attitudes between the two superpowers.
The Berlin crisis helped set the stage for the foundation of a new anti-Soviet, transatlantic alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Founded in 1949, NATO consisted of the United States, Canada, and the nations of western Europe. Members declared that an attack on one of its signatories would be considered an attack on all. The Communist equivalent of NATO was called the Warsaw Pact, signed in Poland in 1955.
The U.S. and its allies had a key advantage over the Soviets and their allies in the immediate postwar years: America’s uncontested control of nuclear weaponry. But that changed in August 1949, when the Soviets stunned America and the world with news that it successfully tested its own atomic bomb. That same year, the Western effort to contain communism suffered a tremendous shock when Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong drove the pro-West nationalist movement out of power. Mao’s success, coming on the heels of the Soviets’ successful nuclear effort, inspired a wave of political finger-pointing in the United States. A number of Americans were arrested on charges of passing nuclear technology to Moscow, raising the specter of Communist traitors in the highest ranks of the U.S. government.
On June 25, 1950, Communist forces in North Korea launched a surprise
attack on pro-Western South Korea. The United States argued that the United Nations ought to come to South Korea’s defense because of the North Korean aggression. When the Soviet Union boycotted a U.N. session during the debate, the U.S. motion to defend South Korea passed. With the United States supplying the bulk of the troops under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, the U.N. operation pushed North Korean troops from the deep south to the Yalu River, which divided the two Koreas. But when MacArthur continued to push further north, Communist China entered the war on North Korea’s side. The war bogged down in a stalemate, and MacArthur was removed from command by Truman. Combat ceased with an uneasy truce in 1953.
Fear of communism helped the Republicans win the presidency for the first time since 1928 with war hero Dwight Eisenhower at the top of the ticket. Eisenhower’s choice for vice president spoke to the nation’s concerns about the Soviet threat—he selected a young senator from California named Richard Nixon, who had made his name as one of Capitol Hill’s strongest anticommunists.
Communism’s string of advances and the possibility of Americans serving as Soviet agents inspired a wave of public concern that the United States was losing the Cold War. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, fanned the flames of anxiety with accusations that he had information about the existence of Soviet agents within the U.S. government. McCarthy rose from political obscurity to become the country’s leading anticommunist zealot. His policy of innuendo and guilt by association set the stage for a larger congressional campaign against suspected Communists in Hollywood as well as in government. The senator’s smear tactics led to the coining of a new word—McCarthyism. His career came to a crashing end in 1953, however, when he accused the U.S. Army of harboring Communists. The subsequent Army–McCarthy hearings, broadcast live on television, led to sharp public criticism of the Senator’s reckless accusations. The Senate formally censured McCarthy in 1954. He died, ravaged by alcohol, in 1957.
The Soviets and Americans continued to develop, test, and deploy a huge and widely scattered stockpile of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the world several times over. The most frightening arms race in human history followed as both sides sought to maintain superiority over the other.
Politicians and military planners looked for strategic openings through surrogate wars outside of Europe. Korea was the first of several conflicts between the Soviets and the United States. In the late 1950s, both superpowers looked to gain strategic advantage as the old European imperial powers began to withdraw from their colonial possessions in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Power changed hands in Moscow for the first time since the 1920s when Joseph Stalin died in 1953 and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, a former coal miner. Khrushchev stunned members of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, when he delivered a long speech denouncing Stalin’s murderous regime. The “secret speech” was a milestone in Cold War history, for it marked the first time that a high Communist official acknowledged the brutality of Stalin’s rule.
Khrushchev was well aware of the significance of the “secret speech.” In 1961, he met with the young, newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, in Vienna. During their summit, the older, more experienced Khrushchev dominated the talks with a litany of criticism of American policy and capitalism. The Vienna summit heightened Cold War tensions as both sides prepared for a conflict over continued Western control of West Berlin. That portion of the city became an oasis for East Germans looking to escape Communist rule. In late summer, 1961, the East Germans began construction on a wall that divided the city, stopped the flow of refugees, and served as a symbol of the Cold War.
Khrushchev, believing Kennedy was weak and ineffective, upped the great power ante in 1962, when the Soviets began building nuclear missile sites on Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. U.S. intelligence provided President Kennedy with evidence of the buildup, leading the president to order a blockade of the island in October 1962. The tense standoff ended when Soviet vessels turned away rather than confront the U.S. naval blockade. The Soviets agreed to dismantle the sites, while the U.S. secretly agreed to remove missiles from Turkey.
The Cuban missile crisis was the closest the Cold War ever came to a nuclear confrontation. During the ensuing years, however, the two superpowers engaged in surrogate wars in Asia and Africa. America’s attempt to halt a Communist insurgency in South Vietnam, an extension of its involvement in the Korean conflict, lasted more than a decade,
and ended with a Communist victory in 1975. An estimated 3 million Vietnamese died, as did 58,000 American troops.
During his presidency (1969–74), Richard Nixon, who had made his name as an anticommunist, initiated a new strategy of engagement with the Soviets, called détente. The policy led to bilateral talks aimed at reducing nuclear arsenals. However, cooperation gave way to renewed confrontation when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Nixon’s 1972 trip to China to meet with Mao and other Chinese leaders was much more successful, at least from the point of view of trade and economic growth.
President Jimmy Carter led a widespread boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the invasion. Carter lost a reelection bid in November 1980, when Ronald Reagan captured the White House after promising to take a tougher stand against the Soviets. In 1983, during a speech in Florida, Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” He deployed a new generation of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and increased defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. The Soviets were hard-pressed to react, in part because of instability at the top. Three Soviet leaders, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, all died between 1982 and 1985.
Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from the chaos to become general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party—the nation’s de facto leader—in March 1985. He instituted new policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“reform”), which impressed Western leaders. Reagan and Gorbachev engaged in a series of four remarkable summit meetings from 1986 to 1988 that produced historic reductions in nuclear arsenals.
The Soviet-dominated nations of Eastern Europe began to dislodge themselves from Moscow’s grip. In November 1989, East Germany announced an end to travel restrictions to the West, making the Berlin Wall superfluous. The wall came down, and so did Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and East Germany itself. The momentum carried all the way to Moscow. On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev signed an order formally dissolving the Soviet Union. The twilight struggle between East and West had come to an unexpected end.
In 1939, physicist Leo Szilard met with his former teacher Albert Einstein on Long Island, New York, to discuss two startling developments taking place in Europe. The German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman had published their discovery of nuclear fission, the process of splitting off neutrons from an atomic nucleus. Moreover, the German military had seized uranium mines in Czechoslovakia and halted the sale of uranium ore. It was obvious to Szilard that the Germans had discovered both the process and the fuel to make a nuclear weapon. He convinced Einstein to write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to inform him of the threat.
In response to Einstein’s letter, President Roosevelt set about formulating and implementing a massive, secret program to develop nuclear technology, and in less than six years nuclear weapons went from obscure theory to dreadful reality. In the United States, the project to develop a nuclear bomb was called the Manhattan Project and was staffed by hundreds of scientists in 30 secret locations, the most famous of which was the laboratory complex at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project was headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the “father of the bomb.”
Between 1939 and 1945, a constant stream of innovations in physics and chemistry proved the practicality of nuclear fission research for both power and weapons. Much of the experimental hands-on work took place in the three-year period between 1942 and 1945. Enrico Fermi created the first working nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in December 1942. Two months later, construction of a uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, began. Two months after that, the Los Alamos team began to assemble. By mid-1944, Los Alamos scientists were testing fissile properties of enriched uranium.
By the time the first prototypes of the bomb were being readied in the end of June 1945, Hitler had already committed suicide, the Germans had surrendered, and the Allied powers were busy dividing the country. Meanwhile, nuclear tests at Los Alamos continued. The first bomb test on July 16, 1945, code-named Trinity, released 20 kilotons of force, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT. The following day, 70 Los Alamos scientists signed a petition urging President Harry S. Truman not to use the bomb on Japanese targets unless Japan first had been given the chance to
surrender. Ten days later, Truman issued an ultimatum to Japan, which was ignored. Meanwhile, two bombs were readied for deployment.
“Little Boy,” the 15-kiloton uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, was detonated in the air over the city at a height that would maximize the explosion’s reach. It released a fireball 1,200 feet in diameter of unimaginable heat—7,200 degrees Fahrenheit. The bomb instantly vaporized thousands of people and sent out a shockwave that shredded much of the city. What was left caught fire. More than 80,000 people were killed immediately. Radiation poisoning killed some of the survivors and debilitated more. In all, as many as 140,000 people were killed by the Hiroshima bomb. “Fat Man,” with improved design and more volatile plutonium fuel, was dropped three days later on Nagasaki and released 21 kilotons, though, as Nagasaki sits in a protected valley, killed fewer—40,000. Japan surrendered six days later.
The debate over Truman’s decision to unleash such a devastating attack on civilian populations has not abated even today. Supporters argue that the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers were saved by avoiding an invasion of Japan. Opponents contend that the first bomb should have been dropped on an unpopulated area.
♦Nuclear Weapons after Hiroshima The speed and urgency of wartime development of the theoretical physics, experimental know-how, and military infrastructure needed to make the United States a nuclear power reflected the widely held belief that first Germany and then the Soviet Union were developing a nuclear weapon. Subsequent historical research, however, casts doubt on any of these powers as early innovators in the area; paradoxically, most of the early innovations in the Soviet nuclear weapons program could be traced to stolen secrets delivered by Klaus Fuchs, a Los Alamos scientist who delivered intelligence to Soviet agents between 1944 and 1946.
Even before World War II ended, the U.S. had become wary of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and knew that the Soviet scientists were racing to develop comparable nuclear technology. It was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union would “have the bomb,” even though it did not become clear until later how much Soviet progress was due to espionage. The timing of Fuchs’s stay at Los Alamos is crucial to the nuclear arms race, since he was not able to deliver any detailed information about new, improved bomb
designs that were developed after his tenure there had ended.
Both “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” got their explosive force from a fission-derived chain reaction. At the time, these were misleadingly called “atomic bombs” or “A-bombs,” though they are now referred to as “single-stage nuclear weapons.” At Los Alamos, scientists discovered that bombs could be augmented by including a mixture of deuterium and tritium gases in the weapon’s core. This led to work on a new kind of nuclear bomb design that used a second stage, a fusion reaction initiated by the X-rays generated by the initial fission reaction. These fission-fusion weapons are dramatically more powerful than single-stage fission weapons. In the 1950s, these were referred to as “hydrogen bombs” or “H-bombs,” though we now know them as “two-stage” or “thermonuclear weapons.” Many Los Alamos scientists were opposed to development of the H-bomb, saying that such weapons would only be useful against targets such as civilian cities and towns, not military troops.
The U.S.S.R.’s first successful A-bomb test had taken place in 1949, much sooner than U.S. predictions, and citing the seemingly inevitable Soviet discovery of the new weapon, work on the H-bomb continued. U.S. scientists conducted tests of increasingly refined and destructive bombs, magnifying their yield from kilotons to megatons, while suspecting that Soviet work was close behind. In the 1950s, most U.S. nuclear weapons tests were performed either at U.S.-controlled Pacific islands or in Nevada testing facilities. According to the Department of Energy, a total of 106 tests were conducted on or near Bikini, Christmas, Johnston, and Enewetak Islands, before the dangers and extent of fallout radiation were well understood. (Those islands remain radioactively “hot” today.) The first successful two-stage thermonuclear weapon test, code-named “Mike,” was off Enewetak Island in the South Pacific on November 1, 1952. It released 10.4 megatons of force, nearly 1,000 times the explosive yield of “Little Boy,” and completely destroyed the island it was on, leaving only a crater in the ocean floor. The first Soviet thermonuclear detonation took place the following year, on August 12, 1953.
Rocket technology was improving, and nuclear-armed rockets began testing in the early 1950s, but rocket range was limited. Military strategy of the time relied on the assumption that an enemy’s weapons would have to be housed in silos or carried by large planes. In the early 1950s, the reasoning behind military nuclear strategy was to prepare a large, overwhelming force that could eliminate an enemy’s weapons with a
single, indefensible “first strike.”
When newly elected President John F. Kennedy appointed Robert McNamara as secretary of defense in 1961, U.S. military strategy underwent a dramatic shift. McNamara was a proponent of the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction,” which stated that the best way to deter an enemy was to stockpile such an overabundance of weapons and keep them readied in such a variety of places that a retaliatory “second strike” would be unpreventable. To this end in 1961, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command began mission Looking Glass, in which one of a fleet of modified, nuclear-armed Boeing EC-135Cs remained in the air continuously for over 29 years, to provide an airborne base of military command in the case of a large-scale attack on ground posts. The global nuclear picture now looked complicated and precarious, as the two superpowers tried to locate ever-increasing numbers of weapons in locations all over the planet.
The nuclear arms race reached its crisis point in 1962, when a Soviet missile base was discovered under construction in Cuba, prompting what was to be called the “Cuban missile crisis.” The U.S. Navy quarantined Cuba, prompting a duel between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev that put the world at the precarious edge of a nuclear conflict. In the end, Khrushchev agreed to remove the weapons, and Kennedy secretly ordered U.S. missiles removed from Turkey.
In the wake of the near-cataclysm, both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. began a period of nuclear détente, gradually limiting the scope of nuclear weapons testing. In 1963, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to halt all aboveground and airborne nuclear tests. (Since 1963, all U.S. tests have been underground, and almost all have taken place in Nevada testing facilities.) Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) held between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. between 1969 and 1972 resulted in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limited the number of ballistic missiles in either nation’s stockpile. In 1976, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to limit tests to fewer than 150 kilotons. SALT II talks, held between 1972 and 1979, resulted in agreements to limit the total number of strategic weapons for either nation, though the treaty was never ratified by the United States and President Reagan withdrew from SALT II in 1986.
♦Arms reduction after the Cold War At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had a combined stockpile of more than 40,000 nuclear warheads, down from the Cold War peak of 70,000.
Building on détente-based agreements from the 1970s, two international agreements in 1995 and 1996 banned further nuclear weapons testing outright; the 1995 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was a U.N. initiative to limit nuclear weapons to those states that had them already, and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibited any nuclear testing by any state. In 2002, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty) was signed between the U.S. and Russia; it contained agreements to reduce the number of active warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012.
In the United States, there is a publicly known process for dismantling old nuclear weapons, but in the case of the old Soviet stockpile, the process is much less regulated, and there is widespread international concern regarding the state of the Russian/Soviet stockpile amid speculation of nuclear weapons smuggling and theft in Eurasia. Although Russian officials deny that any nuclear materials have been stolen, fairly numerous anecdotal accounts, including those from former military, black marketeers, and smugglers suggest otherwise.
♦New nuclear powers The various treaties and agreements aimed at reducing the number of thermonuclear weapons worldwide have not prevented other nations from researching nuclear weapons production. When the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed in 1995, three nations declined to sign and a fourth acceded and then violated the treaty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those nations—India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea respectively—all subsequently became nuclear weapons powers. The current list of nuclear weapons states contains these four plus the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China. In addition, current international scrutiny focuses on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program.
The emergence of two rogue groups—the global Islamic terrorism network and the global arms black market—complicates the picture considerably. Much of the suspected resources of these two groups is thought to originate in stolen Russian or Soviet materials (referred to as “loose nukes”). Moreover, due to the affinity between Islamic terrorist groups and radical Islamic factions inside Iran, there is great concern about Iran’s potential participation (willing or not) in augmenting the striking capabilities of rogue groups.