American officials realized that the Cold
War could not be won by military force alone.
Poverty and despair made people amenable to
communism in countries like France and Italy. In
June 1947, in a speech at Harvard University, US
Secretary of State George C. Marshall (1880–1959)
announced the Marshall Plan – a massive effort to
help rebuild Western Europe by providing economic
assistance and, if possible, attract countries
in Eastern Europe from the Soviet embrace.23 The
accompanying American requirement that Europe
establish common institutions to administer
Marshall aid was a first step along the road to
Europe’s economic and political integration.
NATO and the nascent European community
served to reintegrate recently defeated Germany
(or at least its Western areas) into Europe and the
West. For its part, the Soviet Union established a
counter alliance in 1955 called the Warsaw Pact.
NATO still exists, although its purposes have
changed since the end of the Cold War. NATO
was forged at first as a political and later a military
shield behind which the United States would help
Western Europe recover from World War Two. In
return, the countries of Western Europe would
accept American political leadership. This arrangement
survived until the worst of the Cold War
had passed and Europe had regained its prosperity.
From the beginning of the Cold War, crises
convulsed Western Europe. These frequently
involved probes in which each side sought to
discover what it could get away with without
causing war, often involving unilateral actions
that one side viewed as justified or harmless
but that provoked the other to respond. Several
involved Soviet efforts to impede Western access
to Berlin, the former and present capital of
Germany.24 Like Germany as a whole, the city was
divided among the victors of World War Two and
was located deep within the Soviet zone (see Map
4.1) with Western access guaranteed. In May
1948, the Soviet Union, anticipating the West’s
establishment of a new state from their zones in
Germany, blockaded Western road, water, and rail
access to Berlin. Soviet anger had been sparked by
a unilateral Western currency reform in its zones
that had been implemented because of Soviet
refusal to treat Germany as a single economic
unit. In response to the blockade, late in July, the
Western powers began a massive airlift to the
beleaguered city to loosen the Soviet stranglehold.
By one estimate, US and British aircraft transported
“over 1.5 million tons of food, fuel, and
other goods into Berlin (the highest load in one
day exceeded 12,000 tons)”25 during the 10
months to the end of the blockade in May 1949.
The peaceful conclusion to the Berlin blockade
was an important learning experience for both
sides in how adversaries could confront each
other in a crisis and, with imagination, avoid
resort to arms.
Other dangerous crises involving Berlin took
place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially
in August 1961, when the Soviet Union constructed
the Berlin Wall, dividing Berlin in two.
The Wall was intended to curtail the flight of East
Germans to the West – an embarrassment to the
Soviet Union and the East German communists –
and it stood as a symbol of the abyss separating
East and West until it was torn down in November
1989.
Militarizing the Cold War
Up to this point, the Cold War had been largely
waged in Europe and had remained mainly a
political and ideological contest. Events now took
place that raised the stakes and began to militarize
the conflict. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet
Union conducted its first successful test of an
atom bomb, shocking the West which had
believed that the USSR was still far from acquiring
nuclear weapons. The USSR had been aided by
espionage conducted by Soviet spies, several of
whom had worked on the wartime Manhattan
Project that developed the US atom bomb. The
Truman administration commissioned a classified
report to be written by Paul Nitze (1907–2004),26