The Cold War

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes, events, and effects of the Cold War in the period after the Second World War (Skill 1.B; LO C).
• Account for KC-4.1.IV.A: how deep tensions between the Soviet Union and the West produced the division of Europe described in the West as the Iron Curtain despite efforts to maintain international cooperation through the new United Nations.
• Account for KC-4.1.IV.B: how the Cold War played out on a global stage and involved propaganda campaigns, covert operations, limited 'hot wars' in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and an arms race carrying the threat of nuclear war.
• Explain the principal Cold War crises (Berlin, Korea, Suez, Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the Yom Kippur War, Afghanistan) and their cumulative shaping of the long East-West confrontation.
• Explain the nuclear arms race and the principal arms-control instruments that shaped the late Cold War strategic balance.

Topic 9.3 covers the global Cold War from approximately 1947 to 1991. KC-4.1.IV.A captures the diplomatic origin: despite efforts to maintain international cooperation through the new United Nations, deep tensions between the Soviet Union and the West produced the division of Europe described in the West as the Iron Curtain. KC-4.1.IV.B captures the global character: the Cold War played out on a global stage and involved propaganda campaigns, covert operations, limited 'hot wars' in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and an arms race carrying the threat of nuclear war. The lesson is structured in five parts: the wartime cooperation and its postwar dissolution; the principal early Cold War crises (1947-1962); the period of detente and renewed confrontation (1962-1985); the late Cold War resolution (1985-1991); and the global proxy-war dimension.

Wartime cooperation and its postwar dissolution. The wartime Allied coalition between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union held through the war but rested on substantial unresolved disagreements about the postwar settlement. The United Nations Charter, signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945 and in force on 24 October 1945, was intended to provide the institutional framework for postwar cooperation; the principal United Nations institutions (the General Assembly, the Security Council with its five permanent members and veto power, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat under Secretary-General Trygve Lie from February 1946) reflected the wartime expectation that the Allied cooperation would extend into peacetime. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 had outlined the broad postwar settlement; the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945 had begun to address its concrete implementation.

The wartime cooperation did not survive the political settlement of liberated Europe. The principal disagreements crystallized between 1945 and 1947: the political composition of the postwar Polish government (the Soviet Union recognized the Communist-dominated Lublin Government; the Western Allies pressed for the inclusion of the London-based Polish government-in-exile); the long-term postwar status of Germany (the Soviet Union pressed for substantial reparations and the maintenance of Germany as a unified entity under Allied control; the Western Allies favored economic reconstruction within the Western occupation zones); the Soviet failure to withdraw from northern Iran by the wartime-agreed deadline of 2 March 1946 (the Iran crisis was the first major Cold War flashpoint); the developing Greek Civil War (1946-1949) between Communist and royalist forces that the British government could no longer support after February 1947; and the Soviet pressure on Turkey over the Turkish Straits.

George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 22 February 1946 from the United States Embassy in Moscow articulated the doctrine of containment that organized subsequent American Cold War strategy: the Soviet Union was a fundamentally hostile but cautious power that could be contained through "the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points." Kennan's anonymous "Mr. X" article ("The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs) made the doctrine public. The Truman Doctrine of 12 March 1947 (Topic 9.1 covered in detail), the Marshall Plan of June 1947 (Topic 9.2), the Cominform of September 1947, the Berlin Blockade of June 1948 to May 1949, and the establishment of NATO on 4 April 1949 produced the principal early-Cold-War institutional architecture.

Early Cold War crises (1947-1962). The principal early-Cold-War crises crystallized the East-West confrontation across Europe and the broader world. The Berlin Blockade of 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949 (Topic 9.1) was the first major European flashpoint. The Korean War of 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953 was the first major Cold War armed conflict: North Korean forces invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950; the United Nations Security Council (with the Soviet Union absent in protest of the United Nations' continuing recognition of the Republic of China rather than the People's Republic of China) authorized the United Nations Command on 27 June 1950; United States, South Korean, and other UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur (subsequently relieved by Truman on 11 April 1951 over the question of expanded war into China) fought the Chinese People's Volunteer Army that intervened in October 1950; the war ended in armistice (signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953) with the original 38th-parallel division substantially preserved. American casualties: approximately 36,500 dead. Korean military and civilian casualties: approximately 3 million. The war established the pattern of Cold War limited proxy wars that KC-4.1.IV.B identifies.

Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 25 February 1956 to the 20th Party Congress denounced Stalin's "cult of personality" and produced the destabilizing process of de-Stalinization that the Hungarian Revolution of 23 October to 4 November 1956 demonstrated: the Hungarian Revolution combined the rapid emergence of Imre Nagy's reform-Communist government, Hungary's unilateral withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (announced 1 November 1956), and the subsequent Soviet military invasion (4 November 1956) that produced approximately 2,500 Hungarian deaths and approximately 200,000 refugees. The simultaneous Suez Crisis (29 October to 7 November 1956), in which Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal that Egyptian President Nasser had nationalized on 26 July 1956, demonstrated the limits of postwar Anglo-French independent military action and the United States' postwar primacy in the Western alliance. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 produced the Berlin Wall (constructed from 13 August 1961) that physically embodied the Iron Curtain through 1989.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 16 to 28 October 1962 was the closest the Cold War came to direct nuclear conflict. American U-2 reconnaissance flights on 14 October 1962 confirmed the Soviet emplacement of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba; President John F. Kennedy's address to the nation on 22 October 1962 announced a naval "quarantine" of Cuba (the term avoided the legal complication of "blockade"); the subsequent thirteen-day standoff produced the Soviet agreement on 28 October 1962 to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American commitment not to invade Cuba and a private American agreement to withdraw the Jupiter intermediate-range missiles from Turkey. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 5 August 1963 (signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom; banning atmospheric, underwater, and outer-space nuclear tests but not underground tests) was the first major Cold War arms-control instrument. The crisis substantially shaped subsequent superpower communication: the Moscow-Washington direct communications "hot line" was established by the Memorandum of Understanding of 20 June 1963.

Detente and renewed confrontation (1962-1985). The post-Cuban-Missile-Crisis period produced gradual mutual recognition that direct superpower military confrontation was unsustainable. The principal mid-period developments include the Vietnam War (American military involvement from 1955 onward; substantial American escalation under Lyndon B. Johnson from August 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; American withdrawal completed under the Paris Peace Accords of 27 January 1973; the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces on 30 April 1975); the Prague Spring of January to August 1968 and its suppression by Warsaw Pact intervention on 20-21 August 1968 (the Brezhnev Doctrine of November 1968 articulated the Soviet right to intervene in Warsaw Pact states facing internal "deviations"); and the Sino-Soviet split (announced publicly in 1961 over ideological differences and Soviet refusal to share nuclear-weapons technology with China; produced limited Sino-Soviet border combat at the Ussuri River in March 1969).

Detente (the French word for "relaxation of tension") organized superpower relations from approximately 1969 through 1979. Principal detente instruments include Richard Nixon's February 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China (which substantially reorganized the Cold War strategic geometry); the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I signed in Moscow on 26 May 1972, limiting strategic-nuclear-launcher numbers and including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; SALT II signed in Vienna on 18 June 1979 but never ratified by the United States Senate); the Helsinki Accords of 1 August 1975 (Topic 9.1; the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe with its three "baskets" including the Basket III human-rights provisions that subsequent dissident movements would invoke); and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project of July 1975 (the first joint United States-Soviet crewed space flight).

The Yom Kippur War of 6 to 25 October 1973 (Egyptian and Syrian attack on Israel; Israeli counter-offensive that crossed the Suez Canal and entered Syrian territory; superpower-mediated cease-fire) demonstrated the global reach of the Cold War: the Soviet Union supplied Egypt and Syria; the United States substantially resupplied Israel under Operation Nickel Grass; the resulting OPEC oil embargo against the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, and Rhodesia produced the 1973 oil shock that ended the postwar economic miracle (Topic 9.2). The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began on 24 December 1979 ended the detente period: the United States imposed economic sanctions, boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and substantially expanded covert support for the Afghan mujahideen through the CIA's Operation Cyclone (running from approximately 1980 through 1989, providing approximately $2 billion in covert assistance via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate).

Late Cold War resolution (1985-1991). The late Cold War combined renewed Western pressure (Ronald Reagan's election as President in November 1980; the Reagan administration's substantial defense buildup and Strategic Defense Initiative announced 23 March 1983; Margaret Thatcher's parallel British government from May 1979) with the cumulative dysfunction of the Soviet command economy and the eventual emergence of reformist Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 11 March 1985). Gorbachev's reform programs (glasnost, perestroika, demokratizatsiya) attempted to reform the Soviet system internally; the parallel renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine (signaled at the United Nations General Assembly on 7 December 1988) authorized Eastern European reform without the threat of Soviet military intervention.

The Reagan-Gorbachev relationship produced substantial late-Cold-War arms-control progress: the Reykjavik Summit of 11-12 October 1986 (which approached but did not reach a comprehensive nuclear-disarmament agreement); Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on 12 June 1987; the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 8 December 1987 (the first arms-control instrument to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons; eliminated approximately 2,692 missiles by the 1991 deadline). The 1989 revolutions across Eastern Europe (Topic 9.7), the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact on 1 July 1991, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991 produced the formal end of the Cold War.

The global proxy-war dimension (KC-4.1.IV.B). The Cold War organized political life across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean through proxy conflicts that the principal antagonists supported but did not directly participate in. Principal Cold War proxy conflicts beyond those covered above include: the Greek Civil War (1946-1949); the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960); the First Indochina War (1946-1954); the Suez Crisis (1956); the Congo Crisis (1960-1965); the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002, with Cuban troop presence supporting the MPLA government and South African and American support for UNITA and the FNLA); the Mozambican Civil War (1977-1992); the Ethiopian-Somali War (1977-1978); the Nicaraguan Contra War (1979-1990); the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992); and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989). The cumulative proxy-conflict casualty total reached approximately 20 million people across the Cold War period.

The propaganda and covert-operations dimension was extensive. The principal Western institutions: the Voice of America (founded 1942, expanded postwar), Radio Free Europe (founded 1949), Radio Liberty (founded 1951), and the United States Information Agency (1953-1999). The principal Soviet institutions: the international communist publications coordinated through the Cominform (1947-1956) and subsequent Soviet international-broadcasting institutions. The principal intelligence services: the United States Central Intelligence Agency (founded 1947); the Soviet KGB (founded 1954, the principal direct successor of the wartime NKVD); and the East German Stasi (Ministry for State Security, founded 1950). Principal CIA covert operations include the 1953 Iranian coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh; the 1954 Guatemalan coup against Jacobo Arbenz; the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; and the long-running covert support of the Afghan mujahideen. Principal KGB and Soviet operations include the 1956 Hungarian and 1968 Czechoslovak interventions; the long-running ideological and disinformation campaigns; and the Soviet bloc's domestic surveillance apparatus.

The Skill 1.B argument. Topic 9.3's suggested skill is 1.B (Explanation: explain a historical concept, development, or process). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should explain the multi-phase character of the Cold War: the wartime cooperation and its postwar dissolution; the early Cold War crises (1947-1962); detente and renewed confrontation (1962-1985); and the late Cold War resolution (1985-1991). Each phase was distinct in its political-strategic register but cumulative in its production of the long confrontation. Second, students should explain the relationship between the European center and the global proxy-war periphery: the Cold War's principal European institutional flashpoints (Berlin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia) developed in parallel with the proxy wars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and the two dimensions reinforced each other in the cumulative pattern that KC-4.1.IV.B identifies.

Three sources framing the long Cold War: the doctrine that organized American Cold War strategy, the peak of nuclear confrontation, and the late Cold War rhetorical climax.

1. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Explain the multi-phase character of the long Cold War: wartime cooperation and dissolution (1945-1947); early Cold War crises (1947-1962); detente and renewed confrontation (1962-1985); late Cold War resolution (1985-1991). What distinguishes each phase, and what carries across all four?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.1.IV.A: how did deep tensions between the Soviet Union and the West produce the division of Europe described as the Iron Curtain despite the wartime cooperation and the founding of the United Nations? Cite specific 1945-1947 disagreements.
3. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Explain the global character of the Cold War. Cite specific proxy conflicts in at least three of: Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. How did the proxy wars relate to the European center of the confrontation?
4. (Causation) Account for the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 as the peak of Cold War nuclear confrontation. What political-strategic logic produced the crisis, and what produced its resolution?
5. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Explain the late Cold War resolution between 1985 and 1991. How did Gorbachev's internal reforms, the renewed Western pressure under Reagan and Thatcher, and the cumulative Soviet bloc dysfunction combine to produce the end of the Cold War?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.