[262][263][264] The MPLA eventually requested direct military support from Moscow in the form of ground troops, but the Soviets declined, offering to send advisers but no combat personnel. Thus, the Soviet Union sent troops to preserve communist rule in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979). Nevertheless, there was very little use of weapons on battlefields during the Cold War. Following Japanese surrender, on August 28, 1945 these committees formed the temporary national government of Korea, naming it the People's Republic of Korea (PRK) a couple of weeks later. This is a totally new ballgame. [216] Accused of rudeness and incompetence, John Lewis Gaddis argues that Krhuschev was also credited with ruining Soviet agriculture, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war[217] and that Khrushchev had become an 'international embarrassment' when he authorized construction of the Berlin Wall. "[290], In April 1978, the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution. [198], In January 1961, just prior to leaving office, Eisenhower formally severed relations with the Cuban government. [39], The 1945 Allied conference in San Francisco established the multi-national United Nations (UN) for the maintenance of world peace, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed by the ability of individual members to exercise veto power. Movements against nuclear arms testing and for nuclear disarmament took place, with large anti-war protests. In late February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. "It is this: We win and they lose. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic the subsequent hesitant behavior of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-interference of the Soviet Union broke the dams. From 1965 to 1966, with the aid of the United States and other Western governments,[237][238][239][240][241] the military led the mass killing of more than 500,000 members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party and other leftist organizations, and detained hundreds of thousands more in prison camps around the country under extremely inhumane conditions. [151], Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated a "New Look" for the containment strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime. It directed the US forces of occupation to "...take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany". Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, was a troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist in both the 1967 Six-Day War (with advisers and technicians) and the War of Attrition (with pilots and aircraft) against pro-Western Israel. This sparked the Cuban missile crisis (1962), a confrontation that brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. ", "Contradicting traditional assumptions, however, available declassified Soviet documents demonstrate that throughout 1949 Stalin consistently refused to approve Kim Il Sung's persistent requests to approve an invasion of South Korea. J. Samuel Valenzuela and Arturo Valenzuela (eds.). Omissions? "[4], The first use of the term to describe the specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents,[5] on 16 April 1947. The airliner had violated Soviet airspace just past the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island, and the Soviets treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding US spy plane. [44] At this conference Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed a powerful new weapon. [citation needed], Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease. On the one hand, this caused disagreement among the Eastern European states and, on the other hand, it was clear to the Eastern European population that the governments no longer had absolute power. The Cold War was the tense relationship between the United States (and its allies), and the Soviet Union (the USSR and its allies) between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. The phrase ‘cold war’ was itself coined by British author George Orwell, first appearing in an October 1945 essay on the atomic bomb. [369], "Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion further into Europe. [256][257][258], On 24 April 1974, the Carnation Revolution succeeded in ousting Marcelo Caetano and Portugal's right-wing Estado Novo government, sounding the death knell for the Portuguese Empire. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. In contrast to Eisenhower's warning about the perils of the military-industrial complex, Kennedy focused on rearmament. As part of this policy, Kennedy expanded the United States special operations forces, elite military units that could fight unconventionally in various conflicts. The United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when it was already suffering from economic stagnation. The resulting Winter War ended in March 1940 with Finnish concessions. President Eisenhower's New Look policy had emphasized the use of less expensive nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression by threatening massive nuclear attacks all of the Soviet Union.