Sep 23, · The Cold War was called cold because the featured heavyweights, the Soviet Union and the United States, were nominally "at peace." But they engaged in circling each other, jabbing at each other, testing each others’ supposed weaknesses in every part of the world, in the Byzantine politics of the United Nations, and in a couple of dozen other Cold War (Polish: Zimna wojna) is a historical drama film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Janusz Głowacki and Piotr Borkowski. It is an international co-production by producers in Poland, France and the United Kingdom. Set in Poland and France during the Cold War from the late s until the s, the story follows a musical director who discovers a The Cold War and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union were vital international issues throughout his political career. His inaugural address stressed the contest between the free world and the communist world, and he pledged that the American people would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any
The Cold War | JFK Library
William G. McGowan Theatre The National Archives and Record Administration Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC NOTE: I am not a historianso don't look for dispassionate recording of the Cold War in what follows. I was of course an eyewitness to bits and pieces of the whole period we call the Cold War - but don't look for fragmentary anecdotes which would not do justice to the serious purpose of this symposium. What I will try to do is something in between - an essay about this fascinating almost-half-century — not just what happened, but why, and especially why it came out the way it did.
I was fortunate to work, during the s, with a superlative writer named Thomas W. Wilson, Jr. Cold War and Common Sensehe called it — and indeed his book is not only readable history but full of common sense, about matters which were most uncommon and often nonsensical. When did the Cold War start? For it started when the President of the United States essay on the cold war to protect Iran from our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The wartime allies had used Iran — with the Soviets occupying northern Iran and the British and American forces occupying the south — as a back-door Allied supply line to the Red Army.
At their Teheran Conference in all the allies had agreed to clear out of Iran within six months of an armistice in Europe. The Western allies withdrew before that deadline, which was March 6, The Soviets did not. Indeed, in early March one Red Army column started south from Azerbaijan toward the Persian capital, Teheran, and another swung west toward Iraq and Turkey. Iran, Britain and the U. So — it's still March -- Harry Truman decided after consulting only with his Secretary of State, James F.
Before the end of March Andrei Gromyko announced that Soviet troops would leave Iran, and before long they actually left. The Western allies — Britain, France, and the U.
That summer, another crisis brewed. The Soviets proposed to put an end to the international supervision of the Dardanelles and establish Soviet bases in Turkey. Twenty-five divisions of the Red Army were maneuvering near the Turkish border to show they meant it. and British diplomacy backed by the aircraft carrier Franklin D. The climax came when the Greek government, controlling only a "shrunken area" around Athens, appealed for international help.
Almost at the same moment, in Februarythe British government delivered to Washington a formal note saying that it could no longer afford to help either Greece or Turkey beyond the end of March.
Also in February, a rigged election put Communists in power in Poland — and another piece of Allied postwar planning, the Yalta agreement, was snuffed out by Soviet noncompliance. In American politics the stars were not aligned for a strong reaction to all this.
Americans were delighted the war was over, welcomed the wholesale demobilization of troops, They were looking for some normalcy, maybe even some prosperity. They were certainly far from ready for another kind of war. In Novemberessay on the cold war, U. voters had put Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress.
Senator Essay on the cold war Taft, "Mr. Republican" in those days, was focused, he said, on "straightening out our domestic affairs, essay on the cold war. Yet in Marchwith the indispensable help of a senior Republican, essay on the cold war, Senator Arthur Vandenbe rg of Michigan, President Truman laid it on the line in a historic address to a joint session of Congress.
He called for massive help to both Greece and Turkey -- which was authorized and funded by overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House in less than two months. The great confrontation we came to call the Cold War had quite suddenly become the next stage of world history. What began in Iran in lasted for 45 years, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in Four months after the Truman Doctrine speech, a Commencement address by Secretary of State George C. Marshall added another theme to the sympho ny of Western cooperation.
He had just come back from weeks of fruitless haggling at a Moscow conference of foreign ministers. On the flight home, he had witnessed the hopelessness of a Europe soon to be described by Winston Churchill as "a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate. The Marshall speech was not in itself a cold war maneuver.
The Marshall Plan was a brilliant series of improvisations on a deceptively simple theme: Europe needed help, and only America could supply it. Precisely because it wasn't a cold essay on the cold war move, it turned out to be a a key to the cold war's outcome.
It was even open to the Eastern Europeans; but once the Soviet foreign minister Molotov attended a first planning session in Paris, the Kremlin pulled its satellites out of what looked, from Moscow, like a dangerous opportunity to cooperate. Measured by the cost of failure, let alone the standards of modern war, the Marshall Plan was not expensive.
Its first-year cost, five billion dollars, did provide something like five percent of Western Europe's GNP. The Marshall Plan provided above all a source of dynamism-in-action to reverse a growing hopelessness in Europe.
With the Marshall Plan, the Western Europeans were able to jump-start their economic recovery from World War II; to commence a bold if baffling effort to build a European Union; and to create an inclusive framework within which a new Germany could be both strong and safe.
And then, the Europeans were able to face east with such comparative prosperity and panache that their Eastern European neighbors in time decided to join the Western future — and the Soviet Union itself eventually dissolved.
But meanwhile, the Marshall Plan essay on the cold war a wide range of Soviet efforts to sabotage it. Communist posters plastered the walls of the cities, essay on the cold war. Handbills were passed out to the workers leaving their factories, essay on the cold war. News sheets appeared on the walls of remote villages. Counterpropaganda was torn down or painted red by Communist crews in the streets by night.
The radio programs from Eastern Europe kept up a drumfire of anti-Marshall Plan messages. Riots were staged at U. information exhibits, essay on the cold war. Bundles of U. The Communists spent seven times as much for propaganda as the United States spent for the Marshall Plan information service.
services worked overtime and well. The best film crews that could be assembled turned out news clips, film magazines, and documentaries at prodigious rates. We Americans also derived from the Marshall Plan benefits that are as hard to quantify as they were obvious to see and to feel.
We were associated with a dependable group of European allies in a troublesome postwar world. We helped build a large and congenial market in which to buy and sell. We helped create a political attractant that lured Eastern Essay on the cold war away from totalitarian rule, and withered Soviet Communism on the vine.
These statistics are crude but telling. They deserve a place in any history of postwar Europe. Helmut Schmidt of Germany said it all in one sentence: "The high probability of failure was averted thanks to leaders who did not act according to plan, but instead relied on their moral and national visions as well as their common sense.
Even before the Marshall Plan got under way, the transatlantic allies had put together a military alliance designed to persuade the Soviet Union that military militancy would essay on the cold war pay, essay on the cold war.
General Assembly two decades later, in The North Atlantic Alliance was signed in Six decades later, despite pressures, threats, ultimatums, provocations, and crises, there has been no war among, or armed attack on, the members of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Anyone with a smattering of modern European history can appreciate how extraordinary and unprecedented a piece of good news this is. Something must have been done right. But shining through the military half-measures and the tepid ministerial communiqués was a moral solidarity that somehow made more out of what was objectively not enough.
The real deterrent to Soviet ambitions was this: by and large, with occasional and temporary exceptions which fortunately turned out not to be critical, the Atlantic allies stuck together. The glue that has held the allies together is a large, complex, and dynamic bargain — partly an understanding among the Europeans, but most importantly a deal between them and the United States of America.
The specifics of the bargain, and the comparative burdens to be shared, keep changing. But the constant is that there has to be a bargain. The price of mutual help is self-help: "We Americans will help you Europeans, if you will a help defend yourselves, and b get on with building a united Europe.
The transatlantic bargain, kept alive by continuous consultation, kept 7, U. nuclear weapons and someU. troops in Europe for the long generation we call the Cold War. Whether that was enough for defense we fortunately never had to discover. It did turn out, in the end, to be enough for détente.
The Cold War was called cold because the featured heavyweights, the Soviet Union and the United States, were nominally "at peace. One early bout was in divided Berlin, where the Soviets had a natural advantage: Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany.
In they suspended all road and rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany. In response the Truman administration decided to supply Berlin entirely by airlift.
This extraordinary operation, run by Air Force General Curtis LeMay, came to be known as the LeMay Coal and Feed Company. It "flew in corridors only twenty miles wide, at staggered altitudes, in all weather, twenty-four hours a day, sometimes harassed by Soviet fighter planes, and landing at airports only four minutes from each other.
At its peak, an incredible 1, trips brought 13, essay on the cold war, tons of supplies into Berlin within a twenty-four hour period. More than ten months after it began, and more thanflights later, the Berlin airlift came to an end. The Western Allies were still in Berlin [and] the essay on the cold war war was still cold.
But the world seemed to be heating up fast. In the Soviet Union tested an atomic explosion. In the North Koreans rolled south across the 38th parallel in their Russian-made tanks. Under a UN mandate, the U.
Writing a Cold War Essay: 5 Things You Should Mention
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Sep 23, · The Cold War was called cold because the featured heavyweights, the Soviet Union and the United States, were nominally "at peace." But they engaged in circling each other, jabbing at each other, testing each others’ supposed weaknesses in every part of the world, in the Byzantine politics of the United Nations, and in a couple of dozen other Sep 20, · An age of foreign interference. Foreign interference became a hallmark of the past-World War II era, even its first months. Soviet political interference in eastern European nations was a contributing factor to the Cold War and the formation of an Iron Curtain separating Eastern and Western Europe.. During the late s, the United States offered support and inducements to shape the Nov 07, · 10 Lines on Vietnam War Essay in English. 1. The Vietnam War was a conflict between the communist and the capitalist countries and was a part of the Cold War. 2. The Vietnam War was a controversial issue in the United States. 3. It was the first war to feature in live television coverage. 4
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