Cold War

[Knight of Cydonia]

Y'all know about Cold War that happen in the 1960-s.can anyone show me a link or something that contain all about it.and which country start it? is it just between the US and USSR?

[redxroses]

I've just done this at school :)
it was at its prime in the 1960s but it was actually going on from the end of WW2, mainly between the two superpowers but a lot of other countries were involved, such as Cuba.

I don't think anyone "started" it. It was just the build up of mistrust and competetiveness with both sides feeling threatened by the other after WW2, because during the war they were forced to work together, but afterwards they both wanted different things, especially for the future of Germany. And there was also the problem that there were many newly independant countries after European empires had broken down so both the USSR and US wanted to influence the countries in their ideas of capitalism and communism. The US government feared communism that they tried to contain in by pumping money into poor European countries. Stalin was also going back on promises he had made earliar at conferences near the end of WW2 which made the West worry that he would be a repeat Hitler. Stalin was also suspicious of the US becasue they had failed to notify him of the development of the atomic bomb until the very last moment.
So from 1945 relations between the superpowers broke down to pretty much they were ready to go to war over the Cuban missile crisis but then Kennedy and Khrushchev both backed down and the process of detente began, which on the outside looked like a good thing which was mending relations but really did nothing.

Anyway, before I ramble on, it wasn't really what happened that was important, it was the way that either side interpreted it and how wanted to be dominant over the other.

[chimx]

It began with the death of FDR and Truman taking his place. FDR and Churchill were able to ally themselves with Stalin because they felt that ultimately, capitalism would economically dominate. In doing so, they were willing to compromise with Stalin quite easily. An example is FDR's concession of Poland to Russia.

Truman took a much heavier hand with dealing with Stalin. If you want to give the Cold War a start date, I would give it the 2nd day of Potsdam in 1945, when Truman learned of the successful tests of America's nuclear bomb and initiated an openly hostile attitude toward his Russian ally.

Of course, both Stalin and Truman acted like total douche bags after the fact. So I wouldn't heap too much blame on either side.

[Tekun]

The ‘Cold War’ was the war waged by the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its allies and the workers’ movement, by means of economic pressure, selective aid, diplomatic manoeuvre, propaganda, assassination, low-intensity military operations and full-scale war from 1947 until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The term was coined by the American political adviser and financier Bernard Baruch in April 1947 during a debate on the Truman Doctrine.

At a series of Conferences in Teheran, Moscow, Yalta and Potsdam between November 1943 and August 1945, Stalin, Churchill and US Presidents Roosevelt and Truman made an agreement dividing the world between "east" and "west". However Stalin proved unable to deliver his side of the bargain, with many countries such as Yugoslavia and Hungary refusing to accept the right-wing regimes imposed on them under the pact. Ultimately, it was the decision of the Greek Communist Party in October 1946, to defy Stalin and launch a campaign against British troops and US-backed Royalists still holding one-third of the country, that triggered the beginning of the "Cold War".

In late 1946 US President Harry Truman abruptly terminated aid to the Soviet Union and a policy paper written by George Kennan spelt out the strategy to be followed:

“... we have in Russia today a population which is physically and spiritually tired ... There are limits to the physical and nervous strength of people themselves. These limits are absolute ones and are binding even for the cruellest dictatorship. ... [thus the USSR could be] sensitive to contrary force ... and flexible in its reaction to political realities. [Thus the US should commit itself to] longterm, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies ... [through] the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”

In a speech on 12 March 1947, Truman proposed a new global role for the United States as “policeman of the world”. $400m of aid for Greece was followed up by the Marshall Plan and was virtually a declaration of war on the Soviet Union.

U.S. military power was combined with U.S. financial power to systematically destroy anti-capitalist, pro-worker movements and install right-wing, dictatorial governments wherever possible: – massive economic and military support to “friendly” governments in every part of the world, while economically isolating the USSR, China and Eastern Europe behind an ‘iron curtain’ (a term first used by Churchill in March 1946), backed up by a massive nuclear arsenal, and waging all-out covert war against the workers’ and national liberation movements.

Marshall Aid was used systematically to pressure governments and voters in countries like Britain, France and Italy into rejecting communism in exchange for aid, while Keynesian economic policies were used to provide welfare and jobs for the workers.

The most significant military actions of the Cold War were the invasion of Korea in July 1950 which led to three years of bitter warfare, the invasion of Vietnam which began in July 1955 leading to twenty years of warfare, ending in defeat for the U.S. in 1975. But altogether between the dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945, and the 11th September 2001 when the first blow at mainland USA was struck, the US bombed 21 different countries, installed right-wing, military governments in countless others and forced still more into submission by mounting blockades depriving unfriendly countries of trade.

The Cold War, in which the most powerful state the world had ever known waged an all-out war against the working class, using techniques ranging from thermonuclear extermination to bribery on a vast scale to MacCarthyite witchhunting, had a profound effect on politics during this period. Communism was fought for either with machine guns and Soviet support, or through ‘Mothers Clubs’ and other ‘front’ organisations where the participants pretended that they were not communists at all.

Although the Cold War continued up until the fall of the USSR, it was the Tet Offensive of January 1968 in Vietnam, which struck US bases in the heart of Saigon and dealt a mortal blow to the seeming invincibility of the US, which ended the dominance of anti-communism in the West.


http://www.marxists.org/glossary/events/c/o.htm#cold-war

This is a brief overview from the MIA..., for more info click on the link in my sig

[Knight of Cydonia]

thanks a thousand comrades :D

i guess that would be enough :P

[Resistencia]

I think Truman was one of the key starters of the Cold War, as he came up with his "Containment Doctrine", which he made during the Civil War in Greece.
The Containment Doctrine meant that the USA would help any nation that was threatened by Communism or any nation that wanted to get rid of Communism.
It's basically the start of American interventionism.

[Fawkes]

Truman was more than "one of the key starters", he was the starter. The atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not the last shots of WWII, but the first of the Cold War. Japan had wanted to surrender and had been asking to do so for about six months prior to them being dropped, yet Truman refused to listen and chose to drop the bombs to scare the Soviet Union, thus starting the arms race.

[chimx]

Japan had wanted to surrender and had been asking to do so for about six months prior to them being dropped, yet Truman refused to listen and chose to drop the bombs to scare the Soviet Union, thus starting the arms race.

That's not exactly true. Japan hadn't been asking to surrender. What happened was that the US had received intelligence information which said that Japan would surrender if Russia entered the War. Following the victory over the European Theatre, the United States received a commitment from Stalin to assist with the War in the Pacific Theatre within 3 months.

Thus, some argue that the atomic bombings were completely unnecessary since we knew, secretly, that Japan wanted to surrender--though they never made any official appeal to do so until after the atomic bombs were dropped.

Defenders of the atomic bombings, on the other hand say, that American Intelligence completely over-estimated the power of the Japanese army, which certainly is true, considering we were also planning on inland invasion at the same time as well.

[Fawkes]

Then the Soviet Union went and joined the war for, what was it, 6 days, just so that they could reap the rewards.

[chimx]

reap the rewards

yup, and they did.