Historian Answers Cold War Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
One of the great Cold War theories for the United States was the so-called domino theory. I'm historian Michael Kimage. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is Cold War
[Music] support. 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 Putdam 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 Kushchoff and Eisenhower, the American president in the 50s 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 Miky Gorbachof as the general secretary of the Soviet Union. Gorbachov 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.
Writer Jason 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 mi 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 Kush 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 have 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. Krushov thought he could get an advantage in the Cold War by doing this. He did it against the advice of his staff. Krushchev is going to 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. Kgi 12 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. That 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 fell to 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. Molton07 asks, "Was there ever something built like Fallout vaults during the Cold War?" I think that this person is referencing the show Fallout in 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. You can certainly find them in the Soviet Union. With the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the US came with an inherited 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 vaults 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. First reformer 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 farthinking 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. At LSRP 44
asks, WTF, how did the Berlin Wall work? The 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 Berliner turn out the light bulb when they leave the country? Nikita Krush 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 and 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 barb 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 East 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 2 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 Ask Historian subreddit. Why was the downing of Gary P2 such a major international incident? Gary P2 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 airspace 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. Rex 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 Conn who was one of his assistants from 1950 to 1954 when McCarthy's reign of terror was in full effect. Roy Conn 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 Conn 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 consequentially 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. 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. Agent P501212 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 nuclearpowered 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 30s was coercion and violence. Mikail Gorbachov comes to power in 1985 and basically says we want to 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. Blonde Lady 2024 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. Sal Manella on YouTube 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 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 were 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 70s and 80s, 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. At extension 4159 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 Mikail Gorbachov 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 disaster, but a surprisingly peaceful event. Anti-imperialist Marie asks, why did Gorbachov betray socialism despite growing up under socialist conditions? Mahal Gorbachov comes to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 really wanting to save socialism. Mahal Gorbachov really believed in the teachings and the writings of Vladimir Lenon. 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. Gorbachov'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 Gorbachov couldn't manage the different nationalities within the Soviet Union. There were two buzzwords that were associated with Gorbachov. One is Pistrika restructuring and the other is Glossnos giving people voice and agency. But what's interesting about both of these things is that people started to pull the economy in a free market direction which is not what Gorbachov wanted. And with Glossnos 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 Gorbachov wanted to give people a measure of power. He bungles 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 Gorbachoff for what he was trying to do, and that for better or worse was to save the socialist idea. Nate Nandos2 asks, "Why did the CIA destabilize so many governments during the Cold War?" The official mandate of the CIA in the 1940s and50s was to be very aggressive. Regime change,
coupetas, high degrees of espionage, manipulation, and domestic politics was par for the course. And what the CIA would have said if they had been able to answer the question in the 40s and 50s 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 70s. 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. At creatively 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 Thesars. When the Soviet Union was created, it need to 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 Korn asks were China and Russia allies #fnemies 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 Sinos 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. 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 fremies or enemies in the early 1960s. Here's one from the Ask historian subreddit. Why is
Kissinger considered a foreign policy genius? First thing to say is not everybody considers Kissinger a genius. There are 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 have been arguing about him ever since he was national security adviser and secretary of state. But for those who admire him, it's for his diplomatic skill. Malice
6708 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 mujahedin on the other side and incurs a lot of costs on this part of the Soviet Union. And most importantly, the Afghanistan war creates a lot of discontent within the Soviet Union. People in the Soviet Union really do not want to 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 big blowback for the United States in Afghanistan because the mujahedin 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. Ventrren asks, "What is your favorite Cold War movie?" My favorite Cold War movie by far is a movie called 123 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 satizes the United States, which is trying to sell Coca-Cola in Europe, and it satarizes 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 Doctor Strange Love, 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. At 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, in 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 roller coaster 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 summary 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 roller coaster. 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. Phantom Drive 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. Fat Cat 9000 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, 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. At Hutner wants to know, does anyone understand why it was called the Cold War? I'd imagine no one does. Well,
at Hutner, actually, we do know the answer to this question. Somebody named Walter Litman, and he published a book of essays in the mid1 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. United States and the Soviet Union were going head-to-head, but because of nuclear weapons, they were going to hold back somewhat and that's what made the war cold. But I also think that Walter Litman 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. At pocket butter 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. At Alice F. Short 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 with 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 Mosambique. 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. 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 it's 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. It's Jesus 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. Roberto Carlos 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 going to 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. To Robert 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 Ask History subreddit comes the question, how did America taking away all the radios in Europe and making a radiorefree 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 70s and 80s. And radio for Europe has been in the media in the last week because the US is either going to 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 Free 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
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2025-05-01 23:35
