The Cold War

• The USA and the Soviet Union were willing to cooperate in order to defeat Hitler and liberate Germany from Nazi oppression; but after WWII, the need for cooperation between the two disappeared, and the threat posed by the USSR to non-totalitarian countries increased tensions.

• The espionage by which the USSR obtained American atomic bomb technology might be seen as the starting point of the Cold War.

• Julius Rosenberg (together with his wife Ethel), Russell McNutt, and several others were paid by the KGB to infiltrate the American nuclear weapons program and send classified information to the USSR.

• Alger Hiss was part of a large spy ring inside the US State Department; he and others smuggled secret memos and reports to the KGB.

• Reporters like I.F. Stone were paid by the KGB to convince the American public that there was no network of Soviet-paid spies inside the US government. Persuaded by “Izzy” Stone and news media, average people in the USA never realized how great the danger was.

• The Soviet goal was domination of other countries by means of totalitarian- enforced communism and atheism. American goals were mainly defensive.

• The “Cold War” was so named because the United States and the Soviet Union never engaged in direct military battle. Proxy wars were fought through representative nations (Korea and Vietnam), but most of the Cold War was dominated by espionage, and finally by economic competition.

• The USA eventually built so many expensive weapons so quickly that the USSR’s economy collapsed when it tried to match American military technology. Although the primary cause of the Soviet failure was the expansion of US arms (thus this final phase could be seen as a sort of war of attrition), President Reagan cannot receive credit alone; he was aided by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Polish leader Lech Walesa, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Pope John Paul II, and popular resistance movements in Soviet-dominated nations like East Germany and Romania.