Chapter 3

COLD WAR, 1945–1952

Tyranny over the mind is the most complete and most brutal type of tyranny.

—Milovan Djilas

We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and
underestimate the strength of the people are wrong.

—Mao Zedong

After almost a quarter of a century of distant rivalry followed by a successful, if prickly, four-year partnership
during World War II, the West and the Soviet Union came face to face in 1945 and over the next seven years
developed into resolute enemies. This antagonism was accentuated by the presence of nuclear weapons,
ideological antagonism, and an unparalleled mobilization of civilians imbued with the fear of an imminent
World War III. By 1949, the Big Three’s wartime practices of direct consultation and compromise had
ceased, and for the next three years the United States and the USSR became locked in a Cold War.

TWO RIVALS EMERGE

The rupture did not occur at once. Indeed, there has been an ongoing—and ultimately unresolvable—debate
among historians over when the Grand Alliance dissolved, when the Cold War began, and who was
responsible. This origins debate, heated for a half century by partisan positions, has now been tempered by the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives as well as by the passage of time and the challenge
of new global problems, all of which may obscure the Great Powers’ actual situation, decisions, and
interactions after 1945.
The rupture in the Grand Alliance occurred in the wake of the immense human and material devastation in
World War II. Some sixty million people had died, and the combatants’ bombs had left a swath of destruction
from London to Tokyo. Moreover, the losses were uneven. While large parts of Europe and Asia faced
enormous human and physical losses along with a flood of wounded soldiers, hungry and diseased civilians,
and fleeing refugees, the United States emerged from the war with no physical damage to its mainland, a
death toll (four hundred thousand) that was only a fraction of the USSR’s loss of thirty million people, and a
booming economy with a $211 billion gross national product.
There was also no “zero hour” in 1945. The total defeat of the Axis powers had given the victors not only a
heady sense of power but also a new realization of their vulnerability. The Soviet and US responses of “Never
again!” to the attacks on June 22 and December 7 necessitated an active defense of their national interests,

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clothed in the garb of “security.” Each expected its partners to comply with its expansive desires for
maintaining this security, and each was irate at every demonstration of the other’s bad faith and
aggressiveness, sentiments augmented by both sides’ extensive and vigorous intelligence gathering and by their
less frequent personal encounters.
Consequently, along with the immense tasks of postwar reconstruction came the perhaps inevitable clash of
interests among the Grand Alliance. Inevitable too was the expansion of the victors’ rivalry. Although Europe
was the source and the core of the Cold War, the rest of the world was ineluctably drawn in. Because the
struggle with the Axis had been a global one and Europe’s empires had been disrupted, Asia and the Middle
East, and later Africa and South America, would all be engulfed by the US-Soviet struggle.
Leading personalities still counted, but in a different way than in wartime. President Truman and Prime
Minister Attlee headed vast political, diplomatic, and military establishments weighed down by global
burdens over which they could never exert complete control. In choosing their diplomatic paths the novice US
and British chiefs navigated among rival advisers, bureaucracies, legislators, and publicists at home and
beleaguered and tough foreign governments abroad. Even Stalin, who formulated Soviet foreign policy almost
single-handedly, received conflicting advice from his colleagues and often faced intractable client states
outside his borders.
The Great Power rivalry that followed World War II was fueled by a resurgence of ideological competition,
which had been restrained in wartime. Stalin, brandishing his role as leader of the antifascist crusade, sought
to win adherents to communism’s collective values; Western leaders championed the necessity of personal and
economic freedom; and both warned their citizens that any gains by the other side would endanger their way
of life.
The East-West clash also became systemic, rooted in almost every institution—economic, military, political,
diplomatic, religious, and even cultural. For a world newly freed from war, the prospects were menacing.
Contemplating the dire prospect of “two or three monstrous superstates, each possessed of a weapon by which
millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them,” George Orwell in his
October 19, 1945, essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” used the term “Cold War” to describe “a peace that is
no peace” and grimly predicted that pressures would develop within both sides to ensure conformity and stifle
dissent. The first seven postwar years thus had the semblance of a global compression chamber, but one that
was also porous and short-lived—and unavoidably so.

NUREMBERG: THE FINAL COLLABORATION

Shortly after the Potsdam meeting, on August 8, 1945, British, French, Soviet, and US jurists adopted a
detailed charter governing the international military tribunal that would conduct the trial of the major
German war criminals. This momentous undertaking—first agreed upon in Moscow in 1943 and confirmed
at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam but requiring six weeks of laborious negotiations in the summer of 1945—
opened on November 21 in Nuremberg, the site of the Nazis’ spectacular annual rallies and where their
notorious 1935 racial laws were adopted. Before its end on October 1, 1946, the four-nation tribunal heard
hundreds of witnesses, scrutinized thousands of pages of captured Reich documents, meted out sentences to

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twenty-four individuals and seven organizations, and produced an unprecedented and voluminous historical
record of aggressive war, state violence against combatants and civilians, and crimes against humanity.
The Cold War dimension of the trials is surprisingly unexplored. One of the final acts of the Grand
Alliance, the Nuremberg trials were immediately controversial: defended for giving voice to the Nazis’ victims
and replacing vengeance with justice, but also criticized for their faulty legal practices and politically motivated
judgments toward particular defendants. The preparations for the trials by the four nations had been largely
harmonious, but by early 1946 the growing East-West tension entered the courtroom. Much to the Soviets’
chagrin, the defense attorneys raised the sensitive issues of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Katyn massacre. In
contrast, the United States, Britain, and France were able to block any discussion of the Allied bombing of
German cities and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they prevailed in meting out lenient
sentences to German bankers and industrialists as well as to submarine captains.*
Nonetheless, the Nuremberg collaboration among the three Western governments and the USSR survived
quietly for four decades, enacted through the formalities of four-power control over the Spandau Prison in
Berlin, where seven Nazi prisoners were incarcerated, and ending only with the death of the last inmate,
Rudolf Hess, in 1987. The international tribunal was dissolved in 1946 and followed by separate trials in
Europe and by the US-dominated proceedings against Japanese war criminals, all raising more accusations of
legal lapses and political expediency. As the Grand Alliance unraveled and the Cold War expanded, the
principles and practices of international jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes of aggression disappeared
from the world for almost a half century.†

THE RUPTURE

On the eve of the Nuremberg trials, the first foreign ministers’ conference in London ended abruptly on
October 2, 1945, demonstrating the widening gap among the victors. Not only had they failed to reach
agreement over the future of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but they had also clashed over the control of
atomic weapons. Secretary of State Byrnes, although annoyed by Foreign Minister Molotov’s audacity, was
also fearful of a permanent rupture and thus persuaded Stalin to convene another foreign ministers’ meeting.
In a reprise of Tehran and Yalta, Byrnes arrived in Moscow in December 1945 brimming with confidence
that US power would enable him to break the stalemate with the USSR, and he held two long meetings with
Stalin. Ignoring British grumbling, US and Soviet diplomats seemed poised to work together.
The result was a series of US-Soviet arrangements bolstering their respective interests and crafting
compromises to bridge their differences. In return for the West’s tacit acknowledgment of the communist-
dominated governments in Romania and Bulgaria and the Soviets’ occupation and looting of Manchuria (as
well as the transfer of Japanese arms to the Chinese communists), Stalin grudgingly recognized America’s
leading role in Japan and the temporary presence of its troops and bases in the rest of China. The agreement
on Korea—far more strategically vital to the USSR than to the United States (which was nonetheless fearful
of a communist takeover, à la Poland)—was a masterpiece of Great Power improvisation. Ignoring strong
local sentiments for the country’s unity and independence, the diplomats superimposed an ultimately
unworkable four-power trusteeship on the Soviet-US military partition at the thirty-eighth parallel, paving
the way for Korea’s eventual division.

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 Disagreements were quietly papered over in Moscow. Although Great Britain, the USSR, and the United
States had agreed to create a UN Commission on Atomic Energy, they differed fundamentally over
information sharing, surveillance, and existing stocks of atomic weapons.* There was also no resolution of
their conflicting policies on Turkey and Iran. Shortly after the Moscow meeting, on the last day of 1945, the
Soviet Union firmly detached itself from the postwar US-led international economic system by announcing its
withdrawal from the Bretton Woods agreements, which were signed in Washington by twenty-seven
governments on December 27, 1945.
Whereas the international press greeted the Moscow accords as a new and positive step toward world peace,
the reality was grimmer. In stark contrast to the aftermath of World War I, by January 1946—five months
after an even more ruinous war and the total defeat of their enemies—the victors had neither convened a
peace conference nor produced separate peace treaties with Germany and its five European allies.† In
Germany the occupying powers were pursuing competing strategies. While proclaiming their conciliatory
intentions, their leaders began recoiling from a thorny and increasingly unpopular relationship. Britain and
the United States blamed the Soviet Union for the unsettled world. Taking the lead was Foreign Secretary
Ernest Bevin, the novice but tough diplomat and former member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet who
espoused Labour’s traditional antipathy toward Moscow. Truman, increasingly irritated by US inability to
alter Soviet positions, immediately scolded the returning Byrnes for appeasing Stalin. Indeed, the American
public, stirred by press reports of the USSR’s suppression of the anticommunist opposition in Eastern Europe,
its vetoes in the new UN Security Council, and, especially, its vast spy network in North America,‡ was
becoming increasingly alarmed over the Kremlin’s long-term goals.
The first postwar elections for the Supreme Soviet provided a platform for Stalin’s response. In his much
noted, often misinterpreted speech to the communist faithful on February 9, 1946, the Soviet dictator sent a
mixed message, praising the wartime achievements of the Grand Alliance but also underscoring capitalism’s
bellicose tendencies, announcing the expansion of Soviet civilian production, and warning of the rapid buildup
of its industrial and military power to protect the Motherland “against all contingencies.” Party hard-liners G.
M. Malenkov and L. M. Kaganovich went further, proposing that the Soviet Union go its own way in world
affairs.
The West escalated the rhetoric. In Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, with Truman at his side,
Churchill warned that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across the center of Europe. Although rejecting the
idea that war was either imminent or inevitable and advocating continued dialogue with Moscow, Britain’s
opposition leader insisted on the indispensability of Anglo-American unity and an increase of the West’s
armed might. Stalin’s retort, an unprecedented, scripted interview published in the official Soviet newspaper
Pravda, characterized his old partner as a “racist” and “warmonger,” in a sly reference to Hitler.

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Map 3. After World War II, Southeastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey) and the Middle East
(Iran) became the first sites of US-Soviet disputes.

Behind the scenes, disgruntled diplomats also weighed in. From Moscow in February and March 1946
came detailed dissections of the Soviets’ nationalist and Marxist mind-set and their aggressive behavior toward
their neighbors by the US and British envoys George Kennan and Frank Roberts, who also revived prewar
historical and racial stereotypes about Russia itself. Six months later the Soviet ambassador in Washington,
Nikolai Novikov, delivered his critique of US “striving for world supremacy” as witnessed by its thirst to
control the world’s economic resources and its atomic saber rattling against the Soviet Union. All three
diplomats came to the identical conclusion: the prospects for further collaboration with an aggressive power
were dismal.
There were also dissenting voices to the emerging US-Soviet confrontation. In September 1946 the US
secretary of commerce and former vice president Henry Wallace advocated peaceful cooperation with the
USSR but also urged Stalin to maintain an open door to US trade with Eastern Europe. Thereupon some
Americans criticized Wallace for his naïve idealism, while others took him to task for upholding US economic
imperialism.
It is thus not surprising that 1946 witnessed the first direct clashes between the West and the Soviet Union.
The area of contestation was Iran, and at issue was the Soviet refusal to withdraw troops from its northern
zone by the March 2, 1946, deadline.* Stalin had decided to exploit separatist movements in Iran to force oil
concessions from the Tehran government. Observers also suspected another motive: to hinder US and British
oil companies from prospecting in the north. At the last minute Stalin summoned the Iranian prime minister
to Moscow and, with the threat of Soviet troop movements toward Tehran, demanded an oil concession.
Once the deadline had passed without a Soviet withdrawal, the United States and Britain went into high
diplomatic gear in defense of the sanctity of international treaties and their oil interests. After instigating an
Iranian appeal to the United Nations, Byrnes publicly condemned Moscow’s “imperialism” before the Security
Council, causing a dramatic walkout by Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Union’s permanent UN representative.
The old diplomatic niceties among the three had ended. Stalin, surprised by the furor and fearing US
retaliation elsewhere, backed off. Prudently, he removed his troops on May 9 but secured the oil concession

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(which the Iranian parliament refused to ratify). He also withheld support from his Iranian clients, who were
crushed by the government later that year.
The Iranian episode was the first chilling lesson in Cold War brinkmanship. Instead of a bargain struck by
the three foreign ministers, a seemingly minor episode at the periphery (complicated, to be sure, by oil and
ethnic tensions) had developed into a full-blown international crisis with distinct winners and losers. Later
that year, a US show of naval force along with intelligence reports of US combat scenarios convinced Stalin to
withdraw his demands on Turkey to establish Soviet naval bases along the Straits. But while some Westerners
exulted in their easy victories, these confrontations also had consequences: not only bolstering hard-liners on
both sides but also raising Stalin’s suspicions toward his partners and reinforcing his obsession with building
an atomic bomb.
The German question remained the center of dispute. Unlike the single-power control that had been
established in Japan and the Balkans or the dual control over Korea, in Germany four states had inherited the
awkward Potsdam arrangement of joint governance of Germany through a polarized Allied Control Council
combined with almost total political, economic, and judicial control over their respective zones. In addition,
the occupying powers faced the day-to-day complications of ruling a hungry and sullen conquered people.
(See Map 5.)
Stalin, looking back to the post–World War I period, had hoped for another rapid US withdrawal from
Europe and the reestablishment of a unified and neutral but also smaller Germany, from which he would
extract substantial reparations. Siding with Kremlin pragmatists, he restrained the ideological fervor of the
German communists, ended wholesale looting and food requisitions, and launched a “charm offensive” in
1946, calling for a “united and peaceful” Germany on the model of Austria.*
The Americans and British parried the Soviet challenge by moving further toward partition; as occupiers of
Germany’s largest, richest, and most populous regions, they held the upper hand. On May 3, 1946, the
United States suspended reparations deliveries to the Soviets to protect the economic well-being of its zone,
and that month Britain, citing Soviet obstruction, assailed the continuation of four-power control. On
September 6, 1946, Byrnes, in a major speech to German dignitaries in Stuttgart, announced two key facets of
the new US policy: the amalgamation of the US and British zones (Bizonia) and an American commitment
“to stay” and to restore freedom, self-government, and a robust capitalism to the German people. In another,
quite clever repudiation of the Potsdam accords, Byrnes challenged the permanence of the Oder-Neisse
border separating Poland from Germany, forcing Stalin to take the side of his Polish comrades against the
Germans he was trying to court.
The remainder of 1946 was consumed by acrimonious negotiations over the peace treaties with Nazi
Germany’s former allies, with the terms for Italy drawing the most heated discussion. Harking back to their
wartime strategy, the British were intent on defending their vital interests in the Mediterranean against Soviet
claims, specifically in regard to Libya and the port of Trieste.†
The United States was the crucial mediator. Earlier in the year it had tipped decisively toward London,
granting a huge (and controversial) $3.75 billion loan to Britain but denying a similar Soviet request. Two
civil wars were now raging, in China and in Greece, and although the Soviet hand was not evident in either of
these, the United States had become increasingly committed to halting left-wing revolutionary movements.
Thus, in dealing with the question of Libya, Washington blocked Moscow’s bid for a presence in North

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Africa; swallowing its long-standing resistance to European imperialism, it countenanced a four-year Franco-
British trusteeship under UN supervision. On Trieste, the United States strongly supported the British, and a
still-cautious Stalin (much to the fury of his Yugoslav ally) backed down. The United States authored a
compromise solution that kept the Adriatic port out of communist hands and eight years later awarded the
city to Italy.

1947: THE DIVISION OF EUROPE

The signing of the peace treaties with Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Romania on February 10, 1947,
marked the culmination of the Great Power arrangement that Roosevelt had envisaged. Truman, facing the
first Republican-dominated US Congress since 1932, was assuming a less conciliatory and tougher stance
toward the Soviet Union. Stalin, through his intelligence sources, studied the details of Washington’s growing
estrangement and pondered America’s economic and military might, its growing string of bases throughout
the world, and its emerging alignment with Great Britain. The Soviet leader remained committed to his
forward strategy, bolstered by the terms of the wartime agreements but also tempered with caution and
pragmatism. However, by 1947 an increasingly edgy West was preparing initiatives of its own. That year an
overburdened Britain essentially turned the mantle of its global leadership over to Washington. Faced with
insurgencies throughout the empire, it announced its withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent and the
referral of its Palestine mandate to the United Nations. On February 21 London informed the State
Department of its intention to terminate aid to Greece and Turkey in fourteen months.
Truman, his new secretary of state George Marshall, and undersecretary Dean Acheson were determined to
fill the gap created by Britain’s departure. With great speed, the State Department prepared a $400 million
package of economic and military support for the beleaguered Greek and Turkish governments. In order to
rally a skeptical and parsimonious Congress, the president warned on March 12 that the world had become
divided into two ways of life, “democracy and totalitarianism,” and in the so-called Truman doctrine called on
the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by
outside pressure.”
Although Acheson had quietly assured Congress that the administration contemplated no military corollary
to the Truman doctrine, this startling and expansive commitment reverberated throughout US public life. In
April 1947 the venerable financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch used the term “Cold War” to urge
Americans to unite in the face of a dire internal as well as external threat. In July “Mr. X” (later revealed to be
George Kennan), in a much-noted Foreign Affairs article, called for a policy of “long-term, patient but firm
and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies” through the “adroit and vigilant application of
counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts
and maneuvers of Soviet policy,” an approach that would eventually result “either in the break-up or the
gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”*
On June 5, 1947, Marshall focused the Truman doctrine on the economic rehabilitation of Europe. In his
historic Harvard commencement speech the secretary of state issued an invitation to every nation on the
continent, including the USSR, to coordinate their recovery efforts as a condition of receiving substantial US

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aid. Among the goals of the Marshall Plan were not only to alleviate postwar Europe’s dire economic
condition and reduce the attraction of communism but also to open the door broadly to US commerce.
Stalin decided to test Washington’s initiative. Harking back to the 1920s and to Lenin’s belief in Russia’s
indispensability to the West’s economic recovery, the Soviet leader sent a large delegation to the conference
convened in Paris to prepare a collective European response. Stalin intended to explore the prospects of direct
and unconditional US aid to the USSR but also to offer an alternative to Washington’s domination. To their
surprise and alarm, his delegates encountered strong West European endorsements of the Marshall Plan as
well as a potential threat to the Soviet Union’s East European realm. Stalin backed away, recalling Molotov
on July 2 and pointedly counseling the governments of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia also to
withdraw.
The Soviets’ exit created little surprise and was, in fact, a relief to Washington. It not only removed an
obstacle to rapid agreement but also shifted the blame for Europe’s growing division onto the USSR. In
Western Europe the prospect of Marshall Plan aid strengthened the anticommunist political forces, which
were easily able to quash their leftist opponents by the end of the year. Moscow’s departure also facilitated
Washington’s major goal: the inclusion of the western zones of Germany in the Marshall Plan, providing the
indispensable labor and mineral resources for Europe’s revival.
Soviet historiography has asserted that the proclamation of the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan laid
the foundation for Stalin’s decisive break with the West in 1947. Faced with the threat of an anti-Soviet bloc,
Stalin abandoned his efforts at cooperation and moved to consolidate the communist position in Eastern
Europe. The new Soviet stance was announced by the creation of the Communist Information Bureau
(Cominform) in September 1947 as the successor to the Comintern. In his address to the new organization,
Stalin’s ideological spokesman, A. A. Zhdanov, parodied the Truman doctrine, blaming US aggressiveness for
dividing the world into two distinct camps—imperialist and anti-imperialist. Whatever the exact motive or
moment of his retreat from multilateralism (which the Soviet archives may someday reveal), Stalin still
recognized his country’s unpreparedness for another armed conflict. He thus continued to proceed cautiously,
responding to as much as creating events, although now taking more risks in order to chip away at Western
power.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE EUROPE

Events outside Europe greatly complicated the quest for a peaceful postwar order. In China, despite lavish US
aid and notable Soviet restraint, the beleaguered Chiang Kai-shek government was collapsing before the
resilient revolutionary forces led by Mao Zedong. The anticolonial struggles in the Dutch East Indies, British
Malaya, and French Indochina also provided opportunities for communist penetration, weakening West
European colonial governments and kindling alarm in Washington.
Moreover, the British Labour government had decided to relinquish the burdens of its vast empire.
However, its hasty and ill-prepared withdrawals precipitated ethnic and religious violence in South Asia and
the Middle East. The partition of the Indian subcontinent was followed by a ruinous civil war between
Hindus and Muslims, creating millions of casualties and refugees and two rival successor states, India and
Pakistan, whose border disputes (particularly over the fate of partitioned Kashmir) kept the region in turmoil.

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 The UN division of Palestine in November 1947 intensified the struggle between Jews and Arabs in the
former British mandate. In the half-year civil war that followed, the communist bloc, perceiving an ally in the
Zionist movement, provided crucial military supplies to the Jewish forces, but the United States, fearing to
antagonize the Arab world, declared an official arms embargo. Israel’s declaration of independence in May
1948 and its subsequent military victory over four invading Arab armies brought about the revival of Jewish
statehood, but it also created an uneasy truce in the region. The United Nations assumed responsibility for
some 750,000 Palestinian refugees, whose national aspirations had been crushed by the division of Palestine
among Israel, Jordan, and Egypt (see Map 4).

Map 4. On the left, the boundaries of the two new states in Palestine according to the November 1947 UN
resolution, and on the right the provisional borders of Israel and its neighbors established by a UN mediator
in 1949.

The impact of decolonization and these civil wars was not fully understood by the Great Powers.
Nonetheless, Truman and Stalin, although lacking global perspectives, recognized that the collapse of
European empires would affect strategically important regions from North Africa to the Pacific and inevitably
draw them in as rivals. Thus the United States moved to bolster stability in the Western Hemisphere with the
Rio Pact in 1947 and the restructuring of the Organization of American States a year later. On the other
hand, India’s proclamation of neutrality in the emerging Cold War offered newly independent states an
alternative to joining the communist or capitalist blocs and even a means of provoking a bidding rivalry
between the two.
Another unforeseen consequence of the changing postwar world was the attempt by nongovernmental
organizations and small and medium-sized powers to transform the United Nations from a US-Soviet
battleground into a site of human progress. One major focus—emanating from the promises in the Atlantic
Charter and the atrocities of World War II—was the defense of human rights. These not-always-
complementary goals—promoting freedom and self-determination for subject peoples on the one hand and
shielding individuals and groups from arbitrary state power on the other—held little attraction for the Great
Powers. At the Nuremberg trials the victors had been more intent on punishing the Nazis’ aggression than

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siding with their victims, and the same held true at the Tokyo tribunals. Although the UN Charter contained
several references to human rights, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had frustrated
human rights activists by blocking the inclusion of a universal bill of rights. Nonetheless, in 1946 the fifty-
one-member General Assembly flexed its muscle, creating the Commission on Human Rights (CHR).
Despite the high expectations that attended its birth, the eighteen-member CHR was immediately
dominated by Cold War realities. Its chair, Eleanor Roosevelt, was kept on a tight leash by the US
government, which was determined to thwart any binding obligations that interfered with “the internal
problems of nations” and to use the commission’s forum mainly to castigate the Soviets’ misdeeds. The US
and Soviet delegates both rejected proposals to allow an individual to petition the UN over human rights
violations by his or her government. The two Superpowers were also behind the CHR’s momentous decision
to split its task into three separate components: the drafting of a nonbinding declaration of principles,
followed—at some indeterminate interval—by the conclusion of a human rights convention and, finally, the
creation of a means of enforcement. The first task was completed within two years, but the second took
twenty more, and the third still another year to come to life. By 1948 the Superpowers had effectively blocked
the efforts of human rights activists and the smaller countries to play a significant role in global politics.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the product of the lopsided power relations in the
CHR, was nonetheless a historic document graced with ringing language and high aspirations. It was not,
however, a “universal” statement but one based heavily on Western liberal philosophical and legal traditions.
The UDHR not only placed the Soviets’ insistence on economic, social, and cultural rights in a secondary
position but also omitted Asian and African claims to self-determination and rejected recognition of minority
rights. Moreover, for over two decades it was a pledge without a means of enforcement.
Yet even as a nonbinding gesture, the UDHR gained worldwide currency. Its text permeated constitutions,
treaties, and regional agreements and infused political language throughout the globe. Its principles buttressed
the work of the UN agencies that protected labor, women, children, and refugees and stirred the General
Assembly to annually reaffirm its commitment to human rights. And while Washington and Moscow
considered the UDHR a minor weapon in their Cold War arsenals, other countries began to invoke its moral
authority to protest racism and colonialism throughout the world.

PRAGUE AND BERLIN

For the United States and the Soviet Union, the prize was still in Europe, and in 1948 Europe’s East-West
division hardened. In the Balkans, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia had already fallen under
communist control, but the Greek government, with US aid, was forcibly resisting a communist insurgency.
Poland and Hungary had ended their brief periods of political pluralism with communist takeovers, although
Finland and Austria were able to maintain noncommunist governments through prudent neutrality.*
Czechoslovakia, the last surviving quasi-independent government east of Germany, fell on February 28, 1948,
almost ten years after the Munich Agreement. The Prague coup—a brief, chilling, and largely bloodless
episode of veiled Soviet threats, treachery by the local communists, and miscalculation by the anticommunists
—destroyed the last remnant of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty.

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 In stark contrast to the outcry in the media, Western leaders had already conceded Czechoslovakia (unlike
Greece, Turkey, Italy, and Iran) to the Soviet sphere. Although Britain and France protested the communists’
seizure of power, there was no repeat of the Iran crisis, no urgent appeal to the UN Security Council.†
Instead, public attention now focused on the danger of a Soviet military strike on the West. Asserting their
will to defend themselves, Britain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands met in Brussels in
March 1948 and, with Washington’s endorsement but no precise US commitment, signed a pact pledging
mutual aid against foreign aggression.
Cooler Western observers construed the Prague events as a retaliatory move by Stalin. After the foreign
ministers’ meeting in London (November–December 1947) had deadlocked over concluding a German or an
Austrian peace treaty, the Western powers had decided to exclude the USSR from their decision-making on
Germany’s future. Indeed, two days before the Prague coup, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and the
United States had met in London and announced plans to raise coal and steel production in the Ruhr, create a
separate West German state, and incorporate it into the Marshall Plan. The Soviets’ loud protests were
ignored.

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Map 5. By 1948 Europe was divided between East and West and would remain so for forty-one years.

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 Stalin also encountered dissidence within his own camp. The Kremlin, vexed by independent voices in its
new satellites, removed Władysław Gomułka, an advocate of a “Polish path to socialism” and outspoken critic
of the Cominform. A more formidable rival was Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav resistance chief, whose wartime
exploits and independent postwar policies had long frustrated Moscow. In 1948 Stalin instigated a wave of
purge trials against communist leaders in Eastern Europe—targeting rightist and leftist “deviationists” and
Jewish “Zionists”—that lasted until 1953, sent millions to prison and death, and placed Kremlin loyalists in
charge.
In June Stalin also tried to eliminate Tito; accusing him of attempting to dominate the Balkans, the Soviet
leader expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform. Once more Stalin miscalculated, not only failing to topple
his challenger with an internal coup but also failing to stifle the genie of nationalism that would forever
threaten communist unity. Moreover, after a cautious response to the Stalin-Tito rupture, the United States
moved into the breach, offering aid to Yugoslavia in 1949 as a means of encouraging other communist
dissident leaders.
Moscow also suffered political setbacks in Western Europe, where the Cominform had encouraged
widespread strikes in France and Italy, which threatened two fragile governments but also stirred the
ambitions of two highly independent communist parties. When Washington in late 1947 determined to use
economic and political pressure to counter a perceived Soviet conspiracy, Stalin prudently backed off. In
France, he stood by while the Americans orchestrated the secession of noncommunist labor leaders from the
communist union (CGT), the consequent reduction of the latter’s power and influence, and the stabilization
of the Fourth Republic. In Italy Stalin reined in his most militant comrades, who were roundly defeated by
the CIA-financed Christian Democrats in the April 1948 elections.
Not unexpectedly, 1948’s second crisis occurred in Berlin, the thorny relic of the Big Three’s wartime
collaboration, which lay one hundred miles inside the Soviet sector. Incensed by the introduction of a new
Western currency (the deutsche mark), which would further separate the occupation zones, the Soviets angrily
withdrew from the Allied Control Council in March. The announcement of the West’s intention to introduce
the new currency in Berlin threatened to immensely increase the cost of the Soviet occupation, which
heretofore had been financed by inflated Reichsmarks. In response, on June 24, 1948, Soviet authorities cut
off food, gas, electricity, and other supplies from the western sectors and announced the closing of all road,
rail, and water routes to and from West Berlin.

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Photo 3.1 US transport plane landing in West Berlin during the 1948–1949 blockade. Courtesy of the Library
of Congress, LC-USZ62-136389.

Stalin, balancing the easy takeover in Prague with the communists’ setbacks in France and Italy, had made
an imprudent gamble: he hoped to convince his ex-partners to return to the conference table or lose their
place in Berlin. However, the British and Americans took up the challenge by instituting an extraordinary
airlift, flying 278,000 sorties over the next eleven months that delivered some two million tons of food and
fuel to the isolated western sectors. They also launched a punishing counterblockade against the entire Soviet
zone.
The Berlin crisis occupies a special place in Cold War historiography as an emblem of Soviet aggressiveness
and Anglo-American resistance. It was nonetheless an extraordinarily calibrated confrontation. Truman,
determined to avoid a military showdown, rebuffed advice to send in armed convoys, and Stalin refrained
from attacking the Allied aircraft. Even when Truman announced the dispatch of sixty B-29s to Great Britain
in July—aircraft capable of delivering an atomic bomb but still not fitted to do so—the United States issued
no direct threat against Moscow. Cold War mythology has also stressed the privations and stoicism of the
West Berliners, who nonetheless received ample food and fuel from the local black market and from their
eastern neighbors.
The crisis ended on May 12, 1949, when Stalin finally lifted the botched blockade, using the face-saving
excuse of a foreign ministers’ conference, which, predictably, accomplished nothing. For eleven months Stalin
had insisted on Moscow’s peaceful intentions and its fidelity to the Grand Alliance, but he lost the
propaganda war. The West European press castigated the Soviet Union as an inept bully and praised the
United States for its resolute defense of a beleaguered outpost.

87
 Few at the time or since have questioned the costs or the risks associated with Berlin in 1948–1949. From
that time until the end of the Cold War, the Allies’ presence in West Berlin remained the embodiment of
Soviet frustration and, despite the city’s real vulnerability, of America’s commitment to halt aggression. Berlin
became an important intelligence site for both sides—an opportunity to dig listening tunnels, recruit spies and
counteragents, and monitor the other’s activities—but for the West it also provided an invaluable means to
observe the communists’ military personnel, formations, and equipment.
Moreover, less than four years after World War II, two million West Berliners—and, by extension, the
entire population of western Germany—were suddenly transformed into America’s democratic protégés.
Truman’s actions in 1948–1949 replaced appeasement with firmness and selective engagement with an
expansive definition of US interests and prestige. The Berlin airlift also redefined America’s view of its Cold
War partnerships to include populations unwilling or incapable of defending themselves from aggression, who
would be rescued by decisive US action. In real as well as symbolic terms, the “Berlin syndrome” wiped out the
Munich nightmare that had haunted the West for a decade.

1949

Beyond a simple scorecard of political winners and losers, the Berlin crisis also had larger consequences. Both
sides, after three years of demobilization, now began a vast and rapid buildup of their arms and military forces,
including the reintroduction of the US military draft in June 1948. This was followed by the creation of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). According to the treaty signed in Washington, DC, in April
1949, the Brussels Pact from March 1948 was expanded to twelve members, including the United States and
Canada, who committed themselves to mutual defense against “aggressor(s) . . . with such action as [they]
deem[ed] necessary.”* Despite the vagueness over its members’ actual military commitments, the birth of
NATO—which, like the Rio Pact, conformed to the UN Charter’s authorization of regional self-defense
measures—demonstrated the West’s ultimate abandonment of the Grand Alliance. Unworried by Stalin’s
protests (particularly over Italy’s membership), the West reminded Moscow of the mutual defense pacts that
the Soviets had imposed on their small neighbors. If the Berlin crisis had demonstrated the Superpowers’
reluctance to go to war, it had also thickened the structures of their rivalry.
Many writers cite Stalin’s threat to Berlin as the catalyst for the division of Germany. The West’s resolve to
end the fruitless haggling and create a German ally against the Soviet Union was undoubtedly facilitated by
the blockade. However, the path to the creation of a West German state involved more than simply detaching
their occupation zones from the Soviets. Germany’s western neighbors feared an entity that, with only 50
percent of the Reich’s prewar territory, would still outnumber France by fourteen million people and possess
enormous industrial and military potential.
Thus there were political compromises in the creation of West Germany. Under Western tutelage the Basic
Law, a preliminary constitution adopted by German officials on May 8, 1949 (the fourth anniversary of V-E
Day), announced a total break with the Nazi past, creating a parliamentary democracy with strong human
rights protection and the potential to collaborate closely with other governments as well as ensuring Allied
occupation rights. France, which had failed to obtain the Ruhr industrial region or to suppress Germany’s
economic revival, was mollified by the integrative conditions that gave extensive powers to the new German

88
state governments (Länder), brought the three western zones into the Marshall Plan, and maintained the US
commitment to NATO. To assuage German nationalism (and neutralize Soviet propaganda), the Allies did
not foreclose the possibility of future unification through free national elections and in the meantime allowed
the new state to proclaim itself the sole legitimate representative of the entire German people (including the
inhabitants of the eastern sector), to legislate on their behalf, and even to include West Berlin within its
jurisdiction.
On May 23, 1949, Stalin appeared to suffer a major political setback when the Federal Republic of
Germany (FRG, or West Germany) was officially established. The Allies, ignoring Moscow’s loud protests
over the violation of the Potsdam accords, recognized the new state, comprising ninety-six thousand square
miles and a population of some fifty-six million. Less than five months later, on October 8, the Soviets set up
the nominally independent German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany), a state with almost
nineteen million people and occupying territory about 44 percent the size of its western neighbor. Stalin’s
blunders, combined with deft Allied leadership and the cooperation of West German politicians, had enabled
a potential colossus to arise in the FRG’s new capital in Bonn and West Berlin to remain free.

Map 6. The two German states between 1949 and 1990.

89
 Yet Germany’s division in 1949 also offered advantages for Stalin, who as usual had prepared a fallback
position. The two-state solution not only ended the uneven four-power negotiations but also gave the Soviet
Union a small but solid base from which it could exploit East German labor, resources (particularly uranium),
and chemical industries, and where it could station a half million troops in Central Europe without any
constraints from the West. Some scholars believe that Stalin appreciated the symbolic value of achieving a
communist domain in Germany, something that had eluded Lenin and that would keep guard over Poland
and Czechoslovakia. Although Stalin until his death never dropped his demand for a neutral, unified
Germany,* the prospect of a military withdrawal from Central Europe may well have become less attractive
than staying. If Soviet threats to West Berlin had failed miserably, other forms of pressure could still be
applied.
The creation of two German states, an event unforeseen at Tehran, Yalta, or even at Potsdam, was a signal
Cold War phenomenon. Foreshadowed by the dual occupation of Korea, Germany’s partition in 1949
combined both real and symbolic elements as a means of stabilizing Central Europe as well as a punishment
for the Nazis’ crimes. Four-power occupation had worked in Austria—thanks to the smaller strategic stakes, a
moderate socialist government, and the Allies’ Tehran decision to treat this country gently as “Hitler’s first
victim”—and the country remained intact. In the more populous, resource-rich Germany, which lacked a
central government, the occupiers were able to dominate the revival of local politics. East Germany became
the first “workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil,” and West Germany a liberal, robustly capitalist state.
Both regimes represented not only a renunciation of the Nazi past but also the revitalization of two opposing
political traditions—Marxism and liberalism—each claiming redemptive power over Germany and Europe’s
future and each mirroring the Cold War itself.
Whatever satisfaction the West reaped from its pragmatic solution to the German problem—and from the
end of the bloody Greek civil war and Tito’s escape from Stalin’s grip into a US-supported Cold War
neutrality—was undermined by two grave developments in 1949: the explosion of the first Soviet atomic
bomb and the victory of Mao Zedong’s communist forces in China. Both, unexpected only in their speed, not
only challenged America’s nuclear monopoly and its position in China but also appeared to strengthen the
global revolutionary camp.
On September 23, 1949, Truman shocked the world with his announcement that the Soviet Union had
secretly tested its first atomic weapon one month earlier.* Although the United States already had sufficient
bases, aircraft, and bombs to inflict considerable damage on the Soviet Union, Moscow’s incipient nuclear
arsenal stirred Western fears of political blackmail. Having long abandoned the effort for international control
over nuclear weapons, Truman in January 1950 launched a large-scale program to develop the even more
powerful hydrogen bomb, which was matched by an equally ambitious program by the Soviets.
The birth of the nuclear arms race in 1949 was imprinted in the history of the Cold War when both sides
began committing vast resources to the production of arms capable of destroying not only the enemy’s military
capacity but also the entire planet. The specter of preventive war that had loomed over the Soviet Union after
1945 was now matched by both sides’ hope that deterrence—backed by evergrowing stocks of nuclear
weapons—would compel prudent behavior by their adversaries. Yet both sides also recognized that even the
most powerful delivery systems might not be decisive in managing local conflicts and that armies still counted,
especially in Europe. Moreover, the genies unleashed by nuclear testing and proliferation and by madman

90
scenarios and civilian terror had the paradoxical effect of eroding the ideological distinction between the two
Superpower rivals and kindling a global peace movement focusing specifically on the eradication of nuclear
weapons.
Only eight days after Truman’s announcement another momentous event occurred: the formal
establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The world’s most populous country had
come under the rule of Mao Zedong’s communist forces. The US-supported Nationalist government of
Chiang Kai-shek, which Roosevelt had envisaged as the fourth pillar of the postwar world, fled into exile on
the island of Taiwan on December 8. From Washington’s perspective, the Soviets had greatly expanded their
power and now threatened Japan and Southeast Asia.
The revolutionary dimensions of Mao’s victory were not well understood at the time and are still contested.
Neither a grievous political defeat for the United States nor a great triumph for the USSR, the establishment
of communist rule in China exposed the limits of the Superpowers’ agility and skill. Locked in their rivalry
over Europe in 1947–1948, both had failed to deal adroitly with the rapid deterioration of the Nationalist
(Kuomintang) government and with the communists’ determination to prevail. In Washington, which was
caught up in the close presidential campaign of 1948, the debate between the ardent proponents of military
support for Chiang and the equally passionate decriers of his government’s corruption and ineptitude
produced a $400 million aid appropriation but also a paralyzing fatalism over the US role in China’s future,
particularly given the political impossibility of armed intervention. Similarly, in Moscow, the fears of US
intervention and of a feisty Chinese Tito as well as the advantages of a weak and divided China that would
preserve the Yalta gains had to be weighed against the ideological benefits of obtaining a huge Asian satellite.
Stalin’s capricious gestures in 1948 were the result: a mediation offer that annoyed Washington and infuriated
Mao and the delay in inviting the communist leader to Moscow, but also the intense communications
between the two parties, the procommunist pronouncements later that year, and the stepped-up arms
deliveries and diplomatic contacts in 1949.
The aftereffects of Mao’s victory were equally misread at the time. In Moscow on February 14, 1950, the
Soviet Union and China signed a treaty linking 50 percent of the world’s land mass in a pact of friendship,
alliance, and mutual assistance if either were involved in hostilities with Japan or its allies. China obtained
significant concessions, including the retrocession within two years of the Changchun railway,* the return of
Port Arthur (Lushun) and Dairen (Dalian), and the removal of Soviet extraterritorial privileges. Mao had to
recognize the independence of Soviet-dominated Outer Mongolia, but he obtained Stalin’s permission to
occupy Tibet, which he proceeded to do in the next year. Moreover, Stalin encouraged Mao to demand
China’s seat on the UN Security Council and put pressure on the West by boycotting council meetings until
this claim was fulfilled.
The 1950 pact between the two communist regimes reflected their unequal power and divergent national
interests even more than their ideological solidarity. Despite the semblance of generosity and largesse, Soviet
terms were tough. Moscow’s low-interest but modest $300 million credit for the purchase of Soviet industrial
goods, to be granted in five installments, had to be fully repaid within ten years. Along with its agreement to
create joint stock companies to exploit Chinese mineral resources, the Kremlin obliged Beijing to exclude
other foreign investors. Finally, Stalin asserted his predominance over a regime he had neither anticipated nor
energetically promoted by assigning to Mao the task of promoting anticolonial revolutions in Asia.

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 Cold War scholars disagree over whether the United States lost an opportunity in 1949–1950 to establish
relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly when its closest ally risked its ire and
hastened to do so. The Attlee government, concerned over Hong Kong’s future, spurred by realist sentiment
in the Commonwealth, and wishing to have a “foot in the door” when Sino-Soviet tensions would inevitably
escalate, announced on January 6, 1950, its willingness to grant de jure recognition. Although France held
back out of fear of Beijing’s threat to Indochina, two other NATO allies (Denmark and Norway) and three
European neutrals (Sweden, Switzerland, and Finland) joined India, Indonesia, and Burma and ten
communist governments in recognizing the PRC in 1950.
The United States stood back because of powerful political reasons—the widespread support for the exiled
Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in Congress, the press, and the churches—but also as a result of
conflicting signals from Beijing. In May 1949, a few months before the communists’ victory, Zhou Enlai,
Mao’s chief aide and one of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party, had sent a conciliatory
message to the US through a third party, but Truman’s dilatory response drew a rebuff from Beijing. One
month later came an unofficial invitation to US ambassador John Leighton Stuart to hold talks with Zhou
and Mao. But while this offer hung in the air, the Chinese were detaining the US consul general in Mukden
on trumped-up charges of espionage.
Both sides, wary of the other and divided within, could not move forward until the verdict of Mao’s success
was delivered. The Chinese leadership was still distrustful of American imperialism and hamstrung by its pro-
Soviet faction. America’s leaders, skeptical over uncovering a new Tito, feared manipulation by Beijing and
were concerned over the actions of the third very interested player, the Soviet Union. Moscow, with good
reason to fear another heretic, put extreme pressure on Mao to declare his solidarity.* The Chinese communist
leader, whose exact sentiments cannot be known, undoubtedly bristled at the Kremlin’s behavior, but he could
not ignore Stalin’s stranglehold over Manchuria or his own ideological commitment to Marxist unity. On
June 30, 1949, Mao announced that China was “Leaning to One Side” and intended to ally itself with “the
Soviet Union, with the People’s Democracies, and with the proletariat and the broad masses of the people in
all other countries and form an international united front.” One day later, Secretary of State Acheson vetoed
Stuart’s trip to Beijing.
Once the PRC was established, Washington chose a pragmatic policy between the two extremes of open
hostility and conciliation. Combining balance-of-power concerns, ideological aversion, and fears for the safety
of Chiang’s exile government in Taiwan, the United States refused recognition of the PRC and blocked its
seating in the United Nations, but Washington did not stop others from opening embassies in Beijing or from
breaking relations with Chiang Kai-shek.
Nonetheless, the Chinese revolution (occurring soon after the explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb)
intensified the Truman administration’s fears of communist expansion in Asia. Alarmed over the Vietnamese
communist leader Ho Chi Minh’s February 1950 mission to Moscow, the Soviet decision to recognize his
government, and Chinese support for the Viet Minh insurgency against French colonial rule, the United
States swallowed its anti-imperialist sentiments and cast its lot with the Paris-backed puppet emperor Bao
Dai.
Equally significant was the appearance in April 1950 of the National Security Council document NSC-68.
This top-secret paper prepared by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff called for a major buildup of

92
US military forces to counter the Kremlin’s threats to America’s interests in Europe and in Asia.† NSC-68
aimed at reassuring America’s allies of its resolve to halt the spread of communism, but it also channeled US
Cold War diplomacy away from pragmatism and patience and toward fear and frustration, and from Kennan’s
watchful containment of the Soviet Union to an open-ended crusade against global communism.

Map 7. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China created a major change in power relations in
East Asia, and the Korean War cemented Cold War tensions in the region.

WAR IN KOREA

The Cold War’s first hot war began on June 25, 1950. Following almost two years of armed skirmishes
between North and South Korea, that day ninety thousand North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth
parallel. They easily captured Seoul two days later and threatened to overrun the southern part of the
peninsula. During the two preceding months, the North Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung had obtained
Stalin’s assent and the Kremlin’s promises of military support for the invasion as well as an endorsement from
Mao.* But the timing was the North Korean’s alone, and the invasion created a cascade of surprises for all the
major parties.
With echoes of the 1930s, the United Nations now faced its first test of repelling military aggression
against one of its members.† Although dominated by a Western majority, the Security Council until then had
been paralyzed by Moscow’s vetoes. But because of the six-month Soviet boycott over the UN’s refusal to seat
communist China, the council on June 27 was able to adopt a US-sponsored resolution to provide South
Korea (ROK) “with all necessary aid to repel the aggressors” and then to establish a UN expeditionary force
under the command of US general Douglas MacArthur, to which sixteen nations ultimately contributed.*

93
 Until June 1950 the defense of South Korea had not been part of America’s Asian strategy. Now the
Truman administration, using the language of NSC-68, made it a symbol of the West’s “strength and
determination” to resist Soviet aggression. Even before the UN resolution, Truman had hastily sent Japan-
based US ground, naval, and air forces to South Korea. Washington, viewing the Korean crisis as an
opportunity to protect the rest of Asia from falling like dominoes to communist expansion, also opted to
support the French war in Indochina and moved the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Straits to shield the exiled
Nationalists against a communist attack.† In Europe, the United States used the North Korean attack to urge
its NATO allies to build a stronger barrier against Soviet aggression, one that would include West German
rearmament.
Over the next three months the Korean War shifted dramatically. By early September the North Korean
offensive had halted after a South Korean uprising never materialized, and UN soldiers, tanks, and aircraft
began pouring in. After their spectacular landing behind enemy lines at Inchon on September 15, the UN
troops went on the offensive, liberating Seoul and reaching the thirty-eighth parallel. At this decisive moment
the Truman administration pressed the UN to approve a crossing into North Korea. With the announced aim
of punishing the aggressors, US-led forces in the beginning of October moved northward toward the Yalu
River, Korea’s border with China. Ignoring Beijing’s warnings, the United States aimed to solve the Korean
problem by unifying the entire peninsula under a pro-Western government.
Stalin, although startled by Washington’s strong response, had initially refrained from intervening. Only
after UN troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and North Korea appeared doomed did Stalin take action,
urging Mao to aid their comrades and offering military support and Soviet air support (which did not,
however, materialize until the summer of 1951). A resolute Mao fended off his politburo colleagues’
objections to launching a war with the world’s most powerful country, proclaiming his own domino theory of
communist solidarity‡ and insisting that Korea was the most favorable terrain for China’s inevitable clash with
the imperialist United States.
The Korean War again changed dramatically on October 19, 1950, when nearly three hundred thousand
Chinese troops from the People’s Volunteer Army (CPVA) crossed the Yalu River and drove the US Eighth
Army southward. Seoul fell again in January 1951 but was recaptured by UN troops in March. Mao’s
momentous decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel (which Stalin strongly endorsed) led to a bloody two-
year war of attrition until the July 1953 armistice agreement, which reset the two Koreas’ boundaries in a
diagonal line extending only slightly north of the thirty-eighth parallel.
The Korean War also witnessed the first direct (if camouflaged) US-Soviet combat.* Beginning in late
1950, Soviet MiG-15s, based in Chinese air fields, joined their Chinese comrades in dogfights against US
pilots accompanying B-29 bombing missions over North Korea. Also, some seventy thousand Soviet troops
were stationed along the Yalu to provide air defense.
The costs of the Korean War were horrific. The country was devastated by massive US air strikes using
bombs and napalm as well as by the three years of fierce fighting. Roughly three million (10 percent) of the
Korean population were killed, wounded, or missing, including a very high number of civilians; thirty-seven
thousand Americans lost their lives, along with three thousand other UN members; and some nine hundred

94
thousand Chinese soldiers died. The casualty figures might have been worse had Truman acted on his initial
impulse to use an atomic weapon.†
The war’s political balance sheet was largely negative for all sides.‡ The United States had repelled
communist aggression but had succeeded in neither reunifying Korea nor ending South Korea’s vulnerability
without a permanent UN occupation force. At home the Korean War created an inflationary spiral and a wave
of anticommunist hysteria, and abroad it not only froze US relations with China for almost two decades but
also expanded the Berlin syndrome and militarized American foreign policy in Asia. Moreover, by linking US
policy with French colonialism in Indochina, the defeated Chinese Nationalists, and the highly unpopular
South Korean president Syngman Rhee, Washington damaged its prestige among the newly emerging
countries in Africa and Asia.
Stalin also had miscalculated. Having failed to anticipate Truman’s response and having goaded the
Chinese to engage the United States, he now faced a major buildup of US military power, including the
quadrupling of America’s defense budget and the doubling of its draft quota as well as the establishment of
permanent US bases in Japan and South Korea, the increase in aid to anticommunist governments in
Southeast Asia, and the strengthening of NATO with the addition of West German forces. The Korean War
had seriously drained Soviet resources, and Moscow and its allies’ $220 million contribution to North Korea’s
postwar reconstruction burdened their economies and created domestic discontent. Moreover, the aging and
increasingly rigid Soviet leader failed to recognize that his callous exploitation of an impoverished and
dependent China during the Korean War would sow the seeds of a Sino-Soviet split. China, although
suffering enormous losses, deterred from capturing Taiwan, and forced to postpone its Five-Year Plan, had
emerged from the Korean War with its international prestige greatly enhanced and as a potential rival to
Moscow in the colonial world.
By the time the Korean armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, Joseph Stalin was dead, Harry Truman had
been replaced by Dwight David Eisenhower, and a diplomatic revolution had occurred. The three former Axis
states were now firmly in the Western camp, and the entire mainland of China had fallen within the Soviet
orbit. Germany and Europe had become divided, and Asia and the Middle East were seething with
anticolonial revolts.
The Korean War represented the gory culmination of seven years of Superpower probes of the other side’s
aspirations, strength, and resolve. Each new test had not produced the provisional compromises that had
sustained the Grand Alliance; instead the results were a deepening of their mutual suspicions, an elevation of
their hostile rhetoric, and the reinforcement of their resolve to strengthen their respective camps. The near
collisions in Berlin and in the Korean War had added a military dimension, and the escalating nuclear arms
race lent an element of rigidity and terror to US-Soviet encounters.
Moreover, the Korean War stymied both sides’ hopes of attaining a preponderance of power, whether in
wealth, military might, or ideological truth. The birth of a second communist state in China was a major
challenge to their aim of dividing the world. Given the scale of political and social upheaval in Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could hope to impose its will everywhere
on its own terms. Having gone almost to the atomic brink, the new leaders in Moscow and Washington in
1953 faced the challenge of building a less perilous, more orderly Cold War world that now extended beyond
its original European borders.

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 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Documents

“China and the Korean War.” Woodrow Wilson Center Digital Archive.
http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/188/china-and-the-korean-war .
Churchill, Winston. “Sinews of Peace (Iron Curtain Speech).” March 5, 1946. National Churchill Museum.
http://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/sinews-of-peace-iron-curtain-speech.html .
“Czechoslovakia from Liberation to Communist State, 1945–63: Records of the U.S. State Department
Classified Files.” Archives Unbound. Gale Cengage Learning.
http://gdc.gale.com/archivesunbound/archives-unbound-czechoslovakia-from-liberation-to-communist-
state-1945-63-records-of-the-u.s.-state-department-classified-files/ .
Dedijer, Vladimir. Tito Speaks: His Self-Portrait and Struggle with Stalin. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1953.
“Marshall Plan.” 1948. National Archives and Records Administration Featured Documents.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/marshall_plan .
“NATO Treaty, Washington, April 4, 1949.” Yale Law School Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and
Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/nato.asp .
Parrish, Scott D., and M. M. Narinskii. New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two
Reports. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1994.
Person, James, ed. New Evidence on the Korean War. North Korea International Documentation Project,
History and Public Policy Program, Woodrow Wilson Center. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, 2010.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/NKIDP_Document_Reader__New_Evidence_on_the_Korean_War.pdf
.
Stokes, Gale. From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
“Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November
1945–1 October 1946.” Library of Congress Military Legal Resources.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_major-war-criminals.html .
Truman, Harry. “Atomic Explosion in the USSR.” September 23, 1949. Yale Law School Avalon Project:
Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decad244.asp .
Truman, Harry S., and Winston Churchill. Defending the West: The Truman-Churchill Correspondence, 1945–
1960. Edited by G. W. Sand. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Adopted by the General Assembly in December 1948.”
United Nations. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html .

Contemporary Writing

Lippmann, Walter. The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Harper, 1947.
Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind. New York: Knopf, 1953.

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Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. New York: Scribner, 1952.
Stone, I. F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952.
X [George Kennan]. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 566–582.

Memoirs

Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.
Dimitrov, Georgi. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949. Edited by Ivo Banac. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003.
Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. Translated by Michael B. Petrovich. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1962.
Philbrick, Herbert A. I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist,” Counterspy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952.
Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. 2 vols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955–1956.

Films

The Day the Earth Stood Still. Directed by Robert Wise. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1951.
Exodus. Directed by Otto Preminger. Los Angeles: Carlyle Productions, 1960.
The 49th Man. Directed by Fred F. Sears. Los Angeles: Katzman Corporation, 1953.
Gandhi. Directed by Richard Attenborough. Los Angeles: International Film Investors, 1982.
High Noon. Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Los Angeles: Stanley Kramer Productions, 1952.
The Inner Circle. Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1991.
The Iron Curtain. Directed by William A. Wellman. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1948.
The Murderers Are Among Us. Directed by Wolfgang Staudte. Berlin: Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft,
1946.
On the Waterfront. Directed by Elia Kazan. Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures, 1952.
Pickup on South Street. Directed by Samuel Fuller. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1953.
The Red Menace. Directed by R. G. Springsteen. Los Angeles: Republic Pictures, 1949.
The Steel Helmet. Directed by Samuel Fuller. Los Angeles: Deputy Corporation, 1951.
The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed. London: Carol Reed’s Production/London Film Productions,
1949.

Fiction

Gouzenko, Igor. The Fall of a Titan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954.

Ḥabībī, Imīl. The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel.
Translated by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick. New York: Vantage, 1982.
Jin, Ha. War Trash. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Grove, 1956.

Secondary Sources

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Alvarez, David, and Eduard Mark, Spying Through a Glass Darkly: American Espionage Against the Soviet
Union, 1945–1946. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016.
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* Submarine warfare against Japan had played a major role in the US war in Asia.
† In 1998 the United Nations established the International Criminal Court, a permanent tribunal to
prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
* The prospect of US-Soviet cooperation was halted at the first meeting of the UN Atomic Energy
Commission in June 1946, when the Soviet delegate rejected the so-called Baruch Plan as a US attempt to
control the development of nuclear energy.
† Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Romania.
‡ Set off by the September 1945 defection of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa,
Canada, who delivered extensive evidence of Soviet espionage.
* According to the January 29, 1942, tripartite treaty, Iran agreed to extend nonmilitary assistance to the war
effort, and Great Britain and Russia agreed to respect its independence and territorial integrity and to
withdraw their troops from Iran within six months of the end of hostilities.

* Austria had been restored to sovereignty in 1945 under a moderate left-wing government and four-power
occupation.
† Trieste had been liberated in 1945 by communist partisan forces, which had refused to withdraw in the face
of Anglo-American demands but were persuaded by Stalin to do so.
* Kennan’s call for a global containment of the Soviet Union drew two opposing criticisms: the liberal-
internationalist columnist Walter Lippmann warned presciently that a worldwide struggle with the USSR
would condemn the United States to align itself with “dubious and unnatural allies,” neglect Europe,
cripple the UN by attempting to turn it into “an anti-Soviet coalition,” and end the search for an enduring
peace settlement, while Kennan’s hawkish State Department colleague Paul Nitze, deploring the reactive
essence of his recommendations, urged a significant buildup of US military power to thwart Soviet
advances, a position that gained support two years later.

* In June 1948 the Finnish communists suffered a decisive electoral defeat, and thereafter the Helsinki
government toed a strictly neutral line. Austria, still under four-power occupation, also escaped the Soviet
yoke by accepting neutralism.
† When the Prague events finally came up in the Security Council on May 24, 1948, the Soviet delegate
quashed the discussion with a veto.

* The original NATO members were France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the
United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. Significantly, one of the foremost
critics of NATO’s establishment was George Kennan, who feared it would freeze the division of Europe
and thwart the goal of containment: to bring about a peaceful reform and rollback of the Soviet Empire.

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* In 1952, ignoring the GDR, Stalin floated another proposal for a unified neutral Germany, which was
rebuffed by the West.
* Thanks to Soviet espionage, an almost complete copy of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was replicated by
the USSR.
* A T-shaped, 2,400-kilometer rail system running through China from Manzhouli in the west to Suifenhe in
the east and connecting Harbin with the port of Dalian on the Yellow Sea.
* Indeed, Mao claimed equal status with Soviet leaders because of his original contribution to Marxist-
Leninist ideology: the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.
† NSC-68’s principal author was Paul Nitze, who had replaced Kennan in late 1949 as head of the State
Department’s Policy Planning Staff.
* Still facing pockets of armed Nationalist opposition on the mainland, Mao would probably have preferred
Soviet support for an attack on Taiwan, but he bowed to Moscow’s decision and to the pleas of Kim Il
Sung, who had been an ally in the Chinese civil war.

† Technically South Korea was not a UN member, but the General Assembly had granted it observer status in
1948.
* The United States provided half the ground troops and most of the air and sea power.
† Both moves raised alarm in Beijing, which feared encirclement by the United States.
‡ According to Mao: “If China stood by when North Korea was in peril, then the Soviet Union could also
stand by when China was in peril, and Internationalism would be empty talk.”
* Initially Soviet planes were marked with North Korean insignia and their pilots wore North Korean
uniforms; although this cumbersome practice soon ended, Soviet pilots were under strict orders to avoid
capture.
† In August 1950 nine B-29s arrived in Guam loaded with unarmed atomic bombs, and at a press conference
on November 30, Truman confirmed that he had been actively considering their use since the beginning of
the war, only to assure a panicked Attlee that the United States had “no intention” of doing so except to
prevent a “major military disaster.”

‡ One of the sole gainers was Japan, the new US ally in East Asia, which reindustrialized, increased its
military capacity, and obtained extensive economic benefits from the Korean War.

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 Chapter 4
THE WIDENING CONFLICT, 1953–1963

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

—Charles de Gaulle

Events are not a matter of choice.

—Gamal Abdel Nasser

In the decade following the carnage of World War II and Korea, most of the world experienced an
extraordinary economic recovery as well as a striking diffusion of ideas and technology and record rates of
population and GDP growth. In the noncommunist countries the Bretton Woods system created stable
currencies and exchange rates, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) smoothed international
commerce, and the IMF and World Bank began pouring resources into Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
which provided the West with cheap and crucial raw materials. The Soviet Union, with the exception of its
ties to Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, was slower than the United States to engage in trade outside
its borders.
Europe’s revival was spectacular. In Western Europe, where the Marshall Plan had poured $13 billion into
its recipients’ economies, a neo-Keynesian economic order was established in which governments used public
spending and monetary policies to maintain strong and balanced economic growth. The Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe, although constrained by tight financial, trade, and currency regulations, also made
remarkable technological, industrial, and infrastructural gains.
Postwar Europe was nonetheless split by an Iron Curtain not only with barbed wire, mines, guard dogs, and
machine guns but also with substantial political, material, and spiritual barriers. In communist Eastern
Europe, up to Stalin’s death there had been major efforts to “engineer human souls” by emulating Soviet
models promoting a socialist language, education, science, and aesthetics and rejecting decadent Western
ways. The United States parried Moscow’s utopian message by exporting its consumer products, popular
culture, and liberal political ideals. The most striking site of East-West cultural competition was in the
rebuilding of Berlin. On one side of Hitler’s former capital rose the Stalinallee, a two-kilometer-long, eighty-
nine-meter-wide boulevard with its monumental eight-story structures in the socialist-classicist style, and on
the other the Hansaviertel, a neighborhood of brightly colored residential buildings designed by the world’s
foremost architects in the international style.*
Both Superpowers used propaganda to penetrate their enemy’s territory. From the Kremlin came torrents of
upbeat economic reports and antifascist diatribes as well as attacks on Western racism, capitalism,

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warmongering, and imperialism, which were echoed by Communist Party leaders and adherents in the West.
The other side sent radio broadcasts in the national languages of Eastern Europe from the Voice of America,
Radio Free Europe, and the BBC with news from the outside world, encouraging the “captive populations” to
seek freedom from Moscow’s domination.
The Iron Curtain was porous in other ways. Not only did Western and communist diplomats, businessmen,
church groups, and labor unions maintain regular contacts, but by the mid-1950s a number of cross-border
cultural, scientific, and university exchanges as well as sports competitions, although never removed from
politics, established solid networks between East and West. Images and personalities also counted. Despite a
decade of intense Cold War rivalry between their two governments, Soviet and American citizens were
equally delirious over the twenty-three-year-old Texan Van Cliburn’s triumph in Moscow’s first Tchaikovsky
piano competition, held in April 1958.
Two new leaders appeared on the scene. The new US president, Dwight David Eisenhower, was a veteran
of two world wars, the architect of D-Day, and NATO supreme commander between 1950 and 1952; he
came to office in 1953 promising a tougher stance toward the Soviet Union. The new Soviet chief, Nikita
Khrushchev, was a Ukrainian-born metalworker who had served as a political commissar in the Red Army
during the civil war, had risen rapidly through Communist Party ranks, and was again a commissar on the
Ukrainian front in World War II. As party first secretary after Stalin’s death he deftly outmaneuvered his
rivals Georgy Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria to attain almost complete power over the Soviet Union by 1955.
The other Cold War players fell into two camps. Whereas most European leaders* had been born in the
nineteenth century, almost all the non-Europeans† had come to political maturity during World War II and
had imbibed the promises of freedom and independence in the Atlantic Charter. The generational split was
also evident in the cultural sphere. In both parts of Europe young writers and musicians began challenging
their elders’ political and moral evasions under Hitler and Stalin and attempted to escape the Cold War
straitjacket by embracing the romanticism and spirituality of the hero of Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago
(1958) or the gruff unruly individualism of Oskar Matzerath in Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1959).
Outside Europe, a new generation espoused the proud rebelliousness of Chinua Achebe’s protagonist
Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart (1959), which shattered the image of “primitive” Africa and of its elders’
submission to imperialism.
The world of the 1950s drew closer through radio, via the new medium of television, and especially in the
movie houses. The filmmakers of that decade produced striking universal narratives of love and violence,
death and heroism, memory and forgetfulness, the strength of family bonds, the struggle against
consumerism, and the power of myth and music.‡ Regional and foreign travel brought people together and
created lasting bonds. From the glittering Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, held in
July 1957 and attended by thirty-four thousand young people from all over the globe, came the prize-winning
song “Moscow Nights” (“Podmoskovnye Vechera”), which transcended its Soviet origins to become a
worldwide romantic anthem.
Popular movements spread throughout the globe. The United States in the 1950s gave the world rock and
roll and blue jeans, the Beatnik lifestyle and the impudent figure of the Cat in the Hat, as well as the brave
spirit and voices of its civil rights movement. Humanitarianism also connected rival nations. From Great

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Britain in 1959 emerged World Refugee Year, an international initiative sponsored by the UN and joined by
fifty-four countries in an effort to end the refugee problem through widespread publicity and innovative
fundraising, political mobilization and private charitable efforts.
But the Cold War also intruded into popular culture. Some of the most striking moments occurred during
the 1956 Sixteenth Summer Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. Not only were these the first televised
games and the first to be held outside Europe and North America, but they also stood in the shadow of the
Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary (described later in this chapter).*

A GLOBAL COLD WAR

It was inevitable that the Superpower rivalry would spread beyond Europe, where the Cold War had reached a
stalemate. Neither Washington’s “New Look”—the increased production of nuclear weapons and B-52
bombers to provide greater military capability at reduced cost—nor the extensive covert activities of the CIA
were capable of rolling back the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the United States could only watch
passively on June 17, 1953, when Soviet tanks crushed the East German protesters whom American
propaganda had encouraged to break their chains. Similarly, Khrushchev, despite the Soviet Union’s
increasingly impressive nuclear accomplishments, quickly recognized Moscow’s inability to dislodge the
United States from Western Europe or to thwart the resurrection of an economically and politically strong
West Germany, its entry into NATO, and its rearmament.
The former colonial world was a more promising arena for US-Soviet competition. With their large
populations, crucial raw materials, and strategically important locations, Third World* countries represented a
prime arena to launch a global contest between capitalism and communism. Beginning in 1953 Washington
and Moscow, eager to supplant European control while advertising their own anti-imperialist credentials,
formulated two rival economic development models accompanied by generous military and civilian aid
packages and goodwill gestures (from student scholarships to high-level government visits) to attract the elites
in the colonial and semicolonial states of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Both deployed
their overseas intelligence agencies, the CIA and the KGB, to enlist allies and informants in the Third World,
monitor political movements and foreign governments, and penetrate their rivals’ activities.
Both sides entered this global competition with assets and liabilities, and both approached the Third World
with a combination of ambition, altruism, and fear of the other’s gains. The United States, brimming with
confidence over its role in rebuilding Western Europe and Japan, sought to extend its political influence by
supporting the expansion of free markets and elected governments. The Soviet Union, which had revived
spectacularly after World War II as a major military and industrial power, countered the West’s appeal with
its call for centralized planning and a regime that promoted social and economic justice.
The United States embarked on this contest with a mixed record. Observers were distressed by the wave of
virulent anticommunism that had swept the country in the early 1950s and the bleak condition of its African
American citizens. Abroad, America’s “pactomania,”† its hostility toward nonalignment, and its tendency to
intervene in the affairs of its neighbors far and near raised alarm among Third World leaders. Particularly
damaging to Washington’s reputation were the coups engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency against
two elected foreign governments: in Iran in 1953, toppling Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had

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nationalized the country’s oil industry, and returning Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, and in
Guatemala in 1954, replacing the popular left-wing president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who had advocated
extensive land reform and the expropriation of undeveloped foreign property, with a more compliant regime.
The popular US novel (1958) and film (1963) The Ugly American underlined the urgency of adding
knowledgeable and respectful emissaries (like the hero Homer Atkins) to Washington’s anticommunist
crusade in the hamlets of Southeast Asia.
The Soviet Union’s forays outside its borders were also fraught with problems. Echoing Lenin’s call for a
global struggle against Western colonialism and neocolonialism, the USSR in the mid-1950s launched an
ambitious foreign aid program in the Third World.* But at home, this initiative created problems, straining
Moscow’s economic and financial resources at a time when Khrushchev was vowing to raise living standards
and expand the Soviets’ military and nuclear capacity. Abroad, Khrushchev’s courtship of noncommunist
Third World governments and his endorsement of a “hybrid” form of noncapitalist development (integrating
state and private initiatives) weakened and disheartened Marxist militants in Egypt, Iran, Burma, India, and
Indonesia. But above all, Khrushchev’s initiative left the Kremlin vulnerable to manipulation by ambitious
Third World leaders and to a bidding contest with the wealthier West.
By the 1950s European imperialism was in full retreat in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. A
spectacular note was sounded on May 7, 1954, when, after an almost two-month siege, the communist-led
Vietnamese forces, backed by China, defeated the US-supported French army at Điện Biên Phủ.† On July 21
the Geneva Accords ended more than six decades of French rule in Indochina. Laos and Cambodia became
independent, and Vietnam, temporarily partitioned along the seventeenth parallel, was to hold national
elections two years hence.‡
France’s disaster at Điện Biên Phủ reverberated throughout the colonial world, particularly in French
Algeria, where the nationalist insurrection that erupted on November 1, 1954, also shaped Cold War
international politics. Unlike its treatment of Morocco and Tunisia (which it would grant independence in
1956), the French government was determined to maintain control over its largest possession, which had a
million European inhabitants, immense natural resources, and more than a century of political, economic, and
cultural ties with France. After the Soviet Union and China in 1955 endorsed the FLN (the Front de
Libération Nationale, or National Liberation Front), the union of Algeria’s revolutionary factions, France,
brandishing the specter of communism in North Africa, appealed for Washington’s aid. But the Eisenhower
administration responded cautiously, wavering between support for its NATO ally and fear of alienating the
Muslim world, between America’s decade-long Cold War reflexes and its growing recognition of a new world
of emerging nations that were determined to avoid falling into either the communist or the Western camp.
Significantly, the USSR was also cautious over Algeria. Khrushchev, who was attempting to woo France away
from NATO, tempered his military support for the FLN with assurances of nonintervention in the “internal
affairs of the French Union” and held off political recognition of the Algerian nationalists for several years.

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Map 8. The process of decolonization began after World War II in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa,
accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s, and provided a major arena of Superpower competition.

The 1955 Bandung Conference was a pivotal moment in the creation of a Third World identity. Delegates
representing twenty-nine states in Africa and Asia (one-fourth of the world’s land surface and 1.5 billion
people), meeting in the West Java capital in Indonesia, declared their opposition to all forms of colonialism—
Soviet as well as Western—and their adherence to the principles of nonalignment.* The ten-point Bandung
declaration reaffirmed the charter of the United Nations (in all of whose agencies Asian and African members
were now playing a major role) and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And at Bandung,
Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s moderate leadership signaled his country’s entry into the global diplomatic
arena, overshadowing India’s prime minister, Jawaharal Nehru, as an advocate of anti-imperialism.
The Superpowers responded to this display of Third World self-confidence. The Soviet Union hastened to
endorse the Bandung principles, and the United States began to ease its hostility toward nonalignment (which
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had denounced as “morally bankrupt”), acknowledge the diminishing
appeal of its security pacts, and court independent Third World governments.
Vietnam was an exception. The Eisenhower administration, which had refused to sign the Geneva Accords,
feared a communist victory in the national elections and a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. After the
French withdrawal, the United States proceeded to build up a client state in the south, allowing President

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Photo 4.1 Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, Burmese prime minister U Nu, and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal
Nehru at a private meeting during the 1955 Bandung Conference. Courtesy of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Ngô Đình Diệm to cancel the 1956 elections and to clamp down on his opponents. Contrary to the
Geneva Accords, which forbade the Vietnamese from entering foreign alliances or allowing foreign troops
into Vietnam, Dulles mobilized the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization to agree to protect South
Vietnam against communist aggression. When a popular insurgency, which Diệm contemptuously labeled
Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists), erupted in the south two years later and received support from the
north, Eisenhower expanded US economic and military aid and personnel on the ground.*

HUNGARY

Nikita Khrushchev appeared to be a new Soviet boss. Seeking to counteract West Germany’s entry into
NATO, the Soviet Union in May 1955 concluded the Warsaw Pact with its seven East European satellites,†
tying them tightly to the Kremlin and expanding Moscow’s voice in European affairs. But in that same year,
Khrushchev also emitted conciliatory signals, reestablishing relations with renegade Yugoslavia, withdrawing
Soviet forces from Austria, returning Soviet-captured bases to China and Finland, and establishing diplomatic
relations with the Federal Republic of Germany, including the repatriation of the remaining ten thousand

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German prisoners of war still held in the Soviet Union. At the Geneva Big Four meeting of Britain, France,
the United States, and the USSR, ten years after the last Allied summit in 1945, Khrushchev uttered the
words “peaceful coexistence.”
There were more surprises. Shortly after midnight on February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shook the communist
faithful with his four-hour-long secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Union, in which
he denounced Stalin’s crimes: the self-glorification and the cult of the individual that violated Leninist
principles of collective leadership, the terror tactics against his enemies, the ruinous errors during the Great
Patriotic War, the hideous postwar purges, and Stalin’s “suspicion and haughtiness [toward] whole parties and
nations.”
Khrushchev’s speech, accompanied by the dissolution of the Cominform in April and Tito’s visit to
Moscow in June 1956, seemed to point to major reforms in the Soviet Empire; but the new Soviet leader had
no such intention. In response to nationwide anti-Soviet demonstrations in Poland between June and October
and the return of the renegade Władysław Gomułka, Khrushchev planned a Soviet military strike,
backtracking only in return for Polish assurances that the existing communist power structure would remain
intact and the country would remain in the Warsaw Pact.
The Hungarian uprising posed an even greater challenge. By mid-October Hungary’s massive anti-Soviet
demonstrations by students, soldiers, writers, and workers had led to the disintegration of communist control.
The newly appointed Prime Minister Imre Nagy, a moderate party man who lacked Gomułka’s political
agility, was swept along by the revolutionaries, suddenly announcing a multiparty system and Hungary’s
withdrawal from the communist bloc.
The danger to Moscow was clear. An independent Hungary threatened to create a physical wedge in the
Soviet Union’s East European empire, encourage imitators, and create a domino effect that would menace the
homeland. Khrushchev, after a period of hesitation on the night of October 31 at the height of the Suez crisis
(see the next section), gave the order to intervene militarily and reestablish reliable communist rule in
Budapest.

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Photo 4.2 Street scene in Budapest after a battle between Soviet tanks and Hungarian protestors, November
1, 1956. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.

The cost was substantial. Some 640 Soviet soldiers were killed and 1,251 wounded; on the Hungarian side
were 2,000 dead, tens of thousands wounded, some 35,000 arrested, 22,000 incarcerated, 200 executed
(among them Imre Nagy in 1958), and over 200,000 people who fled the country. Not only was Khrushchev’s
stature at home and abroad greatly diminished, but he forced his country to assume the economic and political
burdens of pacifying millions of resentful East European subjects through military occupation and a less
austere, more consumer-oriented (“goulash”) communism.
The Western public reacted strongly to the images of Soviet tanks crushing a popular uprising. Their
governments promptly accepted thousands of refugees, and in a taunt to die-hard Western leftists, the French
political philosopher Raymond Aron declared in October 1956 that the Soviet Union was merely a “long-term
despotism” that was doomed to fail.
Yet the United States, whose secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, for several years had preached the
rollback of communism in Eastern Europe, had also suffered a moral defeat. Until the last moment, its paid
radio broadcasters had imprudently encouraged the revolutionaries’ belief that outside support was imminent.
Eisenhower, in the final days of his second presidential campaign and absorbed by the Suez crisis, was
unwilling to risk a nuclear war over Hungary. Indeed, prior to the invasion Washington had sent reassuring
signals to Moscow and declined to raise a protest in the United Nations. After the revolt was crushed and his
reelection sealed, Eisenhower combined expressions of sympathy for the Hungarians’ plight with open
acceptance of a divided and stable Europe, thus dispelling the myth of liberation and taking the first step
toward détente in Europe.
Indeed, after 1956 the face of the Cold War in Europe did change. The ideological confrontation became
less aggressive. The doctrine of peaceful coexistence, repeated by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party
Congress, facilitated cultural exchanges between East and West. Westerners gradually discovered the films,
literature, music, art, and scholarship from behind the Iron Curtain, while Soviet and East European citizens,
increasingly exposed to Western visitors and ideas, continued to hope for less repressive, more humane
socialism.
Although Moscow had secured its East European empire in 1956, its control over the world communist
movement was diminishing. There were still loyalists to Stalin, such as the eighty-eight-year-old African
American political philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois, who pronounced Khrushchev’s criticisms “irresponsible
and muddled” and blamed the upheavals in Eastern Europe on US meddling. There were also new renegades,
such as the Comintern veteran Palmiro Togliatti, leader of Italy’s second-largest party, who coined the term
“polycentrism” to distance himself from the Kremlin’s dictates, and the Yugoslav dictator Tito, who again
escaped Moscow’s clutches by embracing nonalignment.
The strongest response came from Beijing. Not only were Mao Zedong and Khrushchev mistrustful
comrades, but the Chinese leader was appalled by the general secretary’s de-Stalinization campaign, which
had led to the tumult in Poland and Hungary. Stung by Moscow’s arrogance, tough economic terms, and lack
of enthusiasm for liberating Taiwan, Mao also decided to pursue a more independent path.

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 SUEZ

By 1956, only four years after toppling the corrupt and ineffective King Farouk, Egypt’s second president and
virtual dictator, the thirty-six-year-old Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, had become a major figure in
international affairs. A champion of pan-Arabism, he aimed to build up Egypt and liberate the Middle East
from the last vestiges of European colonialism. He had won Britain’s agreement to withdraw its eighty
thousand troops from the Suez Canal Zone, played a starring role at the Bandung Conference, and defied the
West with a spectacular arms deal with communist Czechoslovakia in 1955 and the establishment of
diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1956.
By 1956 Nasser’s feats had aroused his opponents. Israeli leaders, worried over their neighbor’s acquisition
of sophisticated Eastern-bloc weapons, the escalating border violence, and the hostile propaganda emanating
from Cairo radio, contemplated a preemptive strike. They found a kindred spirit in France, where the Guy
Mollet government was obsessed with Nasser’s support of the Algerian revolution. And Britain’s prime
minister, Anthony Eden, furious over Nasser’s attempts to undermine British interests in Iraq and Jordan,
viewed the Egyptian leader as an “Arab Mussolini” intent on using Soviet aid to dominate the Middle East
and to threaten Western Europe’s oil supplies.
The Superpowers were ineluctably drawn in. One year earlier, the United States, hoping to gain influence
in the largest Arab state, had agreed to a generous $54 million loan to support the building of the Aswan
High Dam. However, by the spring of 1956 Eisenhower had grown wary of Nasser’s flirtation with Moscow,
his anti-Western statements, and his hostility toward Israel. Khrushchev on the other hand—despite his nod
to noncapitalist development—was absorbed in the tumult in Eastern Europe and skeptical of the dam project
and therefore declined Nasser’s request to enter a bidding contest with Washington. Suddenly, on July 19, an
exasperated and suspicious Eisenhower withdrew the US loan, and Eden readily vacated Britain’s $14 million
offer as well.
Shocked and humiliated, Nasser took action, announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal to pay for
the dam, stirring his compatriots, electrifying the Arab world, and triggering a prolonged international crisis.
In a stroke, Nasser had attained a commanding position over the lifeline of Britain’s commonwealth and
empire and over one of two principal routes of Middle Eastern oil deliveries to the West. With the closure of
the Strait of Tiran, he had also gained a chokehold on Israel’s maritime ties with East Africa and Asia.
The Superpowers’ responses were a study in contrast. Khrushchev, caught off-balance by what he privately
termed Nasser’s “ill-timed” move, neither spread a Soviet diplomatic mantle over Egypt nor offered additional
arms, expecting the United States to rein in its allies. Thus during the next three months Eisenhower took the
lead, striving to prevent an attack on Egypt, which, he was convinced, would destabilize the Middle East and
encourage further Soviet moves into the region.
Pitted against the US president were his two agitated NATO partners: France, smarting over the loss of
Indochina and the uprising in Algeria and with public opinion solidly behind punishing Nasser, and Britain,
with a divided cabinet and parliament and almost unanimous commonwealth opposition to the use of force,
but led by an ailing and impulsive prime minister determined to reassert his nation’s power and protect its oil
supply. Israel played a crucial role. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had vacillated out of fear of US or
Soviet intervention, was won over by militant cabinet members with the prospect of joining a Western

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alliance. In early October Eden agreed to Mollet’s audacious scheme for an Israeli invasion of Egypt as cover
for an Anglo-French seizure of the canal and the toppling of Nasser. Israel’s agreement to strike first was
sealed in a secret pact with France and Britain signed at Sèvres on October 24, 1956.

Map 9. The attack on Egypt by Israel, France, and Great Britain, October–November 1956.

Operation Musketeer began smoothly. On October 29 Israeli paratroops landed in the central Sinai and
quickly reached the Suez Canal. One day later Britain and France issued a twelve-hour ultimatum demanding
that both sides withdraw from the Canal Zone; when Nasser refused, on October 31 they bombarded
Egyptian airfields, and after a five-day delay, their troops began ground operations. In the meantime Nasser
had responded on November 1 by blocking the canal with blown-up craft and equipment. During that
explosive week a wave of outrage swept the world, almost obliterating the dire news from Hungary.
It was now up to the Superpowers. Khrushchev was again taken unaware, having been lulled through
October by Nasser’s overconfidence, faulty Soviet intelligence, and his underestimation of Eden’s resolve.
Once hostilities began, Khrushchev, absorbed by Hungary, ignored Nasser’s pleas for military or diplomatic
support, leaving the way open for US management of the crisis. Eisenhower, furious over his allies’ deception,
was determined to halt the aggression against Egypt and to do so before Moscow acted. The United States
called on the United Nations, and after an Anglo-French veto blocked action by the Security Council, the

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General Assembly on November 1 voted 64–5 in favor of an immediate ceasefire. In an extraordinary Cold
War moment, Soviet and American aims had become identical and the United Nations had become a site of
peacemaking.
Both Superpowers overplayed their hands. With the Hungarian uprising almost crushed, Khrushchev on
November 5 warned Eden, Mollet, and Ben-Gurion that the Soviet Union was prepared to use its nuclear
weapons “to crush the aggression and to restore peace in the Middle East.” Eisenhower, who had applied
heavy political and economic pressure on the three belligerents, won both a second term and a ceasefire on
November 6 and then took the lead in transporting a UN Emergency Force to Egypt and pressuring the
invaders to withdraw their armies.
Khrushchev’s saber rattling was alarming, but America’s desertion of its allies drew even heavier criticism at
home and abroad. A humiliated Eden resigned, forcing Washington to reassure Britain and other NATO
members of US protection and goodwill. France was even more disaffected over Eden’s yielding to
Washington and Eisenhower’s nonchalance over Khrushchev’s threats. Musketeer’s author, Guy Mollet,
resigned in May 1957, and the Suez fiasco undoubtedly prepared the way for the reemergence one year later
of Charles de Gaulle, a leader imbued with a profound distrust of Britain and America and determined to
ensure France’s national security outside a US-dominated NATO and to build its own nuclear force.
The Suez crisis also produced the West’s first oil crisis. Almost immediately after Nasser blocked the canal,
other Arab governments moved to choke the West’s oil supply. Syria severed diplomatic relations with Britain
and France, and the pipeline carrying oil through its territory from Iraq to the Mediterranean was
immediately disabled when three of its pumping stations were blown up, reportedly by units of the Syrian
army. On November 6 Saudi Arabia also broke its ties with the aggressors and banned tankers from carrying
its oil to Britain or France. Everything now depended on the United States, still a major oil producer and
exporter as well as home to five of the seven multinational oil companies. An incensed Eisenhower refused to
relieve his allies’ mounting oil shortages or rescue the plummeting British and French currencies until they
withdrew their armies from Egypt.
To be sure, the oil scare had little impact at the time. Once Britain and France had caved in, the United
States helped ease the delivery problem, and Anglo-American oil companies resumed their cooperation.
Moreover, higher energy prices reduced consumption, and the unusually warm winter in Europe in 1956–
1957 softened the impact of diminished supplies. By March 1957, the canal had been cleared and the
pipelines repaired, and rationing had ended in Western Europe. Worldwide oil production increased, and
prices fell dramatically. Nonetheless, the specter of future shortages that could threaten the West’s security,
halt its industries, and bring hardship to its population had presented itself in 1956, along with the lessons of
US dominance over supplies and the Arabs’ willingness to use this weapon.
Israel, which had demonstrated its military prowess, emerged stronger from the Suez crisis. It now had a
French ally willing to supply arms and even nuclear material. With strong French support it had secured an
international guarantee of naval passage through the Strait of Tiran as well as a UN force to protect it against
guerrilla raids from Egypt, although both gains were dependent on Nasser’s compliance. On the other hand,
the exiled Palestinian leadership based in Gaza, which had witnessed the Egyptians’ rout firsthand, had
become more determined than ever to pursue their goal of national liberation and sought more substantial
Arab support. Israel’s relations with Washington had also soured: the United States had forced Israel to

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relinquish the prizes of its stunning victory—the capture of Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt—and to recognize
its minor role in Eisenhower’s political calculations.
The Cold War had now spread into the Middle East. In the beginning of 1957 Eisenhower—echoing
Truman ten years earlier—announced a new US doctrine, pledging military and financial aid to Arab
countries threatened by the “spread of communism.” But Washington overestimated the Arabs’ fear of
communism and underestimated their nationalism and political divisions along with their hatred of
colonialism and of Israel. Meanwhile, Moscow, fixated on securing a foothold in a strategically important
region, overestimated its resources and its influence over the Arabs and underestimated the US resolve to
replace Great Britain as the major power in the region. The Suez crisis had demonstrated the readiness of
Middle East actors to use the Superpowers but also the latter’s insufficient knowledge and understanding of
the region’s populations and politics.

THE NUCLEAR QUESTION

The best-selling 1957 novel On the Beach by the Anglo-Australian writer Nevil Shute was set in a world
devastated by nuclear war. In that year the Superpowers had accumulated enough weapons not only to
annihilate each other but also to make the globe uninhabitable.
Khrushchev’s nuclear bluff in November 1956 had been the threat of an underdog. The United States still
held a clear superiority in strategic weapons, with nuclear bombs and long-range bombers outnumbering the
USSR’s by approximately eleven to one. Moreover, the United States had encircled the Soviet Union with a
chain of bases housing its Strategic Air Command bombers, which included 1,000 B-47s, 150 B-52s, and 250
B-36s and were complemented by a worldwide fleet of aircraft carriers capable of launching long-range
bombers from practically everywhere. Thus in 1956 the Soviet Union, with fewer bombs and aircraft, was
vulnerable to a US first strike or a retaliatory attack, while the United States was still sheltered by numbers,
distance, and a superior surveillance system.
Khrushchev was determined to overcome the Soviets’ inferiority. Alongside his calls for peaceful
coexistence, he ordered a buildup in Soviet bombs and bombers and launched the development of
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). With the appearance of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, thrust into
space by a long-range Soviet rocket, the United States mainland suddenly became vulnerable to attack. Civil
defense programs, which had begun earlier in the decade, made Americans aware that Soviet rockets could
now target any place on the globe. The Eisenhower administration hastened to regain US superiority by
launching an ambitious space and missile program and providing government subsidies for higher education,
especially in scientific and technical fields.
America’s Western Europe allies stood precariously between the two Superpowers, and the Iron Curtain
was its pervasive reality. Khrushchev’s nuclear threats in November 1956 and Eisenhower’s bland response
had exposed their vulnerability. Despite Western Europe’s growing economic strength and the turmoil within
the Soviet satellite nations, the Warsaw Pact’s ground forces outnumbered NATO’s by about six to one; and
once mobilized and committed to war the communist forces could not be stopped before they reached the
Rhine, even with the use of tactical nuclear weapons. West European leaders began questioning whether the
United States would expose its own territory to retaliation by launching a nuclear strike against the Soviet

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Union. Some also asked whether American military bases endangered their dense population centers and
necessitated a reconsideration of NATO membership.
East Europeans raised questions as well. In a daring speech to the UN General Assembly on October 2,
1957, Polish foreign minister Adam Rapacki called for the de-nuclearization of Central Europe, which would
have blocked the stationing of Soviet bases in Poland and Czechoslovakia as well as US bases in West
Germany. Washington, although recognizing the significance of this independent initiative, promptly
denounced the plan as a threat to NATO’s nuclear shield, a nonsolution to the German question, and a
solidification of the Iron Curtain.
A global nuclear disarmament movement began to swell in the 1950s, drawing on memories of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, challenging the accelerating US-Soviet arms race, and bringing together people of different
ages, races, and ideologies to demand a world free from the fear of a nuclear catastrophe.

BUILDING EUROPE

Among the most anxious witnesses to the Hungarian and Suez crises was West German chancellor Konrad
Adenauer. The Federal Republic, NATO’s newest member, had declared its neutrality in the war against
Egypt, but it had been jarred by the Soviets’ brutal repression in Hungary and by Moscow’s threats to London
and Paris as well as by America’s cavalier treatment of its principal European allies. Seizing the moment of his
arrival in Paris on November 6, just as the ceasefire was announced, Adenauer urged his hosts to work
together to “build Europe.”
The project of European unity had a long history and had gained force after World War II with the
Marshall Plan and the European Coal and Steel Community, the 1951 agreement that had brought France,
West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) together
under a common high authority. For more than a year the Benelux project of a common market—involving
both economic and nuclear cooperation—had languished because of Franco-German hesitations, France over
the future role of its empire and West Germany caught in an internal debate over chaining itself
institutionally and politically to its weaker neighbors.
The Suez crisis brought Bonn and Paris together in 1956 in a historic gesture of real and symbolic
reconciliation. Adenauer believed that Western Europe needed to form a counterweight to the Soviet threat
and American unilateralism, and Mollet wished to avenge the humiliation of Suez. The Treaty of Rome of
March 25, 1957, which brought the European Economic Community (EEC) to life, grew out of a bargain
involving substantial concessions to France’s overseas territories and a major financial commitment by Bonn,
but it was also a clear sign of West Germany’s increased role in European affairs.
Britain’s future role in Europe was also affected. Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan, accepted Britain’s
economic and strategic dependency on Washington. He also reduced ties with Paris, repaired the frayed
bonds with the British Commonwealth, and acknowledged that the “wind of change” was blowing through
Africa. However, EEC membership held little appeal for London. Britain, already a nuclear power, was
disinclined to share secrets and techniques with the continent. Moreover, it still sent 74 percent of its exports
outside Europe, thus diminishing the attraction of submitting to the tariff and political controls of continental
bureaucrats.

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 The six-member EEC developed into a significant US Cold War ally, although more robust in economic
and cultural influence than in its military capabilities. Britain stood out until 1973, until its empire had
disappeared and its economic isolation from the continent had weakened it further. In another unanticipated
development, the Treaty of Rome not only created a supranational bureaucracy and expanded its members’
prosperity but also revived the dream of a whole, united, and democratic Europe that would exert a strong
influence across the Iron Curtain.*

PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE?

Khrushchev’s appeal for peaceful coexistence, echoing Lenin’s bid in the early 1920s, had evoked a cautious
response from Washington. Indeed, the “spirit of Geneva” in 1955 had rapidly dissipated over Khrushchev’s
bullying behavior in 1956, the ensuing Soviet arms buildup, and the general secretary’s boasts of the future
global triumph of socialism. After Khrushchev had rejected Eisenhower’s Open Skies proposal† at the Geneva
summit, the United States launched an ambitious aerial intelligence-gathering program involving high-
altitude photoreconnaissance aircraft (U-2s) as well as the development of reconnaissance satellites to breach
the barriers of the Soviets’ nuclear program and see beyond Khrushchev’s bluster.
The German question remained a fundamental source of contention among the World War II victors.
After refusing the West’s 1955 proposals for national elections and a united Germany that would maintain
links with NATO (with adequate security guarantees for its neighbors), Khrushchev had impulsively
committed the USSR to preserving the independence and survival of East Germany (which Stalin had
considered merely a Cold War bargaining card), thereby saddling Moscow for more than three decades with
the burden of propping up and defending a weak, unpopular regime. Moreover the Berlin problem (the status
of the divided former German capital lying one hundred miles inside the GDR) exacerbated East-West
tensions. By the mid-1950s West Berlin had become a glittering showcase of capitalist prosperity that
provided an easy escape route for almost two million disaffected East Germans. It was also militarily
indefensible by its small US, British, and French garrisons—except at the cost of a nuclear war.
On November 10, 1958, Khrushchev provoked another Berlin crisis, emboldened by the successful coup in
Iraq (which had overthrown the monarchy and removed that country from the British-organized Baghdad
Pact) and by the peaceful outcome of the US-Chinese standoff over the Quemoy and Matsu islands (in
which, he believed, his own quiet saber rattling had averted America’s nuclear threat to China). Almost ten
years after Stalin’s failed probe, the Soviet leader threatened to repudiate the four-power occupation regime in
Berlin and allow East Germany to control access to West Berlin. In his ultimatum he gave the West six
months to negotiate their treaty rights with the German Democratic Republic. Khrushchev’s ostensible goal
was to stabilize conditions in Central Europe: to crush Bonn’s hopes for unification, prop up the faltering
GDR, and transform Berlin’s western sector—a “bone in the communists’ throat”—into an unarmed and
vulnerable free city that, stripped of Western protection, would inevitably be swallowed by East Germany.

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Photo 4.3 Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev debating in front of a model US kitchen,
Moscow, July 24, 1959. Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, A10-024.43.16.1.

Once more a Soviet leader had underestimated US determination to maintain its presence in Berlin.
Ignoring British reservations over risking annihilation for the sake of two million former enemies, Eisenhower
took a tough stand, exceeding de Gaulle’s strong response to Moscow’s threat, reassuring an anxious
Adenauer, and maintaining West Berlin as a powerful symbol of American credibility. The Berlin crisis
temporarily evaporated. In May 1959 Khrushchev let the deadline pass in return for a foreign ministers’
conference in August and an invitation to become the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. And that
summer at the opening ceremony of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Khrushchev held his
famous impromptu “kitchen debate” with Vice President Richard Nixon—the first high-level meeting
between the Superpowers since the Geneva summit in 1955—an exchange of jibes, captured on camera, over
the superiority of the communist versus the capitalist systems.
Khrushchev’s September 1959 visit to the US, although a personal triumph, was also a setback for the
Kremlin. At their Camp David meeting Khrushchev and Eisenhower agreed to put the Berlin problem “on
ice” until the summit conference a year later, thus failing to halt the flight of East Germans westward—some
144,000 would escape in 1959 and another 200,000 in 1960. And inevitably Khrushchev’s growing coziness
with the capitalists raised alarm in Beijing.
The amicable spirit of Camp David was also short-lived. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev were
committed to reducing their nuclear stockpiles, but both were under pressure from their respective militaries
to maintain sufficient bombs and missiles—the United States to stay far ahead, the Soviets to catch up—to
prevent the other side from exerting nuclear blackmail. Eisenhower, urged by the intelligence community to

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inspect Khrushchev’s new ICBMs, in March 1960 reluctantly approved the resumption of U-2 reconnaissance
flights—well aware that violating Soviet air space could compromise his efforts to achieve disarmament. On a
particularly poorly chosen date, May 1, the annual celebration of International Workers’ Day and a major
Soviet holiday, a U-2 was launched from Peshawar, Pakistan, on a 3,800-mile flight over the USSR to have
ended in Bodǿ, Norway. Instead the craft, tracked by Soviet radar, was apparently forced by engine trouble to
descend from its impregnable seventy-thousand-foot altitude, and as it approached three of the Soviets’ five
ICBM launchpads, it was shot down over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers,
who had parachuted from the stricken plane, was captured immediately, and the wrecked U-2 plane went on
display in Gorky Park near the center of Moscow. The details of the May 1 crash—how exactly Powers’s
plane was hit and also his failure to destroy the plane and himself—remain controversial to this day.
Only two weeks before the long-awaited four-power Paris summit to discuss Berlin and disarmament, the
downing of the U-2 created a sensation. Eisenhower, dismissing his advisers’ counsel, on May 11 took full
responsibility for the espionage flights, which he deemed a “distasteful but vital necessity” to guard the United
States against “massive surprise attacks.” Khrushchev, infuriated by the president’s admission and determined
to defend Soviet skies from foreign surveillance, demanded an apology, which Eisenhower refused.
Thereupon the general secretary departed Paris on May 18, torpedoing the conference. In a vengeful gesture
Khrushchev, en route to Moscow, stopped in East Berlin to reaffirm his commitment to “solving the German
problem.”
Some observers have suggested that a major opportunity to end the Cold War was lost in May 1960; others
strongly disagree. To be sure, neither the United States nor the Soviets were in agreement over the future of
Germany; nor could they harmonize their views over disarmament, particularly in light of the pressures each
had encountered from within and without. Eisenhower, nearing the end of his second term, had become
increasingly alarmed over the power of America’s “military-industrial complex,” the vast public and private
resources allocated to national security. On leaving office he admitted “a definite sense of disappointment”
that no “lasting peace [was] in sight.” Khrushchev’s efforts toward complete and general disarmament were
also opposed, not only by members of the politburo and the Soviet military and intelligence elite but also by
Beijing. After the failed Paris summit he marked time until Eisenhower’s departure and became more
adventurous and truculent, courting Third World leaders, sending aid to the communist guerrilla movement
in Laos and to the leftist regime of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and treating the world to a shoe-banging
performance at the UN General Assembly in September 1960 in protest against the Philippines’ delegate’s
criticisms of Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe. The stage was thereby set for a new and even more dangerous
round of US-Soviet confrontation.

CUBA AND BERLIN

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on a wintry Friday, January 20, 1961, ushered in a new Cold War
decade. The forty-three-year-old president, the first US leader born in the twentieth century, who had won
the election by an extremely narrow margin, sent a mixed message. To Americans and the world he
announced that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any
foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” but he also held out the prospect of renewed

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disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union as well as a global alliance to ensure “a more fruitful life for
all mankind.”
Khrushchev initially welcomed the new and pragmatic US leader, with whom he sought to settle the Berlin
question once and for all and to continue the quest for nuclear disarmament. Over Beijing’s strong objections,
Washington and Moscow quietly cooperated in March to obtain a ceasefire in Laos and create a neutral
government. In early April Khrushchev and Kennedy agreed to meet in Vienna in June. And on April 12 the
Kremlin received another boost when the astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in outer space.
But a new barrier had been raised between the Superpowers. In January 1959 a revolution in Cuba led by
the charismatic Fidel Castro had toppled the corrupt, US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After
Eisenhower imposed a crippling embargo in retaliation for the nationalization of US landholdings, banks, and
industries, Castro turned to the Kremlin. Khrushchev in February 1960 grasped the opportunity to challenge
the Monroe doctrine and enter the Western Hemisphere, offering to purchase Cuban sugar, grant low-
interest loans, and provide substantial arms. Eisenhower, furious at Castro’s defiance—made explicit in his
four-and-a-half-hour denunciation of “Yankee imperialism” before the September 1960 meeting of the
General Assembly—and the appearance of thousands of Soviet technicians and military and diplomatic
personnel, broke off relations with Cuba in January 1961 and handed his successor a plan to invade the island
and overthrow its leader.
Kennedy, although skeptical, approved the operation. It involved a landing on three beaches of the Bay of
Pigs by exiled Cubans, trained by the CIA and US Special Forces, who would ostensibly stir a revolt against
Castro’s rule. However, at the last minute the new US president called off the air strikes that would have
provided cover for the invasion force. Castro’s Soviet-supplied tanks and planes easily overwhelmed the
invaders, who also had no local guerrilla forces to support their operation. A rueful Kennedy took full
responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster, in which 1,100 survivors were taken prisoner in Cuba.
America’s second humiliation in two years formed the backdrop of the rough Vienna meeting in June 1961.
Khrushchev, facing grim economic news at home, the collapse of his client Lumumba’s regime in the Congo,*
and growing Chinese defiance, issued another Berlin ultimatum that sent Kennedy reeling back to
Washington, searching for an appropriate response. Both sides decided on prudence. Kennedy, disregarding
his senior advisers, urged an increase in the US defense budget and called up reserve troops and the National
Guard, but he did not declare a national emergency. Khrushchev on his part had decided to avoid a nuclear
showdown and to solve the Berlin problem in August 1961 by encasing West Berlin inside a concrete wall. By
allowing the East Germans to erect this heavily fortified structure, Khrushchev closed off the last escape route
from the Iron Curtain and saved the GDR.
The Western powers’ reaction was muted. Although protesting the limitations on inter-Berlin travel and
communication, the United States, Britain, and France ultimately accepted the fait accompli that brought
stability to the continent by removing the last dispute between Washington and Moscow. As Kennedy
famously remarked to his aides, “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

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Photo 4.4 October 1961: East German workers reinforce the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate,
formerly one of the city’s principal arteries. Courtesy of the National Archives, 306-BN-104-1.

For almost three decades the Berlin Wall was the Cold War’s most powerful symbol. In a surrounded West
Berlin the West had gained an island outpost: a major intelligence site as well as a precious propaganda tool
against communist repression. But for Chancellor Adenauer and West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, the wall
was also proof of America’s acquiescence in the division of their homeland and an important spur to pursue a
more independent and dynamic German foreign policy.
Once the storm over Berlin had subsided, Khrushchev embarked on an even riskier initiative. By October
1962, with Castro’s approval, the USSR had begun construction of thirty-six medium-range-missile sites and
twenty-four ICBM sites in Cuba. Alerted by evidence from a U-2 overflight, Kennedy grimly informed the
American public, announcing an air and naval “quarantine”* to block the arrival of additional nuclear
armaments to Cuba and demanding the removal of the existing missile sites, while his administration secretly
prepared for air strikes and an invasion of Cuba. With thirty Soviet ships headed for Cuba, the moment of a
Superpower confrontation and a nuclear war seemed about to occur. Then both sides backed down, with
Khrushchev agreeing to withdraw the missiles in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and to
remove its missiles in Turkey.

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Photo 4.5 President Kennedy signing the Cuba Quarantine Proclamation in the Oval Office of the White
House, October 23, 1962. Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, JFKWHP-ST-459-
9-62.

For almost a half century US historians characterized Khrushchev’s action as an unprovoked threat to the
United States and praised Kennedy’s courage and restraint in forcing a showdown and a unilateral Soviet
withdrawal. However, recent research has modified this narrative. Khrushchev was, in fact, reacting to
American aggressiveness toward his ally in Cuba—which included assassination plots, sabotage, and large-
scale military exercises in the Caribbean aimed at toppling Castro—as well as the marked expansion of
America’s military power after 1961, including the installation of intermediate-range nuclear-armed Jupiter
missiles in Turkey, which had sparked fears of a first strike against the Soviet Union and which had been
under consideration during the Berlin crisis in 1961. By placing the missiles in Cuba Khrushchev had boldly
gambled on giving the Americans “a little of their own medicine.”
Moreover, Kennedy, despite his public warning over the menace posed by the Soviet missiles, recognized
that America’s vast nuclear preponderance was unaltered (even if its first-strike capability had now been

122
curtailed). Sensitive to the political fallout over the missiles’ presence in Cuba, he responded with a display of
brinkmanship that terrified the world, but he also refrained from the military showdown advocated by some of
his advisers. And rather than inflicting a humiliating defeat, the president agreed to Khrushchev’s terms over
the Jupiter missiles.
Instead of stabilizing the Cold War, the near collision between the Superpowers in October 1962 had a
problematic outcome. Khrushchev, who had refrained during the crisis from threatening West Berlin,
emerged all the more determined to achieve nuclear parity with the United States, whose growing fleet of
reconnaissance satellites continued to patrol Soviet skies. And America’s NATO allies were less impressed
with Kennedy’s resolution than stunned over the dangers they had faced because of Washington’s unilateral
overreaction to a strategically insignificant event: in the pithy words of French president de Gaulle,
“annihilation without representation.” Indeed, bolstered by their growing economic prosperity—and with the
status quo now cemented by the Berlin Wall—West European governments had become less frightened of a
Soviet invasion and sought ways of improving relations with the Eastern bloc.
The nuclear alarm in October 1962 had the positive effect of prompting renewed efforts for strategic arms
control. On June 20, 1963, the hotline agreement established direct communications between the White
House and the Kremlin. In August the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed a major
treaty prohibiting nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, or at sea. But with the arrival of two new
members in the nuclear club—France in 1960 and China (which refused to adhere to the test ban) in 1964—
the specter of proliferation shook Washington and Moscow.

EXIT KENNEDY AND KHRUSHCHEV

With the construction of the Berlin Wall and the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, each Superpower
had halted the other’s incursions into their proper realms. Moscow’s Iron Curtain was reinforced in East-
Central Europe in 1961, and a year later the United States curtailed the Soviets’ military presence in the
Western Hemisphere. After testing each other’s nerve and mettle—and taking the world to the brink of a
nuclear war—John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev suddenly disappeared from the international scene
within a year of each other.
John Kennedy, who was assassinated in November 1963, left an ambiguous Cold War legacy. In his June
1963 American University commencement address he expressed optimism over achieving peaceful coexistence
with the Soviet Union. But within two weeks he set out to Europe to reassure his NATO allies of America’s
commitment to their defense (while also appealing for a greater contribution on their part), and in West
Berlin he denounced the brutal system on the other side of the wall and chided those who believed “we can
work with the communists.” Moreover, the otherwise prudent Kennedy markedly increased US military aid
and advisers to the embattled government of South Vietnam and shortly before his death also authorized the
generals’ successful coup against Diệm, thus expanding America’s responsibility for another, even more
distant, and indefensible ally.
Khrushchev was overthrown in October 1964 by a politburo disgruntled by his brinkmanship over Suez,
Berlin, and Cuba and also opposed to his erratic search for coexistence with the United States. During his
nine-year rule, Khrushchev had attempted to achieve the impossible: while striving to dismantle the repressive

123
elements of Stalinism, he had used Stalinist measures to crush popular revolutions in Eastern Europe; while
seeking to unify global communism, he had created a powerful rival in Mao’s China; while seeking to revive
Marxist-Leninist revolutionary impulses in the Third World, he had not only raised Washington’s hackles but
also embraced nationalist leaders who imprisoned their left-wing opposition; and while seeking détente with
the United States and the end of NATO, his inflammatory language and nuclear threats had underscored the
need for a united West.
Despite their differences in age and temperament, Kennedy and Khrushchev were both hardened Cold
Warriors who only dimly recognized the radical changes in the world landscape that were beginning to reduce
the Superpowers’ control. Their successors, less experienced in diplomacy and more intent on domestic
reforms, would create a dangerous pause in the Superpowers’ post-Berlin, post-Cuba search for détente.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Primary Sources

“The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents: Electronic Briefing Book.” National Security
Archive. 2002. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB76/ .
“Bay of Pigs Release.” Central Intelligence Agency. Last updated August 2, 2011.
http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/bay-pigs-release .
“Berlin Wall.” Newsreel Archive. British Pathé. http://www.britishpathe.com/workspaces/rgallagher/Berlin-
Wall-4 .
Castro, Fidel. “Castro Speech Data Base.” Latin American Network Information Center.
http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/castro.html .
“CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents.” National Security Archive.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/guatemala/ .
“Cuba Documentation Project.” National Security Archive.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/cuba.htm .
“Digital 1956 Archive.” Open Society Archives. http://osaarchivum.org/digitalarchive/index.html .
“Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference of Bandung (24 April 1955).” Centre Virtuel de la
Connaissance sur l’Europe.
http://www.cvce.eu/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-
en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html .
“Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath.”
Office of the Historian, US State Department. http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v11 .
Kennedy, John F. “Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
Video, 16:00. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BqXIEM9F4024ntFl7SVAjA.aspx .
Kennedy, John F. “JFK on the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962/10/22.” YouTube video, 3:08. Posted by Universal
Newsreels, September 13, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0MUbVQl9Ns .
Kennedy, John F. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Edited by
Ernest R. May and Philip Zelikow. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.

124
Khrushchev, Nikita S. “Nikita S. Khrushchev: The Secret Speech—on the Cult of Personality, 1956.”
Modern History Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html .
Nixon, Richard M., and Nikita S. Khrushchev. “Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate.” C-SPAN Video
Library, 15:00. July 1, 1959. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/110721-1 .
“The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953.” National Security Archive. 2000.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/ .
“Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, Outer Space and Under Water.” Entered into
force October 10, 1963. NuclearFiles.org. http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/treaties/partial-test-
ban/trty_partial-test-ban_1963-10-10.htm .
“The U-2 Spy Plane Incident.” Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.
http://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/u2_incident.html .

Contemporary Writing

Djilas, Milovan. The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. New York: Praeger, 1957.
Kissinger, Henry. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Published for the Council on Foreign
Relations by Harper, 1957.
Rostow, W. W. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1960.
Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Foreword by Gunnar Myrdal.
Cleveland, OH: World, 1956.

Memoirs

Dayan, Moshe. Diary of the Sinai Campaign. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers. Translated and edited by Strobe Talbott. Boston:
Little, Brown, 1970.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Translated and edited by Strobe
Talbott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich. Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes. Translated and edited by Jerrold
L. Schecter and Vyacheslav V. Luchkov. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.
Morton, Kati. Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

Music

Cliburn, Van. “Van Cliburn.” YouTube video, 1:59, from a performance of “Moscow Nights,” 1958. Posted
by “Posterfromus,” October 3, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1vZWJT-XGw .
Hvorostovsky, Dmitri. “Dmitri Hvorostovsky Moscow Nights.” YouTube video, 3:25, from a concert
recorded in Moscow, 2004. Posted by “Apomethe,” January 29, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=mIHPhFHjn7Q .

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 Films

The Atomic Café. Directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty. Los Angeles: The Archives
Project, 1982.
Ballad of a Soldier. Directed by Grigoriy Chukhray. Moscow: Mosfilm, 1959.
Battle of Algiers. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Rome: Rizzoli Film, 1966.
Black Orpheus. Directed by Marcel Camus. Rio de Janeiro: Dispat Films, 1959.
Bridge of Spies. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Los Angeles: Walt Disney Studios, 2015.
Come Back, Africa. Directed by Lionel Rogosin. New York: Milestone Films, 1959.
Funeral in Berlin. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1966.
Gigant Berlin. Directed by Leo de Laforgue. Berlin: Leo Laforgue Filmproduktion, 1964.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Directed by Alain Resnais/Paris: Argos Films, 1959.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel. Los Angeles: Allied Artists Pictures, 1956.
Kanal. Directed by Andrzej Wajda. Warsaw: Studio Filmowe Kadr, 1957.
La Strada. Directed by Federico Fellini. Rome: Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, 1954.
Mon Oncle. Directed by Jacques Tati. Paris: Specta Films, 1958.
On the Beach. Directed by Stanley Kramer. Los Angeles: Stanley Kramer Productions, 1959.
One, Two, Three. Directed by Billy Wilder. Grünwald: Bavaria Filmstudios, 1961.
Pather Panchali. Directed by Satyajit Ray. Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, 1955.
The Seventh Seal. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Stockholm: Svesnk Filmindustri, 1957.

Fiction

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Astor-Honor, 1959.

Anselme, Daniel. On Leave. Translated by David Bellos. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.
Arévalo, Juan José. The Shark and the Sardines. Translated by June Cobb and Raul Osegueda. New York: L.
Stuart, 1961.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Mandarins: A Novel. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman. Cleveland, OH:
World, 1956.
Beti, Mongo. Remember Ruben. Translated by Gerald Moore. London: Heinemann, 1980.
Carpentier, Alejo. Explosion in a Cathedral. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Gollancz, 1963.
Deighton, Len. The Ipcress File. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Fleming, Ian. From Russia with Love. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Pantheon, 1962.
Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment. New York: Viking, 1958.
Lederer, William J., and Eugene Burdick. The Ugly American. New York: W. W. Norton, 1958.
Pasternak, Boris. Dr. Zhivago. Translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Max Hayward, and Manya Harari.
New York: Pantheon, 1958.

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Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Translated by Max Hayward and
Ronald Hingley. New York: Praeger, 1963.
Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Wright, Richard. The Outsider. New York: Harper, 1953.

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Barnhisel, Greg. Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York:
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Oxford University Press, 2016.
Castillo, Greg. Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design. Minneapolis, MN:
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Craig, Campbell. Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War. New York: Columbia University
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Crump, Laurien. The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–69.
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Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
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* The international chain of Hilton hotels built in the 1950s also conveyed a cultural message. Conrad Hilton,
whom the US State and Commerce Departments had encouraged to build his grandiose pleasure palaces in
the major cities of the world as “Little Americas,” called his modernist structure in West Berlin in 1958 “a
new weapon with which to fight communism, a new team of owner, manager, and labor to confront the
class conscious Mr. Marx.”
* Among them FRG chancellor Konrad Adenauer (born in 1876), the GDR party chief Walter Ulbricht
(born in 1893), French president Charles de Gaulle (born in 1890), British prime ministers Anthony Eden
(born in 1897) and Harold Macmillan (born in 1894), and Yugoslav prime minister Josip Broz Tito (born
in 1892).
† Among them Ahmed Sukarno (born in 1901) of Indonesia, Habib Bourguiba (born in 1903) of Tunisia,
Kwame Nkrumah (born in 1909) of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser (born in 1918) of Egypt, Nelson
Mandela (born in 1918) of South Africa, and Fidel Castro (born in 1926) of Cuba. Important exceptions
included Indian prime minister Jawaharal Nehru (born in 1889), Iranian prime minister Mohammad
Mossadeq (born in 1882), and Kenyan revolutionary and first prime minister Jomo Kenyatta (born in
1894).

‡ These references are to the films La Strada (1954), The Seventh Seal (1957), Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959),
Pather Panchali (1955), Mon Oncle (1958), and Black Orpheus (1959).

* The Suez crisis in October–November delayed the torch relay from Greece to Australia, and the
International Olympic Committee turned back calls by several Arab nations to bar Israel, France, and
Britain from participating in the games.
Even more dramatic was the response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Spain, Switzerland, and the
Netherlands boycotted the games. And after the notoriously foul-ridden Soviet-Hungarian water polo match
on December 6, which the Hungarians won four goals to nil, the photograph of a blood-covered Hungarian
athlete became a worldwide sensation.
* This term, evoking the underrepresented Third Estate in the French political order on the eve of the
revolution in 1789, was first used in 1952 by the radical French economist Alfred Sauvy to characterize the
aspirations of the world’s less powerful, more populous states to achieve the recognition and respect of the
dominant minority. But by the 1960s the expression “Third World” had also come to represent a group of
states distinct from the capitalist West and the communist bloc.
† The name given to the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to link the United States with strategic areas of
the world, forming alliances with forty-two states and treaty relations with nearly one hundred.
* Over the next fifteen years, Moscow extended to thirty-five countries some $4 billion in military and
economic assistance, which included the dispatch of thousands of Soviet technicians, the granting of low-
interest loans, and support for three giant development projects: the Bhilai steel complex in India, transport
facilities and power plants in Afghanistan, and the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt.

† By 1954, the United States was supplying 78 percent of France’s war matériel, but Eisenhower refused
French pleas to use US air power, including tactical nuclear weapons, to lift the siege.

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‡ Recent research in the Vietnamese archives has modified earlier accounts of Ho Chi Minh’s reluctant
acceptance of partition because of Chinese and Russian pressure (neither wishing to prolong the fighting
and reignite Cold War tensions with the United States). Because of his heavy losses, the need to
consolidate his rule over the north, and the favorable prospects of winning the 1956 elections and unifying
the entire country peacefully, Ho (perhaps making the best of a difficult political situation) claimed he had
gained a “big victory” (thang loi lon) with the Geneva Accords.
* Despite the participants’ claims of inclusiveness, several countries were excluded from Bandung because their
presence would have been divisive: Israel, South Africa, and Taiwan, as well as North and South Korea.
* Between 1955 and 1961 the United States poured more than $1 billion in economic and military aid into
the Diệm regime, and by the time Eisenhower left office there were approximately one thousand US
military advisers in South Vietnam.
† Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
* On the other side of Europe was the eight-member Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance), founded by Stalin in 1949 in response to the Marshall Plan, charged with regulating economic
relations among the socialist states, and dominated by the Soviet Union.
† Aiming at overcoming the Soviets’ opposition to on-site inspection, the president had proposed a mutual
exchange of blueprints and aerial photoreconnaissance.

* The murder of the Congo’s first prime minster in February 1961—supported by Belgian, US, and British
intelligence operatives—ended Khrushchev’s first effort to establish a Soviet foothold in Africa, ultimately
leading to a Western-oriented government under Joseph Désiré Mobutu.
* Kennedy avoided the term “blockade,” which, according to international law, signified a state of war.

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