Throughout Second World War, the Soviet Union as well as the United States fought jointly as allies versus the Axis powers. Nevertheless, the association between these countries turned into a tense one. For a long time, the Americans had been cautious of communism of the Soviet Union and worried about the leader of Russia Joseph Stalin’s oppressive, blood-thirsty rule of his own nation. The Soviets, on their side, disliked the Americans’ many years’ refusal to regard the USSR as a lawful international community’s component as well as their held up entry into the Second World War that led to killing of many Russians. Following the end of the war, these grudges matured into an overpowering sense of common enmity and distrust. Postwar expansionism by Soviet in Eastern Europe incited several Americans’ concerns of a plan by Russian to take control of the world. In the meantime, the USSR came to dislike what they comprehended as American officials’ belligerent oratory, arms buildup as well as interventionist strategy to global relations. In such an antagonistic environment, no sole party was completely to blame for the Cold War since it was predictable (Walter, 1991).
Particularly, officials in America bucked up the atomic weapons development such as the ones that led to the end of the Second World War. This started a deadly arms race, and in the year 1949, the Soviet Union tried their atom bomb. In reaction, President Truman proclaimed that the United States would construct an atomic weapon that was more destructive the hydrogen bomb and Stalin followed suit. Consequently, the Cold War stakes were dangerously high (Jonathan, 1999). The initial H-bomb test, in the Marshall Islands, demonstrated just the way fearsome the nuclear era could be. It produced a 25-square-mile fireball, which gasified an island, blew an enormous hole in the ocean’s floor and was capable of damaging half of Manhattan.
Exploration in space acted as another theatrical sphere for Cold War rivalry. On the 4th of October 1957, a Soviet R-7 international ballistic missile established Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in the world as well as the initial man-made item to be put into the orbit of the Earth. Sputnik's establishment was a surprise to the majority Americans. In America, space was viewed as the next border, a rational extension of the grand American exploration custom, and it was vital not to lose much space to the Soviets. On top of this, this exhibition of the overpowering authority of the R-7 missile, apparently able to deliver a nuclear warhead into the air space of U.S., made collecting intelligence concerning Soviet military actions chiefly urgent. In 1958, America established own satellite that was devised by the Army of the U.S. under the guidance of Wernher von Braun.
In May 1961, following Alan Shepard being the first American in space, President Kennedy claimed publicly that the U.S. would land someone on the moon prior to the end of the decade. His forecast turned true on July 20, 1969, when NASA’s Apollo 11 mission’s Neil Armstrong, turned to be the first man to reach on the moon, efficiently being the winner of the Space Race for the Americans. American astronauts turned to be viewed as the ultimate heroes of America. Soviets, successively, were depicted as the ultimate scoundrels, with their monumental, relentless attempts to exceed America and confirm the communist system’s power (Roberts, 2006).
Soon after President Richard Nixon took office, he started to enforce a new strategy to global relations. Rather than considering the world as an antagonistic, bi-polar spot, he proposed, the use mediation rather than military action to form more poles. Thereto, he persuaded the United Nations to acknowledge the Chinese communist government and, following a trip to China in 1972, started to set up diplomatic associations with Beijing. Simultaneously, he took on a détente-relaxation policy toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet premier signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that forbade the nuclear missiles’ manufacture by the two sides and went on to reduce the many years’ nuclear war threat.
In spite of Nixon’s attempts, the Cold War screwed up once more under President Ronald Reagan. Like several leaders of his time, Reagan trusted that the communism spread anywhere jeopardized liberty everywhere. Consequently, he worked to offer financial, as well as military assistance to insurgencies and anticommunist governments all over the world. This policy, chiefly as it was employed in the growing world in places such as El Salvador and Grenada, was referred to as the Reagan Doctrine.
Even as Reagan was against communism in Central America, though, the Soviet Union was getting worn out. In reaction to harsh economic difficulties and developing political uproar in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985 and brought in two policies that redefined the relationship of Russia to the other parts of the world. In 1989, each other communist nations in the area substituted its government with a noncommunist one. The Berlin Wall that was most noticeable decades-long Cold War symbol was lastly destructed, just more than two years following Reagan challenge of the Soviet premier in a speech, in Berlin.
Reference List
Jonathan, N. (1999). Cold War (1945–91): Changing Interpretations The Oxford Companion to American Military History. John Whiteclay Chambers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, G. (2006). Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. London: Yale University Press.
Walter, L. (1991). Cold War. A Reader's Companion to American History,, . Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company.
