Essay Example: Was Cold War Inevitable?

Cold War was the political, ideological, and financial war between two world superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union that started in 1947 toward the end of the Second World War and went on until the breakdown of the Soviet Union on the 26th day of December 1991. The Cold War was set apart by constant competition between the two previous World War II associates. Strife spread over from unobtrusive undercover work in the greatest urban areas of the world to brutal battle in the tropical wildernesses of Vietnam. It ran from atomic submarines skimming silently through the profundities of the seas to the most innovatively propelled satellites in geosynchronous circles in space. In basketball and hockey, in artful dance and expressions of the human experience, from the Berlin Wall to the motion pictures, the political and social war pursued by Communists and Capitalists was a giant meeting on a scale at no other time found in mankind's history.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

Owing to the causes of the cold war, its inevitability is debatable. Some causes of the cold war could have been solved via dialogue or any other means of problem resolution. However, some of the causes of the cold war and its effects, especially the impacts of the second world war seemed to be unforgivable hence the cold war was inevitable. The impacts of the Second World War and the major causes of the cold war between the warring nations are very useful in the study of the cold war. Therefore, in the essay below, I will discuss the causes and impacts of the cold war while showing why the cold war could have been avoided or why it could not just be avoided.

One of the most punctual occasions in the beginning of the Cold War emerged from the counter Communism comments of British pioneer Winston Churchill. On March 5, 1946, in a well-known discourse normal for the political atmosphere of the time, he said: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "Iron Curtain" has dropped over the landmass. Behind that line lie every one of the capitals of the antiquated conditions of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these well-known urban areas and the populaces around them lie in what I should call the Soviet circle, and all are subject, in some structure to Soviet impact as well as to a high and now and again expanding measure of control from Moscow. This sounded as a warning and war preparatory statement as Winston was misinterpreted to mean that the USSR was preparing to take over the world, especially America.

The American people were thereafter prepared for war; as a result the cold war began. Had he elaborated his statement to the people clearly or should the warring nations resolved to dialogue among its leaders, the war could have been avoided. What a few antiquarians call hostile to socialism, others break down as apprehension, since Stalin, soon after attacking Berlin, had gone ahead to vanquish all of Eastern Europe. The Americans reacted to Stalin's moves in Eastern Europe with the Marshall Plan, a liberal procurement of free budgetary guide for the reproduction of war-torn Western Europe.

The Soviets reacted to the Marshall Plan with the Zhdanov Doctrine, disclosed in October of 1947. The Zhdanov Doctrine asserted that the United States was looking for worldwide mastery through American government, and additionally the breakdown of majority rules system. Then again, as indicated by this Doctrine, the Soviet Union was resolved to disposing of government and the remaining hints of one party rule, while fortifying majority rule government. The Americans responded to the Zhdanov Doctrine with the purported "Long Telegram," composed by George Kennan, Deputy Chief of Mission in Moscow, saying to some extent: Soviet power, dissimilar to that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventurist. It doesn't work by settled arrangements. It doesn't go for broke. It is Impervious to the rationale of reason, and it is very delicate to the rationale of power.

Thus it can without much of a stretch pull back and as a rule does when solid resistance is experienced anytime. As a result of George Kennan and his Long Telegram, official US strategy turned into the "regulation" of Communism. This telegram was another issue among the nations that triggered the cold war. The telegram was annoying to the opponents and since most people had prepared for war, the cold war began. It could have been avoided had the leaders of the various nations considered properly the consequences of war. From the WWII, the leaders should have learned and realized that war affects the economy entirely. By ignoring the telegram before spreading, the war should have been easily stopped.

The Soviet Union and the United States, two countries that had never been foes on any field, and which had battled next to each other amid WWII, were currently undeclared adversaries in a war that could never tear out in the open, yet which would keep going for over fifty years. At the point when in 1949 the Soviet Union added to its first nuclear bomb, the meeting between the USA and the USSR heightened to the atomic level, and mankind trembled at the possibility of a worldwide atomic calamity. People feared the bombing calamity hence American decided to fight the USSR in order to save the world. The bombs were a bigger risk to the world. The bombs while tested by the USSR proved to be very hazardous to the people and the world entirely.

The 1950s acquainted America with one of the darkest and most illiberal thoughts in its political and social history, McCarthyism. The administration, and even private venture, carelessly blamed thousands for Americans of being Communists or kindred voyagers and sympathizers, and subjected them to cross examination, examination and approvals. The Americans considered themselves greater than other nations. The warring nations were not happy about that and there was no chance but for the USSR to fight them to prove their superiority as well.

The remarkable elements of McCarthyism were the Hollywood boycotting of craftsmen and erudite people, and the famous "Hearings" of the House Un-American Activities Committee-maybe the most unexpectedly named board of trustees in the historical backdrop of the United States. McCarthyism turned into an expansive political and social wonder that eventually discolored the big-hearted worldwide notoriety of the United States. The themes of most of the American films influenced war as they praised Americans while despising other nations. This was not received properly by other nations who were at war during the Second World War hence the feeling of discrimination resulted into the cold war.

The Cold War proceeded even after McCarthyism was to a great extent uncovered as suspicion and self-serving promulgation. John F. Kennedy was chosen to the administration in the year 1960 and not long after, two emergencies emitted. In August of 1961, the USSR raised the Berlin Wall, intended to stem the expanding number of East Germans who were escaping Communist East Berlin toward the West. The accurate number will never be referred to, yet maybe upwards of two hundred East Germans were shot and murdered attempting to escape over the Wall. The USSR was strongly against the Communist, they supported the East Germans who were escaping the Communist and this triggered the cold war between the USSR and America. Each of them wanted to prove their powerfulness to confirm that they were the super powers of the world.

At that point in 1962, the Cuban rocket emergency blasted, and the world was a breath far from atomic war. How close did we come? Amid the emergency, a chief and political officer on board one of the Soviet's subs outfitted with an atomic rocket came to trust an atomic war had as of now started and chose to dispatch their nuke against the United States. The two, being in assertion, had the power to dispatch. The main thing that ceased them was the energetic contentions from one man: Vasili Arkhipov, the man who spared the world.

What began the emergency? In 1959, Cuba had fallen under the initiative of Fidel Castro, who had rejected American impact to associate himself with the Soviets. In the fall of 1962, American spy planes found that Castro was introducing Soviet atomic rockets prepared to do rapidly striking focuses in the US. The United States naval force barricaded Cuba, anticipating Soviet conveyances of war materials. For a heart-halting time the world reeled toward atomic war. In the end, Soviet pioneer Nikita Khrushchev consented to uproot Soviet rockets on the island in return for the American withdrawal of similarly deliberately set rockets from Turkey.

From 1962 to 1975, the United States was included in the war in Vietnam, where the Soviets supplied the Viet Cong with weapons; while amid the Soviet intrusion of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1988, America bolstered the Afghan Mujahideen. By and by American and Soviet warriors were never to go up against one other on a field of fight. The Soviet and American soldiers could not just go to war openly but the Soviet had been taking away American members of the Communist hence there was cold war between the two regions. The laws governing the two regions did not however allow them to battle openly hence the cold war that started without the knowledge of most people including some top officials and leaders.

Amid the 1960s, the space race turned into an a great deal more tranquil and helpful, front line this time for mechanical and ideological prevalence. The Soviets led the pack on October 4, 1957, when they propelled Sputnik 1, the world's first simulated satellite. They caught up by shooting the primary human, Yuri Gagarin, into space in 1961 and the principal lady, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov was the first to leave his shuttle and go for a spacewalk, just about getting stood out there all the while. The zenith of the space race happened on July 20, 1969, when the US reacted to the Soviet accomplishments with the Apollo 11 arriving on the moon and Neil Armstrong's "monster jump for humanity." The Americans and the associated nations did not take this well and in the process of revenge; the cold war erupted between the two warring regions.

In any case, it was the fights between the two countries over sports that were, maybe, the most captivating and the most innocuous also. Aside from the US blacklist of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the comparing Soviet blacklist of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, most games challenges made them basic political strain however no unmistakable political substance. Two extraordinary bombshells, the first-ever annihilation of the United States in an Olympic ball competition in Germany in 1972, coordinated by the 1980 "Wonder on Ice" thrashing of the Soviet hockey group in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, have gotten to be legends of advanced popular society. Had the two regions discussed the problems they faced other than engaging into war, it is anticipated that peace would have existed between them and there was no need for any wars between them.

Amid the 1980s, the disintegrating of the monetary and political structures of the Soviet Union turned out to be progressively evident. By 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to control, the Soviet Union was entangled in awful monetary issues. Likewise, the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe were surrendering socialism in a steady progression.

In 1988, the Soviet Union surrendered its nine-year war in Afghanistan. Next, Gorbachev declined to send military backing to guard the past satellite conditions of the USSR, significantly debilitating their Communist administrations. This was the background for Gorbachev's visit to East Berlin...