On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane
piloted by CIA employee Francis Gary Powers was
shot down over Soviet air space (see Figure 4.1). For
almost five years, these planes, flying at over
70,000 feet, had been photographing the Soviet
Union’s most secret installations. Believing the
pilot dead, Washington claimed the plane had
gone off course from Iran while investigating
weather conditions. The story was almost immediately
shown to be false when Soviet Premier
Nikita S. Khrushchev (1894–1971) produced the
pilot with photographs of the crash site near
the city of Smolensk, thousands of miles from
where the Americans claimed it was supposed
to be. Furiously, Khrushchev demanded that US
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) apologize,
and, when Eisenhower refused, Khrushchev
cancelled a summit meeting with Eisenhower
scheduled to be held in Paris. As this incident
illustrated, intelligence gathering was a major
activity during the Cold War, and both sides
developed sophisticated technological means to
help them do so.
The Cold War,1 which began soon after World
War Two ended, was the climactic struggle of the
second half of the twentieth century. In this
conflict, the United States and its allies, including
supporters of capitalism, engaged in ideological
warfare against the Soviet Union and its allies,
advocates of communism, an alternative and
incompatible, economic and political system.
The theme of continuity and change is visible
in the Cold War. In many ways, this era marked
a break with the past. It ushered in the nuclear age
and featured the absence of great power war.
Thus, the Cold War is described by historian John
Lewis Gaddis as the “long peace” because of the
remarkable absence of such wars in contrast to
earlier eras.2 In other ways, the period reveals
continuity, with continuing emphasis on the role
of great powers in driving global politics and
the ever present possibility of conflict. We shall
see through the remainder of the text that our
understanding of Cold War politics profoundly
affected the manner in which we – laypersons,
scholars, and policymakers – understand and react
to contemporary global issues.
The chapter begins by examining how to
explain the onset of the Cold War using different
levels of analysis and different theoretical lenses.
The chapter then examines how the Cold
War deepened as the United States adopted the
Truman Doctrine and instituted a strategy of
containment to halt Soviet expansionism. The
military side of the conflict grew with the Soviet
explosion of an atom bomb, the US adoption
of NSC-68, the communist triumph in China,
and the Korean War. Domestically, rabid anticommunism took the form of McCarthyism in
the US, just as anti-capitalism led to purges in the
USSR.
The chapter then examines the Vietnam War
and its consequences, as well as describing the
1962 Cuban missile crisis and its consequences,
including Soviet–American détente in the 1970s.
Détente ended abruptly with the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan and deepening Soviet–American
tension during the first Reagan administration.
The chapter traces how a process begun after
Mikhail Gorbachev became the Communist
Party’s General Secretary culminated in ending
the Cold War, and it examines alternative explanations
for this epic development. The chapter
concludes by looking briefly at Russia’s evolution
since the Cold War’s end.