Dimitri’s Reviews > The Cold War > Status Update

Kennedy ironically came to the House on his strong commitment against the alleged "Missile Gap" (a term coined during the 1958 election to criticize the Eisenhower administration's allegedly weak defense) only to be flustered in quick succession by the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and Yuri Gagarin.

Sounds like he was ready for a showdown over Cuba.

Krutshev did intregate his nuclear arsenal into traditional sabre-rattling, as a bluff for peaceful coexistence, given the weakness of his strategic bomber/rocket force as shown by the 1956/60 U-2 flights.

"Eisenhower was at once the most subtle and brutal strategist of the cold war. He only prepared for an all-out nuclear war, not a limited nuclear or conventional conflict, because he knew that it was the most likely, in spite of Kissinger' s hope to give nukes a [defined] place in rational statecraft."

Stalin wanted to avoid a new Pearl Harbour scenario & somehow [Gaddis is frustratingly brief here] secured Mao's willingness to go along with his "let Americans be our neighbours" courtesy; a mass of Chinese troops reversed the NATO invasion past Seoul to its original deadlock onto the 38th paralel.

Mao's victory surprised both Washington & Moscow, which spontaneously got his allegiance, unlike other communist leaders who secured their countries without Soviet help, such as Tito. The next year, Korea looked like a safe bet to Stalin: USA hadn't given the Chinese Nationalists much help, so maybe they'd stay out of a proxy war. But Kim's surprise invasion of the South triggered like a new Pearl Harbour.

According to George Kennan's 'Long Telegram', "Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule.[...]The solution was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge while awaiting the mellowing of the Soviet regime."
[quotation from online version].
He was so spot-on with this CONTAINMENT that it would remain an invaluable guideline until 1991.

Stalin raised the Iron Curtain in response to the Marshall Plan. Never mind that it made him look like the Bad Guy (again), he'd simply use the USA as the imperialist posterchild. The post-1953 atomic parity helped his successors continue this line, as it triggered a US military presence in Europe.

Was Churchill's communist paranoia onto something? Did Russia plan to advance up to France if no Second Front opened? Why should it accept only Eastern Germany, the part with little industry and 1/3 of the population? If it entertained hopes to gain more from the occupying Allies, the bizarre episode of the Berlin Airlift sank'em. Same with Soviet brutality and a new settlement by a new, lenient German regime.

Different goals against the common enemy (Nazi Germany) made A cold war inevitable between the two strongest victors. Stalin wanted - in exact order - sucrity for himself, his regime, his country and his ideology. But he still believed wrongly in a new war between USA&UK. The USA slowly woke up to the hard fact that isolationism no longer guaranteed security; UK was a little ahead, but not even fit to save its Empire