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THE COLD WAR (1945-1990)
Events
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Postscript -- The Nuclear Age, 1945-Present
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Informing the Public, August 1945
-
The Manhattan Engineer District, 1945-1946
-
First Steps toward International Control,
1944-1945
-
Search for a Policy on International Control,
1945
-
Negotiating International Control,
1945-1946
-
Civilian Control of Atomic Energy,
1945-1946
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Operation Crossroads, July 1946
-
The VENONA Intercepts, 1946-1980
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The Cold War, 1945-1990
-
Nuclear Proliferation, 1949-present
The
postwar organization of atomic energy
took place against the backdrop of growing tension with
the Soviet Union. Relations between the United
States and the Soviet Union had been strained ever since
the revolution of 1917 had first brought communists to
power in Russia. This mutual distrust further
deepened following the Soviet "non-aggression" treaty with
Nazi Germany in August 1939 and the Soviet Union's
subsequent invasions of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic
Republics. Although Britain was allied with the
Soviet Union following Germany's June 1941 invasion of
Russia, as was the United States in the aftermath of Pearl
Harbor, mutual suspicion lingered throughout the Second
World War. The failure of the United States and
Britain to tell the Soviet Union about the atomic bomb in
anything other than the most vague terms only heightened
the extreme suspicions of the Soviet dictator, Joseph
Stalin (right). Not only did the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
help end the Second World War, but they also played a role
in setting the stage for the half-century of conflict with
the Soviet Union that followed it -- the Cold War.
In March 1946, the former British Prime Minister, Winston
Churchill, warned that an "iron curtain" was descending
across Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union imposed
non-democratic communist governments on every nation under
its military control. A year later,
President Harry S. Truman proclaimed the
"Truman Doctrine," asking for funds for overseas military
assistance to those governments that would oppose
communism. On the issue of
international control of nuclear weapons, the United States, believing that the Soviet army posed
a threat to Western Europe and recognizing that American
non-nuclear forces had rapidly demobilized following the
war, refused to surrender its monopoly on nuclear weapons
without adequate controls. In 1948 and 1949, the
United States continued implementing its policy of
"containment" of communism and the Soviet Union, most
notably with the "Marshall Plan" to help rebuild the
economies of Western Europe and with the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) designed to oppose any Soviet
invasion of Europe. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested
its first atomic bomb (closely resembling the
plutonium device tested
at Alamogordo, thanks to
espionage). That same year, Chinese communists defeated
their nationalist opponents in the Chinese Civil
War. By the time communist North Korea attacked
American-backed South Korea in June 1950, many in the
United States and around the world believed that a third
world war was imminent or had already begun.
In this atmosphere of national emergency, government
officials believed that continued American superiority in
nuclear weaponry was vital to preventing a third world
war. If a global war should begin, American military
planners hoped that continued nuclear superiority would
allow the United States to strike the Soviet Union with
such force that damage to the United States would be
minimized and that Western Europe could eventually be
reclaimed from an invading Soviet army. The
generation of United States Air Force generals who had
overseen the aerial destruction of the cities of Germany
and Japan was determined to prevent similar destruction of
American cities. In 1950, following the beginning of
the Korean War and a secret governmental study called NSC
68, the United States nearly tripled its defense
budget.
The defense buildup of 1950-1951 included an expansion of
the nuclear weapons complex and an increase of the
stockpile of fission weapons. Truman also approved
the design and production of the next generation of
nuclear weapons,
thermonuclear weapons (the "hydrogen bomb"). When the United States tested the first of these
on November 1, 1952 (right), the result was an explosion
that was equivalent to one produced by more than ten
million tons of TNT. This was approximately
700 times the power of the uranium (fission) bomb
dropped on
Hiroshima Hospital. In August 1953, the Soviet Union tested its first
"boosted fission weapon," which used thermonuclear burning
to enhance its yield, and in November 1955 the Soviet
Union tested its first true thermonuclear weapon.
There was now almost no limit on the size of an explosion
either superpower could create. In August 1957, the
Soviet Union tested the world's first intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM), a feat dramatized two months
later by the launch of the "Sputnik" satellite. The
following year, the United States first began limited
operation of its own ICBM. One of these
nuclear-tipped missiles from either side could arrive at
its target in less than an hour, and no defense was
possible once the missile was launched. The only
thing thought now to be preserving the "delicate balance
of terror" was the promise that if one nation attacked,
the other would surely retaliate. The era of "mutual
assured destruction," or "MAD," had dawned.
No global third world war ever took place. Mindful
that a full-scale nuclear exchange would be a disaster for
both sides, the superpowers fought each other through a
variety of proxy wars and "shadow struggles" in Korea,
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and dozens of other places.
The strategy of the United States and its like-minded
allies was to use the nuclear threat to avert a direct
Soviet attack on Western Europe and allow time for the
eventual internal reform or even collapse of the Soviet
Union and its satellite states. Events eventually
confirmed this strategy, but the Soviet Union in the
interim proved willing to use overt military force to
prevent the collapse of communist governments, most
notably with its invasions of Hungary in 1956 and
Czechoslovakia in 1968. At the same time, the Soviet
Union supported the spread of communism through
insurrections and the overthrow of pro-western regimes in
the third world. The United States, in turn,
responded with economic and military aid and, where
necessary, armed force to prop up friendly governments and
used its own secret intelligence services in attempts to
overthrow unfriendly governments.
After four decades of an enormously expensive arms race,
the Soviet economy in the 1980s finally collapsed.
Once it became clear that the Soviet Union would no longer
intervene militarily, the people of Eastern Europe
overwhelmingly rejected communism in a wave of mostly
peaceful revolts throughout 1989 and 1990. When the
Russian people were finally allowed to participate in a
democratic election, they too rejected communism, weary as
they were of more than seven decades of repressive and
sometimes murderous governments. The peoples of
other nations that had been forced to join the Soviet
Union -- from the Baltic Republics to Ukraine to the
Caucasus Mountains to the steppes of Asia -- chose to
leave the Soviet Union completely. On Christmas Day,
1991, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over
the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union officially ceased to
exist.
This "victory" did not come cheap. Millions died in
the wars fought in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere. Untold wealth, which could have been put
toward any number of social or humanitarian needs, was
expended on military manpower and sophisticated
weaponry. Nor was victory foreordained. No one
knew for certain whether communism would not prove to be
the inevitable wave of the future or if the ideological
struggle would not all end in a massive nuclear exchange
spawned by accident or desperation.
The nuclear weapons designed, built, and tested by the
Manhattan Project and its lineal descendents were perhaps
the single most defining element of the second half of the
twentieth century.
At the same time that they visited on the world
unprecedented fear and a daily awareness of the nearness
of global holocaust, nuclear weapons also bought the
necessary time to achieve a successful outcome to the Cold
War on the basis of ideology, economics, social structure,
and the limited application of military
might. In the over half-century since the
Manhattan Project, the world has seen no wars that have
even come close to matching the death and destruction
associated with the two world wars of the early part of
the century. Perhaps
Robert Oppenheimer's wish for a weapon
that was so terrible that war itself would become obsolete
was not entirely without hope.
-
Informing the Public, August 1945
-
The Manhattan Engineer District, 1945-1946
-
First Steps toward International Control,
1944-1945
-
Search for a Policy on International Control,
1945
-
Negotiating International Control,
1945-1946
-
Civilian Control of Atomic Energy,
1945-1946
-
Operation Crossroads, July 1946
-
The VENONA Intercepts, 1946-1980
-
The Cold War, 1945-1990
-
Nuclear Proliferation, 1949-present
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Sources and notes for this page.
Most of the text for this page is original to the
Department of Energy's
Office of History and Heritage Resources. Parts were adapted from, and portions were
taken directly from, the History Office publication:
Terrence R. Fehner and F. G. Gosling,
Origins of the Nevada Test Site (DOE/MA-0518;
Washington: History Division, Department of Energy,
December 2000), 86-87. The phrase "the delicate balance of
terror" is from Albert Wohlstetter's famous article of
the same name, Foreign Affairs 37 (January
1959), 211-234. The photographs of the Berlin Wall
in 1962 and of Dean Acheson signing the NATO Treaty are
courtesy the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The photograph of Joseph Stalin with Vyacheslav
Molotov is courtesy
Roosevelt Presidential Library
(via the
National Archives
(NARA)). The photograph of the B-29s over Korea is
courtesy NARA. The photograph of the Berlin Wall
in 1987 is courtesy the White House Photographic Office
(via NARA). The photograph of the Marine in Korea
is courtesy the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force
(via NARA). The photograph of the Soviet R-7 ICBM
is courtesy the
Federation of American Scientists. The photograph of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear
(hydrogen bomb) test and the Ivy King
nuclear test are courtesy the Department of Energy's
Nevada Site Office.
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