Historian Answers Cold War Questions

One of the great Cold War theories

for the United States was the so-called Domino theory.

I'm historian Michael Kimmage.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Cold War Support.

[upbeat music]

First question, when did the Cold War start

and when did it end?

To get to the bottom of this question,

I think we should talk about a timeline

of the Cold War.

1945, that's the date of the Potsdam Conference

on the outskirts of Berlin.

That was Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Harry Truman.

And what you can see is that the two big superpowers, the US

and the Soviet Union are beginning

to divide up the world in a certain way.

You can also see in 1945, the fault lines of disagreement

between Stalin and Truman.

Let's jump forward to 1960.

That's the date that Gary Powers gets intercepted

over the Soviet Union and Khrushchev

and Eisenhower, the American president in the fifties,

were supposed to have a summit meeting.

In 1960, that gets blown off course by the U2 SPY incident,

so the Cold War is put back on track.

And then in the early 1960s we get the construction

of the Berlin Wall, which is the ultimate symbol

of the Cold War.

Divided Berlin, divided Germany, divided Europe.

Let's fast forward all the way to 1985,

that's the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev

as the General Secretary of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev is a reformer, that sets in motion a series

of revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.

They culminate in 1989 when Poland, Czechoslovakia,

East Germany and Hungary break free from Soviet Control.

Two years later, 1991,

the Soviet Union itself collapses

when the Soviet flag is taken down over the Kremlin

and the Russian flag is put up.

That's on Christmas Eve, 1991.

And with that, the Cold War is definitely over.

WriterJason from Reddit asks,

What was the height of the Cold War?

The height of the Cold War

was definitely the Cuban Missile Crisis

which took place in the fall of 1962.

US oversight spy photography got a missile launch site

that was being created on the island of Cuba.

This map shows us the scale of what the Soviets

and the Cubans had in mind in terms

of making Cuba into a Cold War nuclear installation.

This wasn't just one or two weapons,

this was a pretty big shift.

And when you think of how close Cuba is to the US,

90 miles from the tip of the state of Florida,

you can understand why this was of such grave concern

to American military planners.

So it was no small step

what Khrushchev was undertaking in 1962 in Cuba,

it was a pretty big provocation.

This caused a huge crisis in the White House

where there was a sense

that the US absolutely had to respond.

And there was a debate

and discussion in the White House

about the different options available to President Kennedy

at the time.

One of them was the outright invasion of Cuba.

Another was a kind

of diplomatic negotiation discussion with the Soviet Union.

The US opted for the latter course,

and we know now if the US had invaded that the likelihood

of a nuclear strike on the United States is very, very high.

The reason that we know that the Cuban Missile crisis

could have gone nuclear really comes from the memories

of Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader.

He was pressuring the Soviets to respond

with nuclear force if the US would've invaded the island.

So this is a time when the two superpowers came

to the very edge of the abyss, to a nuclear confrontation.

The reason the Soviets put the missiles in is they wanted

to gain advantage in Europe, not so much in the Caribbean.

The Soviets felt that the US was encroaching

on the Soviet Union in West Berlin.

Khrushchev thought he'd get an advantage

in the Cold War by doing this.

He did it against the advice of his staff.

Khrushchev is gonna be pushed from power a few years

after the Cuban Missile Crisis

because of how he behaved during it.

It's a Soviet embarrassment, the Cuban Missile Crisis,

and it's something of an American success.

Kollegi12 wants to know,

Was the American fear

of worldwide communist domination a legitimate fear?

I think the US had a lot of legitimate concerns

with Soviet power in Europe,

but the US blew out of proportion the whole communist story.

Let's take a look at this map of the world.

It helps us to see that the world divided up in the Cold War

into three basic camps.

You have the Soviet Chinese camp on the one hand.

You have a US led camp on the other.

And in between you had

what were called the non-aligned states.

One of the great Cold War theories

for the United States was the so-called domino theory.

And this was the idea

that countries were lined up in some kind of sequence,

and if one of them would fall to communism,

the rest would fall after the first one fell.

So the domino theory is something that dominates

thinking about American Cold War policy for the first two,

three decades of the Cold War,

it is a very simplistic theory

and it contributed to a lot

of misunderstandings in American foreign policy.

The biggest one is in Vietnam,

that's the ultimate domino,

where the US feared that if Vietnam felt a communism,

Laos, Cambodia

and other neighboring countries would fall as well.

And so the US pushed itself into an unnecessary war

because of this theory.

It's not a footnote or a side note

to the Cold War, the domino theory,

it's the cause of some of the biggest mistakes

that the United States makes during the Cold War.

Molten07 asks,

Was there ever something built like 'Fallout Vaults'

during the Cold War?

I think that this person is referencing the show Fallout

and the video game Fallout

and absolutely there were fallout shelters

that were built during the Cold War.

You can still find some of them in the vicinity

of Washington DC.

You can find lots of them in Europe,

and you can certainly find them in the Soviet Union.

With the Cuban Missile Crisis,

the Soviet Union in the US came with an inherit breath

of actually having a nuclear war.

It was one of the realities that

people had to live with then.

So governments did all kinds of planning.

They had contingency plans.

They built places to make government conceivably possible

during a nuclear war.

But there's something crazy about it at the same time,

because if there had been a nuclear war,

these fallout faults would give you 10/12 hours of peace,

security, and safety, and then the game would still be up.

So it was a psychological device like the duck

and cover exercises where students were given instructions

of what to do during a nuclear war.

It helps us to understand the strange psychology

that I guess all of us need to have

while we live in the nuclear age.

Firstreformer asks, Was Stalin really

as evil as people claim?

Yes, you could say that Stalin is a gifted statesman

for the Soviet Union.

He wins the Second World War for the Soviet Union.

You could also say that Stalin

is a far thinking state builder for the Soviet Union.

It's really Stalin who builds the whole Soviet state,

and that's no small matter,

but he does so at incredible cost to the peoples

of the Soviet Union

and to peoples on the periphery of the Soviet Union.

This is millions upon millions of lives that were reordered

through violence and coercion

through incarceration and through execution.

So he's one of the great 20th century villains.

@LSTrip 44 asks WTF? How did the Berlin Wall work?

The Berlin, Berlin Wall worked in the following way.

We have a depiction of it here.

This is the city of Berlin,

and after the second World War in 1945,

Germany and Berlin alike were occupied by the Soviet Union,

by France, by Britain, and by the United States.

And the city of Berlin is divided up into four zones.

But really the French, the British

and the US zones are one zone.

You could describe that as the Western zone of the city

and the Soviet Zone was the other part of the city.

The Berlin Wall is put up when a lot

of East Berliners are flowing into West Berlin.

There was a joke at the time,

will the last East Berlin turn out the light bulb

when they leave the country?

Nikita Khrushchev

and the Soviets decide that the Berlin Wall has to be there.

You could almost describe it as one of the big mistakes

that the Soviet Union makes

because it symbolizes a part of Europe, a part of Germany,

a part of Berlin where people have to be held in.

So it becomes this big Cold War symbol.

John F. Kennedy goes to Berlin

and gives his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech

to show that West Berliners were free

and East Berliners were not.

The Berlin Wall runs through the center of the city.

At the same time,

it runs around the whole western part of Berlin.

It was concrete.

It was a tall wall with watchtowers.

It looked very menacing.

It's full of barbed wire as well.

And you also have East German border guards

with the right to shoot who were there at the wall

to prevent people from crossing it.

And there were quite a few people

who died at the Berlin Wall who were shot or killed

when they were trying to escape.

So what goes up can also come down.

In 1989, you have a press conference

where an German official bungles

what he was supposed to say.

He was supposed to talk about eventual travel rights.

He talks about immediate travel rights.

That evening,

people rush out to the Berlin Wall and cross over it,

and they dance and party at the Berlin Wall,

November, 1989.

This is one of the great,

great symbolic moments of the Cold War.

It's not until two years later, 1991

that the Soviet Union collapses,

but emotionally, the Cold War ends

when the Berlin Wall is breached.

This next question is from the AskHistorian SubReddit.

Why was the downing

of Gary Power's U2 such a major international incident?

Gary Power's U2 spy plane was flying over the Soviet Union.

It got detected, it got intercepted.

Gary Powers parachuted out of the plane.

He didn't commit suicide

as his instructions may have required him to do,

and he was captured as a trophy by the Soviet Union

and paraded before World Media to show

that the United States was doing its dirty business

in Soviet aerospace.

And the Soviet Union was the victim protecting itself,

defending itself from American aggressions.

The Cold War was, at its very core,

a battle over images, perception and narrative.

So this was a propaganda victory for the Soviet Union.

There were a ton of spy planes during the Cold War.

The Soviets of course had many,

and the United States had many.

What they were trying to figure out was

what the nuclear facilities were in the other country,

and especially they were trying to figure out

how many nuclear weapons the other country had

and where they were stationed.

This is before you really have satellite technology.

At that time, U2 spy planes

and the like were the state of the art.

Recs_Saved asked

How did the Red Scare and McCarthyism affect US politics

during the Cold War?

Was it reasonable?

The Red Scare really was not reasonable.

This is around 1950,

Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin.

Sitting next to him is Roy Cohn, who was one

of his assistants from 1950 to 1954

when McCarthy's reign of terror was in full effect.

Roy Cohn is a famous figure in American history,

second half of the 20th century,

because he would end up being a mentor

to Donald Trump when Donald Trump was

on the rise in New York City.

Roy Cohn is depicted in a recent film, The Apprentice.

The Red Scare was a response to something real.

The Soviet Union had some success

infiltrating the State Department in the 1930s,

and most consequently,

the Soviet Union got a few nuclear secrets

from Julius Rosenberg in the 1940s with the access

that Julius Rosenberg had to Los Alamos

where the atomic bomb was being worked on.

So those were facts,

but they were created into something really monstrous

by Senator Joseph McCarthy when he accused all kinds

of people who had nothing to do with this espionage

of communist affinity and communist affiliation.

And these people could be in academia,

they could be in journalism,

and sometimes just to be accused of doing something wrong,

even if there were no facts behind it,

was enough to ruin people's reputation.

That means you could become unemployable.

And the most famous examples of that are in Hollywood

where various directors

and creative people were denied jobs,

careers were interrupted, or in some cases outright ruined

by being blacklisted.

It was a technique of creating fear,

of making people intimidated,

making them afraid to speak their minds, and in a way,

trying to guarantee consent

or guarantee support for the US government.

It's a very unfortunate episode in American politics.

AgentP-501_212 asks,

I don't understand the collapse of the Soviet Union.

How does a government fall without any violence?

It's one of the most mysterious historical events.

It's the collapse of a huge nuclear power,

affluent up to a point empire in 1991

for really no apparent or obvious reason.

If I had to give an explanation,

I would say that the Soviet Union

was a very strange patchwork quilt of different ethnicities

and nations.

What held it together when Stalin assembled the Soviet Union

in the 1920s and thirties was coercion and violence.

Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in 1985

and basically says,

we wanna run the Soviet Union without power and violence.

And what happens is that the nation states

of the Soviet Union, including the Russian nation state,

basically say we no longer wish

to be a part of the Soviet Union.

And the Soviet Union collapses.

It was oddly constructed,

could only be held together through violence and coercion.

When that violence and coercion was lifted,

the whole thing went up in a puff of smoke.

Blondelady2024 asks,

So what did we really learn from the JFK files?

Now, there was no huge breakthrough with the JFK files,

but I think that we learned

that there was actually quite a bit of back

and forth between the United States

and the Soviet Union about the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald.

We think of the Iron Curtain as this wall

that you couldn't cross between east and west,

but it wasn't the case.

These are two countries that often enough did diplomacy

with one another, the big summit meetings

and the gatherings, but also behind the scenes,

they seem to have been in touch

and been communicating with one another.

That's a bit of a Cold War surprise.

Lee Harvey Oswald is fascinating,

not just because he's the assassin of John F. Kennedy,

but because he's one of these in-between figures

of the Cold War.

He was an American citizen,

but he lived in the Soviet Union.

He had a Russian wife,

Lee Harvey Oswald was an international man of mystery,

and he was definitely noticed

by both the United States and the Soviet Union.

I think they may have had suspicions

that he was on the other side, that he was an American spy

for the Soviets or a Soviet spy.

And I guess you could come up with all kinds of arguments

that make both of those theories seem plausible.

We've never had a biographer

or a historian exactly explain what he was up to.

And there's just a lot of tidbits in the JFK files about

who he was, what the Soviets knew,

what the US government knew.

And although both governments knew a lot,

it seems never to be enough.

SalMinellaOnYouTube asks,

How historically accurate is The Americans?

I think the Americans is pretty historically accurate.

There are a lot of those sleeper cells

that were implanted in the United States

and in other countries and never quite activated.

There are a few literary liberties that The Americans takes.

First of all, I think all the sex

and violence that you see in The Americans was not really

what the experience of the actual sleepers was.

And also what historians have noted

about these different sleeper cells

is that they delivered very little usable information

for the Soviet Union.

So the best moles for the Soviet Union were not really

from the Soviet Union, as you see depicted in The Americans,

what they were were sympathizers

and loyalists to the Soviet Union

who are actual American citizens.

And the most important example

of this would be Julius Rosenberg

who did steal nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union.

His wife, Ethel Rosenberg, the two of them were executed

for nuclear espionage.

Also in the seventies and eighties,

you have a few moles as well.

They weren't really sympathetic to the Soviet cause,

but they were taking money and in return,

giving the Soviet Union Secrets.

Famous example of an American mole is Aldrich Ames

who was working in the FBI,

the Soviet Union was giving money to him.

He was giving secrets to the Soviet Union.

AdExtension4159 asks,

Every time I mention Ronald Reagan to my father,

he says that he quote/unquote, 'arguably won the Cold War.'

Was Reagan's presidency an important factor

in ending the Cold War?

Reagan opened the door

to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.

He conducted a lot of diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev

and Reagan was careful not to push too far,

to push the Soviet Union beyond a threshold

where it might have responded with war or military force.

Technically speaking, it's George Herbert Walker Bush,

who's president when the Cold War comes to an end.

And George Herbert Walker Bush was also good

at giving a peaceful ending to the Cold War.

So I would say that the Soviet Union falls apart for reasons

that are internal to the Soviet Union.

It's not that the US was really able to pull the plug,

but the US plays a big role in navigating

and managing that moment

and making sure that the end

of the Cold War was not a bloody war or a disaster,

but a surprisingly peaceful event.

Antiimperialistmarie asks,

Why did Gorbachev betrayed socialism

despite growing up under socialist conditions?

Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power

in the Soviet Union in 1985,

really wanting to save socialism.

Mikhail Gorbachev really believed in the teachings

and the writings of Vladimir Lennon.

He wanted to bring the Soviet Union back to

what he felt were its glorious beginnings.

The only way he felt he could do so

after 1985 was through reform.

Gorbachev's reforms quickly run out of his control.

The economy continues to unravel

and get worse while he's the General Secretary

of the Soviet Union.

That creates a lot of discontent within the Soviet Union,

but it's really not for reasons of socialism or capitalism

or economics that the Soviet Union falls apart.

It's because Gorbachev

couldn't manage the different nationalities

within the Soviet Union.

There were two buzzwords

that were associated with Gorbachev.

One is perestroika, restructuring,

and the other is glasnost, giving people voice and agency.

But what's interesting about both of these things is

that people started pull the economy

in a free market direction,

which is not what Gorbachev wanted.

And with glasnost, with voice and agency,

people began to articulate across the Soviet Union,

a desire to break free from the Soviet Union itself,

this is Russians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and others.

And so Gorbachev wanted to give people a measure of power.

He boggles the question of nationalities

within the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union falls apart.

It's an incredible case of unintended consequences.

But let's remember Gorbachev for what he was trying to do,

and that for better or worse,

was to save the socialist idea.

NateNandos21 asks,

Why did the CIA destabilize so many governments

during the Cold War?

The official mandate of the CIA in the 1940s

and fifties was to be very aggressive.

Regime change, coup d'etats,

high degrees of espionage, manipulation,

and domestic politics was par for the course.

And what the CIA would've said

if they had been able to answer the question

in the forties and fifties

is that the Soviet Union was doing the same thing.

So what the Soviet Union was doing, we had to do as well.

There are three good examples of governments

that the US interfered with, meddled with, manipulated

during the early stages of the Cold War.

The first is Italy, where the US put its thumb on the scales

and tried to get the non-communist political parties

elected after World War II.

Second is Guatemala

where the CIA was actively involved

in overthrowing the government.

And the third is Iran, the overthrow

of the government in Iran that the CIA

and British Intelligence was a part of

creates a very strongly anti-American mood in Iran

in the 1960s and seventies

and that culminates in the Iranian revolution of 1979.

So a famous term that's connected

to CIA overthrow operations is blowback,

the bad things that happen

when you overthrow foreign governments.

And the most spectacular example

of blowback in modern American history is Iran.

We're living with the effects of that in the present day.

@Cre8evLee asks,

Where did the hammer and sickle come from?

This question takes us back into the early part

of the 20th century.

You have the Russian Revolution in 1917,

that topples the empire of the Czars.

When the Soviet Union was created in it show to itself

and to the outside world what it represented,

and so the Soviet Union came up with the hammer

and sickle that you see on this flag.

The hammer and the sickle represented the two pillars

of the Soviet economy.

The sickle was agriculture, the hammer was industry.

Now in reality, these were two parts

of the Soviet experiment

that didn't always fit very well together,

but symbolically, the idea was to show

that these were two integrated,

harmonious parts of the Soviet economy,

and this is what was lifting up the Soviet Union

into a great world power and a great superpower.

I LIKE CORN asks,

Were China and Russia allies #frenemies?

China and Russia were both.

They were allies for quite a while during the Cold War.

China models itself on Stalin's Soviet Union

and was a close partner of the Soviet Union in the 1950s

in ways that drove the United States absolutely crazy.

And then in the early 1960s,

you get something called the Sino-Soviet split.

And this was Chairman Mao separating himself

from the Soviet Union, becoming more autonomous.

It was a border dispute between the Soviet Union and China.

And that really issued in a lot of tension

between these two countries.

And so you get Richard Nixon going

to China in the early 1970s to triangulate the Cold War

and not make it a US Soviet binary,

but make it a US Soviet Chinese triangle.

But that's only possible because the Soviet Union

and China became really frenemies

or enemies in the early 1960s.

Here's one from the AskHistorian SubReddit.

Why is Kissinger considered a foreign policy genius?

First thing to say

is not everybody considers Kissinger a genius.

There's some people who think of Kissinger as one

of the villains of the Cold War.

This has to do with the aggressive policies

that Kissinger supported, especially in Latin America.

What Kissinger was trying to do is

to buy the United States time after the Vietnam War

and diplomacy was the answer.

So there's a lot to argue about with Kissinger

and people who have been arguing about him ever

since he was National Security Advisor

and Secretary of State.

But for those who admire him, it's for his diplomatic skill.

Malice6708 wants to know

why did the USSR invade Afghanistan?

So this is one of the things that sinks the Soviet Union.

It invades because it had a communist partner

in Afghanistan.

It invades because Afghanistan is,

as we've learned in the last couple of decades,

a pretty strategic country, and it invades

because it could, it had the military power.

None of this is great reasoning on the Soviet part.

Soviet Union is very quickly led

into a quagmire in Afghanistan.

The US supports the mujahideen on the other side

and incurs a lot of costs on the part of the Soviet Union.

And most importantly, if the Afghanistan war creates a lot

of discontent within the Soviet Union.

People in the Soviet Union really do not wanna fight

in Afghanistan.

Many of them come home and they start

to push against Soviet rule.

So in the end, it's a disaster for the Soviet Union.

There's also a big blowback for the United States

in Afghanistan because the mujahideen forces

that the US supports in the 1980s in Afghanistan,

this is a CIA run operation,

later become linked to Osama bin Laden

and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

That's of course long after the Cold War,

but it's another reminder that the world of the Cold War,

it's ancient history in one respect,

but it's also the world that we're still living in

in another.

Venturin asks,

What is your favorite Cold War movie?

My favorite Cold War movie

by far is a movie called One, Two, Three by Billy Wilder.

I wish it was better known.

It's a really funny movie.

It's a comedy about Berlin, and it's filmed

before the Berlin Wall goes up,

so you see people going in cars

and taxis between east and west Berlin.

It satirizes the United States,

which is trying to sell Coca-Cola in Europe.

And it satirizes the Soviet Union,

which is this very heavy handed dominant military force

in Germany and in Berlin.

And basically what it does is turn the whole Cold War

into a series of really funny jokes about

how the two sides make some of the same mistakes

and do some of the same stupid things.

One fascinating movie that takes us back to the spirit

of the 1980s is a movie called Red Dawn,

which is about a Soviet invasion of the United States.

I don't know if it's a great movie in cinema terms,

but it helps us to understand the fears

and the anxieties that were such an important part

of the history of the Cold War,

but also the Cold War Classic, Dr. Strangelove,

which takes the whole story of nuclear weapons,

actually in a very careful considered

and thoughtful way,

and makes us realize that a lot of the people

who could control these weapons could also be crazy,

but it also spins a certain tragedy from the fact

that it's humans who are in control of nuclear weapons,

and that's one of the scariest things about these weapons.

Here's a question from Quora.

Is NATO a Cold War relic?

It certainly represents a world that existed in the Cold War

and no longer exists.

NATO was created in the late 1940s

to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had its own structure on the other side

of the Iron Curtain, and that was called the Warsaw Pact.

So originally NATO was a handful

of countries in Western Europe,

and that's how it remained until 1991

when the Soviet Union collapsed.

After that, NATO expanded to a lot

of new countries in Eastern and Central Europe.

Now, NATO has still not been attacked

all the way down to 2025,

but what you have now is a hot shooting war

right on the border, flush up against NATO,

at the present moment, in Ukraine.

Ukraine, borders, Romania, Slovakia, and Poland.

Those are all NATO states,

and so NATO is much closer

to an active war in the present moment than it ever was

during the Cold War.

@geopolitics_101 asks,

Are we in a new Cold War today?

Absolutely. We have some of the same fault lines.

The East/West dichotomy is there,

Washington on one side and Moscow on the other.

We've got all kinds of tensions,

and there are a lot of global consequences

of the current tensions that are felt in Latin America,

in Asia, in the Middle East and Africa.

The thing that reminds us most

of the Cold War at the present moment is

that there is a nuclear component to these tensions.

There's a rollercoaster at the present moment

when it comes to US Russian relations.

You have summit meetings.

Joe Biden met with Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2021,

and in recent weeks, you've seen a fair amount

of conversation, phone calls,

and also symmetry between Putin's Russia

and the United States.

But this is not unlike the Cold War,

one has to say,

because the Cold War was a rollercoaster.

You had lots of back and forth between the United States

and the Soviet Union, and you had periods

of really bleak confrontation

followed by phases of diplomacy,

that's very similar to the present moment.

At the same time, you could argue that the moment

that we're in now is in fact worse than the Cold War

because you never really had a shooting war where the US

and the Soviet Union were as directly involved

as both the US and today's Russia are

involved in the war in Ukraine.

And so it's the Cold War today,

but it's possibly worse than the Cold War was

back in the day.

FantomDrive asks, During the Cold War,

did the Soviet Union possess any technologies

that surpassed those of NATO and the United States?

Absolutely, Soviet Union was a powerhouse in science,

engineering, mathematics.

The biggest moment in this case is the Sputnik satellite

that was launched in 1957,

the first satellite to be put up in space.

And this caused a tremendous commotion in the United States

when it was clear that in at least a few areas,

the Soviet Union was ahead

of the United States technologically.

The US response to that was

to pour money into science research, into universities

and into education.

The National Science Foundation is connected to this effort,

and so that's a turning point in the Cold War in 1957.

The US does certainly catch up by 1969 with the moon launch,

but really where the US begins

to outpace the Soviet Union technologically

is in the private sector,

and that's with microchip technology

and computing technology.

So that by the 1970s and 1980s,

the Soviet Union is way behind

and just unable to catch up,

especially where microchips are concerned.

And if the Soviet Union loses the Cold War,

if you can put it that way, it loses for that reason.

Phatcat9000 wants to know,

Why did the USA and USSR make so many nukes?

This question takes us to the heart of the Cold War.

Cold War was always about perception of the other side.

So if the US had a new weapon,

the Soviet Union had to take note

and it felt that it had to compete.

By the early 1950s,

both sides have the capacity

to completely destroy the other,

but they feel the need for more

and more, more nuclear submarines, nuclear weapons

that you can deliver with airplanes.

So you have a massive arms race between these two countries

where huge amounts of money

and scientific research goes into nuclear weaponry

because each side was always afraid of the other

gaining an advantage.

It was deeply irrational.

It sinks the Soviet Union into a kind of relative poverty

by the 1970s, 1980s.

And that's one of the reasons

that the Soviet Union collapses.

The US is more fortunate in this regard,

but you can think of a lot of better purposes

that the federal money could have been spent

during the Cold War than on nuclear weapons.

We live in the world that's created

by the Cold War in this respect,

and it's a world that has far too many nuclear weapons

for its own good.

@HOOtner wants to know,

Does anyone understand why it was called the Cold War?

I'd imagine no one does.

Well @HOOtner, actually,

we do know the answer to this question,

somebody named Walter Lippmann

and he published a book of essays in the mid 1940s about

what was happening in the world

and he called it the Cold War.

I think he had in mind

that this was a real military conflict.

The United States

and the Soviet Union were going head to head,

but because of nuclear weapons,

they were gonna hold back somewhat,

and that's what made the war cold.

But I also think

that Walter Lippmamn may have had the Soviet Union in mind,

which is a cold place,

and that also contributed to this idea

of it being a Cold War.

@Pocketbutter wants to know,

Was the Cold War actually about the economic ideologies

of capitalism versus communism,

or is there evidence to suggest

that this was a false pretense for a simple power struggle

between two superpowers?

I think it was both.

The Cold War was very much a struggle

about capitalism and communism.

These were two systems of governance,

two systems of economics, and the Soviet Union

and the United States were always trying to show

that their system was the best system.

But behind this, there was a geopolitical struggle

for preeminence in Europe, in Asia,

in Latin America, and in Africa.

But the way that they competed was through this language

of communism and capitalism.

@alicefshort asks,

What is a proxy war?

What were some proxy wars during the Cold War?

Although the Soviet Union

and the United States had their daggers drawn,

they never fought actively against one another.

Instead, what they did was fight proxy wars.

They encouraged conflicts

and got involved in conflicts

where they would be on the opposite sides of each other,

but the proxies were there to wage the wars themselves.

The most important is the Korean War at the beginning

where you have North Korea

and South Korea as the two proxies.

We have Afghanistan.

And then of course,

the Vietnam War is also a classic proxy war.

Lots of US military infiltration in the countries

of Latin America, South America that are there

to combat the influence of the Soviet Union.

Those are proxy wars you have in Africa,

proxy wars around Angola and Mozambique.

They were costly.

They were very bloody.

They were often inconclusive.

They created huge resentment across the world

from people who suffered from these wars.

And we live often in the legacy

and the history of those grievances and those resentments.

The first time that the US really

knocks off several hundred Russian soldiers,

not Soviet, but Russian is actually in Syria in 2018.

And of course, the US is very directly involved in the war

in Ukraine and its US weaponry

and military assistance that's resulting in the death

of Russian soldiers,

but that's of course something that begins in 2022.

So the world that we live in now is less

of a proxy war world than the world of the Cold War.

Its-cheesus asks,

How come we don't talk about the Korean War as much?

The reason is that the United States

didn't win the Korean War and it didn't lose the Korean War.

And in a sense, the Korean War never comes to an end.

The Korean War is the first big hot war of the Cold War.

It begins in 1950 when you have disputes

between the United States on the one hand,

and China and the Soviet Union on the other.

That breaks down in a geographic way where the Chinese

and the Soviets support the northern part of Korea

and the US supports the South.

So today's North Korea

and today's South Korea are direct legacies

of that conflict.

It's not over, but you're right,

it's not talked about as much as it should be.

RubberToeCarLoss asks,

Why was the Hungarian uprising of 1956 significant

to the Cold War?

Hungarian uprising in 1956 is when Hungary,

which was under Soviet control, tried to break free

and Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest

and other places in Hungary

to keep Hungary within the Soviet fold.

It's really important not

because the Hungarians won, they didn't,

and not because the US supported Hungary directly,

the United States didn't.

It's important because this is the first big break

from Soviet control in Eastern and central Europe.

It's only 20-25 years later that the rest of the countries

of Eastern Europe are gonna break

free from the Soviet Union.

It's the first Soviet domino to fall, in a certain sense.

Hungary wobbles in 1956,

but all of the dominoes begin to fall in 1989.

Torobert asks,

Why was the KGB more successful than the CIA?

If the KGB really was more successful,

and it's hard to say

that the KGB achieved really great things

for the people of the Soviet Union or anywhere else,

it was because the KGB had more firepower

and certainly within the Soviet Union,

more repressive tools than the CIA.

I think that the KGB was also a little bit more shameless

in pursuing what are called active measures,

efforts to instill disinformation,

manipulate media information.

Throughout the Cold War, the CIA did some of that,

but then there were restrictions, things like a free media

and congressional oversight,

which didn't always reign in the CIA by any means,

but at times curtailed its power.

So the CIA did have to contend with revelations

that came sometimes from the US government

and sometimes from the US media.

KGB was able to operate under a much, much thicker cloak

of secrecy.

From the askhistory SubReddit comes the question,

How did America taking away all the radios in Europe

and making a radio free Europe help its Cold War efforts?

Radio free Europe wasn't about taking people's radios away.

What it was about was using radios in Eastern

and Central Europe to give them a message

and to provide them with media coverage

that they couldn't have gotten in their own countries

or gotten from Soviet media apparatuses.

So it's part of the Cold War struggle.

And from the US side,

it was felt that this paid a lot of dividends.

It created discontent within the Soviet side

and also encouraged various dissident

and opposition movements,

especially in the seventies and eighties.

And Radio for Europe has been in the media in the last week

because the US is either gonna defund it

or seriously limit its funding.

It's very much not a priority of the Trump administration.

And so if we're looking for ways to talk about

how the Cold War ended,

Radio for Europe survives a couple of decades

after the Cold War, but not forever.

It's coming to an end now.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Cold War Support.

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