Let’s Learn About the Cold War Part 2: Setting the Stage

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Sean D. Smith
  • Minot Air Force Base Public Affairs
MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. --  To understand the Cold War, we have to understand the mindset of the world at the time. Everyone had been touched by World War II in some way. Europe and Japan were devastated. America's economy was reeling, a problem exacerbated by the enormous number of young men lost to the war, men who could no longer be a part of the work force tasked with getting the country back on its feet.

The Cold War earned its name via a lack of direct action. There was no conventional aggression in part because of nuclear weapons, but also because nobody wanted another world war.

The Cold War is a popular setting for spy thrillers, and it will always be a historic symbol of espionage and political playmaking and subversion on the world stage. This doesn't come from the romantic notions of writers and filmmakers; it comes from the collective psyche of the world at the time.

With a conflict as cataclysmic as World War II still so near in the rearview mirror, world governments didn't want to settle things on the battlefield if they could help it. Espionage and indirect action would become the obvious fallback in the years to come.

While there was a divide in ideology between the United States and the Soviet Union, there was also a geographical divide. After the war, Japan and Western Europe accepted help from the United States to rebuild, via a proposition called the European Recovery Program. This plan is often referred to as the Marshall Plan, and in today's dollars it was worth approximately 120 billion dollars.

The USSR rejected the Marshall Plan, mostly on the grounds that it offered aid to postwar Germany, which the Soviets found objectionable. In 1947, Soviet Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov stormed out of a meeting with European leaders, and the USSR urged its Eastern European allies to reject the plan as well.

The United States saw this as proof that the Soviet Union wanted to hold off western influence and to bring communism into Europe. The Eastern and Western Blocs were born from this divide, with the line separating east from west running through the middle of Germany, and making Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria into the western front of Soviet influence.

That line running through Europe would shift and change through the coming decades, and it would also come to be known as the Iron Curtain.

Next time: Communism