The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [242]
The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans, Prange, Gordon W. (1999), Brassey’s, ISBN 1574882228
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Buchanan Crown Publisher, 2009.
Chapter 16
The Cold War 1945 to 1989
The Cold War dominated the time between the end of World War II and 1990. The USSR and the United States of America held the trump cards, nuclear bombs and missiles. The two nations controlled the fate of the world in the sense that they controlled whether the world would come to an abrupt end. While the Cold War progressed so did society which went on as if the threat of nuclear obliteration was just an apparition. The Space Race, computer development, superhighway construction, jet airliner development, the creation of an international phone system, the advent of television, enormous progress in medicine, and the creation of mass consumerism—among many other things—all played a part in the world that developed after World War II. However, much of the world progressed poorly compared to the Western Democracies. In Africa, India, Asia, and the Middle East, colonialism was in its last throws and transitioning to new ways of governance was rough. Hundreds of wars accompanied by mass killing marred the world emerging from eighteenth century colonialism. Nothing has been easy in this ongoing birth of a modern world.
The Cold War began immediately after World War II concluded, or perhaps even before, and ended when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989. There is little doubt that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted a world based on a sizeable level of trust between the United States and the Soviet Union. For reasons that are hard to determine, he trusted the dictator and murderer of millions, Joseph Stalin. Winston Churchill tried to warm up to Stalin, but quickly discerned Stalin was not trustworthy. He saw that Roosevelt was falling for the duplicitous Stalin’s words of compromise and attempted to warn Roosevelt, but to no avail.
At war’s end, Roosevelt was no longer the president of the United States, and Churchill was no longer the prime minister of Great Britain. Roosevelt died in the last months of the war and Churchill was voted out of office. The new men, Truman as president of the United States and Atlee as prime minister of Great Britain, took over where their predecessors left off. As for Truman, he was in the dark about everything. The atomic bomb was news to him. Roosevelt had told him nothing; as a result, Truman was on his own when confronting the problems of a new world filled with massive armies and atomic weapons.
One of Truman’s first decisions was to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in an attempt to end the war. Some have said it was the first act of the Cold War, designed to show Stalin the power possessed by the United States, and to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Truman, however, said he used the atomic bomb to end World War II.
The Cold War was going to be something entirely new for planet Earth. Actions in the international arena were not what they might seem to be. Some event may have a hundred starting points, no real end point, and what actually occurred might be foggy at best and denied by everyone in every government everywhere. It is very hard to tell the history of something so close in time when a lot of emotional baggage is still around and documents are all but impossible to come by in some cases. The Cold War was fought with technology, spies, and nerves. Clandestine operations were often the key to everything, and secret operations are not disclosed by most governments until many years have passed—if ever.
Economics played a large part in the Cold War. In Europe, with US help, a recovery without precedent took place between the end of the war and 1970. The recovery rate in the output of goods exceeded 200 percent. In 1957 France, Italy, and Germany led the way in starting a customs union, the European Economic Community. This union was the