Today I will be talking about the time period when the world was the closest to nuclear war even with all of today’s political problems, the Cold War was still worse. The Cold War was a time when the United States and the former Soviet Union, which is now Russia were neck to neck in a series of espionage, arms races, and proxy wars that could have ended in World War 3. You might have been wondering, how did this happen in the first place?
Well, the Cold War all started after the end of World War Two. The tensions between the Americans and Russians were mainly caused because Britain and the United States were worried about communist states being set up in Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. The US and Britain wanted democratic states in Europe but the Soviet Union was keen on setting up communist nations. This system of putting communist nations across Eastern Europe was called the iron curtain, a sort of defense system, to keep the United States and other democratic nations from reaching Russia in a war as easily.
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This escalated when the Truman Doctrine was passed. This policy was basically supposed to stop the spread of communism across the world. This policy allowed the creation of NATO, an alliance with several major Western nations like Canada, the US, Britain, Western Germany, and France. This alliance was going to be kinda like an emergency plan, just in case the Soviet Union and the US were at war.
The US and Russia were racing to help their sides in Europe economically and the US was doing a pretty good job under the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan gave Western Europe $12 billion dollars to recover after World War 2. Since the Americans were doing better at helping Europe, the Russians made Comecon rival the Marshall Plan.
After NATO was created, the Soviet Union developed its first nuclear bomb, codenamed “First Lightning”, which was very alarming for NATO
During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union fought many proxy wars. A proxy war basically two sides fighting but not in their lands, but instead supporting civil wars in different countries. The first major proxy war is the Korean War. The Korean War started when Soviet-backed North Korea declared war on the pro-democracy South Koreans. After the declaration, the US and the United Nations set up an emergency team to push the North Koreans out of South Korea, which did work but technically has never ended to this day since a peace treaty was never signed. So the most major proxy war during the Cold War probably had to be the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War started in 1955 and ended in 1975. During the war, millions of US men were drafted into the war and the damage was especially severe because fighting in the jungle, where the enemy lives, knows their way around and could easily hide and jump you by surprise, are not very good circumstances for war. Over time the Americans pulled out of the war because it seemed way too unwinnable and the American people were getting outraged with a popular slogan “Make love, not war!”. Over the Cold War, many other proxy wars were fought like the Afghanistan War and many wars in Africa and South America. Personally, my family was affected greatly during and after the Vietnam War, and in that fact thousands of families, during the proxy wars, were either killed or suffered.
The US and Russia also had arms races in weapons technologies and space. You may have heard that the Americans landed on the Moon in 1969, but that was all caused because the Americans wanted to show dominance against Russia in the space race after they sent the first man into orbit. They also had more passive-aggressive arms races like expanding their nuclear arsenals in numbers and strength. The time the world was the closest to nuclear war was when the Cubans received Soviet nuclear missiles, which were in the range of hitting most of the United States. The United States was obviously very alarmed that nuclear missiles that could kill millions of people were in their backyard, so they planned to blockade Cuba, so no Soviet ships carrying nukes could come to Cuba. During this crisis, a Soviet submarine thought that an invasion had started, so 2 officers voted to launch a nuclear torpedo at Miami, but one officer did not want to launch the missile, so knowing that one man prevented World War 3 is very frightening how easily the world can go to mayhem. This crisis ended when Russia proposed a peace agreement to remove the missiles from Cuba, if they remove the missiles placed in Turkey, a day before the US planned to invade Cuba.
All of this started ending when the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985. He made major changes to the law, by starting to allow freedom of speech and slowly allowing revolutions in Eastern Europe. A major moment in the Cold War was when the Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin Wall was the divider between Western Berlin and Eastern Berlin, made by the Russians. The Wall fell after Eastern Berlin allowed East Berliners to cross into Western Berlin, and during the mass migration, the Berlin Wall fell after a series of riots. This was a major moment in the fall of the Soviet Union. Many revolutions were happening in the iron curtain and slowly it would affect Russia itself. Many underground leaders in the Soviet Union were proposing overthrowing the government and splitting it into 15 countries, the largest being the Russian Federation. The people agreed that they wanted to end the Soviet Union, so the Communist Party of Russia stepped down from power after almost a hundred years.
This conflict was probably the most major time in human history with major human innovation, in both good and evil. The World is still affected by the Cold War to this day, with Communist Nations set up by the Soviet Union, like China and North Korea, still being major problems with NATO and many other nations. I hope you had a good day and thank you for listening.
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