Cold War: Mutually-Assured Destruction, Proxy Wars, and More
After the Americans ended World War Two with back-to-back nuclear detonations over Japan, soon after Japan’s surrender, the United States and wartime Ally The Soviet Union began a 45-year-long Cold War that saw the world teeter repeatedly on the brink of mutually-assured nuclear annihilation.
Truman’s Communism Containment Plan
Beginning in early 1947, President Harry S. Truman announced his Truman Doctrine, which ultimately pushed back against Russian-sponsored communist insurgencies in Turkey and Greece, igniting an arms race between the two superpowers, as well as the creation and detonation of atomic bombs far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bay of Pigs and Missile Crisis
As the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction raised the anxiety levels of average Americans in the 1950s and 60s, Americans built bomb shelters and practiced attack drills in schools and other public places, reaching its zenith with the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Proxy Wars and Space Race
The Cold War also led to proxy wars between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, first in Korea from 1950 to 1953, then in Vietnam from 1955 to the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Others include the Chinese Civil War of 1944 to ’49, The Iran Crisis of 1946, the Paraguayan Civil War of 1947, the Malayan Emergency of 1948 to 1960 and some 50 more regional proxy wars during the Cold War era.
The Cold War also launched the Space Race, beginning with the Soviet Union’s early lead in their 1957 launch of Sputnik and ending when Americans repeatedly inhabited the moon.
It also sparked the Second Red Scare in America beginning in 1947, leading to congressional hearings into possible communist subversives in Hollywood and beyond, culminating in an anticommunist witch hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, which cost hundreds of people their jobs and reputations during a dark period known as McCarthyism.
Gorbachev Reforms Soviet Union
After years of political stalemate, economic stagnation and ethnic separatism, by the late 1980s, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev instituted a series of political and economic reforms to shore up the Soviet Union’s steady downward fall, infusing the nation’s historic command economy with elements of liberal western economics.
By late 1991, however, Gorbachev’ Glasnost Perestroika reforms had failed amidst catastrophic political and social pressures, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which granted independence and sovereign rule to the 15 republics that made up the former U.S.S.R., making the Cold War, one of the most dangerous times in recorded human history.