The origins, development, key crises and resolution of the Cold War between the superpowers from 1945 to 1989

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to explain why the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union broke down into the Cold War, how the conflict developed through crises and proxy wars, the easing of tension during detente, the renewed confrontation of the early 1980s, and why the Cold War ended around 1989. You need to handle causation, ideology and historiography, and to analyse sources from both sides. The option is examined through source analysis and essays in the external paper.

The Cold War's origins lie in the breakdown of the wartime Grand Alliance. Even before 1945 the United States and the USSR distrusted each other across ideology, capitalism against communism, and over the future of Europe. The Yalta and Potsdam conferences of 1945 exposed disagreements over Poland, Germany and reparations. As the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe, Soviet-backed governments were installed, which Churchill described in 1946 as an iron curtain dividing the continent.

The United States responded with containment. The Truman Doctrine of March 1947 pledged support to nations resisting communism, and the Marshall Plan of 1947 offered economic aid to rebuild Western Europe and resist communism. The first major crisis was the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 to May 1949), when Stalin cut off West Berlin and the West sustained it by airlift. The crisis produced the formation of NATO (1949) and the division of Germany into the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. The USSR formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

The conflict spread globally and to the edge of nuclear war. The Korean War (1950 to 1953) was the first hot proxy conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the USSR placed missiles in Cuba and President Kennedy imposed a naval blockade, brought the superpowers closest to nuclear war before Khrushchev withdrew the missiles. The crisis prompted the first arms-control measures, including the 1963 hotline and Partial Test Ban Treaty. Meanwhile the United States became mired in the Vietnam War, which damaged its prestige and exposed the limits of containment.

Detente, an easing of tension, characterised the late 1960s and 1970s: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I in 1972), the Nixon-Brezhnev summits, Nixon's opening to communist China in 1972, and the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Detente was always limited, and superpower competition continued in the developing world. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 effectively ended detente.

The early 1980s saw renewed confrontation, sometimes called the Second Cold War. President Ronald Reagan denounced the USSR as an "evil empire", increased defence spending, and announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Tension peaked around the 1983 Able Archer exercise. The turning point came with Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Soviet leader in 1985. His reforms, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), plus summits with Reagan and the 1987 INF Treaty eliminating intermediate-range missiles, transformed superpower relations.

Gorbachev's decision not to use force to prop up Eastern European communist regimes was decisive. In 1989 the communist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed in a wave of largely peaceful revolutions, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. The Cold War was declared over, and the USSR itself dissolved in December 1991.

Historiographically, "orthodox" historians blame Soviet expansionism for the Cold War, "revisionists" emphasise American economic imperialism and the atomic bomb, and "post-revisionists" such as John Lewis Gaddis stress mutual misperception and the security dilemma. On the war's end, debate divides between those crediting Reagan's pressure and those crediting Gorbachev's choices and the structural failure of the Soviet economy.