What was The Cold War?
This page shows how history, poetry and art are all connected and how we can relate poems and artwork to The Cold War. During this era people were living in a hostile word, and most of the poets based their poems around this, and about the dominance competition between Communist and Anticommunist governments and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. The artwork and paintings of this time also reflect the events that happened.
Video made by Karen Alvarez, creator of this website.
The purpose of the Cold War was to dominate international affairs for decades. Many major crises occurred during the Cold War, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Hungary and the Berlin Wall being just some. For many, the growth in weapons of mass destruction was the most worrying issue. During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. Americans had long been alert of Soviet communism and concerned about their leader. The Soviets also resented the Americans’ decades-long. After the World War II ended, the grievances between the two different parties ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and hatred.
In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War. The best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” The Soviet Union believed that with the U.S. there can be no permanent agreement between parties that disagree; America’s only choice was the long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. The country urged to use military force to “contain” communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Consequently began a deadly “arms race.” Bomb tests showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. The present threat of nuclear destruction had a great impact on American domestic life as well. Space exploration served as another case for Cold War competition. The Soviet launched the world’s first artificial satellite and first man-made object to be placed into orbit. In the United States, space was seen as a logical extension of the grand American tradition of "Manifest Destiny," and it was crucial not to lose much ground to the Soviets. In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, and "the Space Race" had initiated. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set food on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. Soviets became "..pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system." With the spread of communism in people were scared that communism could infiltrate the United States. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, hysteria over the threat posed by Communists became known as the Red Scare. Also, the Soviet Union had become a world superpower and had nuclear bombs. People were scared of anyone who may side with the communists and help the Soviets get secret information about the United States. American officials feared that when the Soviet-backed North Korean Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south it was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and declared that no intervention was not an option. President Harry Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the war dragged to a deadlock and ended in 1953. Other international disagreements followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable “Third World.” Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansion there, they would have to intervene more actively. However, what was intended to be a brief military action became a 10-year conflict. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, undecided place, President Richard Nixon suggested, to use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles. He encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. Détente was the period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took form when President Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was signed, which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war. However, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan. Like many leaders, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and uprising crowds around the world. Even if Reagan fought communism only in Central America, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that newly defined Russia’s relationship to the rest of the world, which were political openness and economic reform. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a non-communist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall, the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War, was finally destroyed. By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War had come to and end. |
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