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There has never been direct military engagement between the Western allies and the Soviet Union, but there was half a century of military build-up as well as political battles for support around the world, from the 1940’s to the break-up of the Soviet pact following Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan in the late 80’s ultimately leading to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990.
Way back in 1953 changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the relationships of power. Dwight D. Eisenhower was made president in January 1953, however during the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defence budget had quadrupled; and Eisenhower resolved to reduce military spending by brandishing the United States' nuclear superiority while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively. In March 1953 Joseph Stalin died, and the Soviet Union was now led by Nikita Khrushchev who slowly started to move away from Stalin's policies. There was some relaxation of tensions after Stalin's death in 1953, but the Cold War in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce. Western troops seemed to be stationed indefinitely in West Germany and Soviet forces were stationed throughout Eastern Europe. To counter West German re-armament, the Soviets established a formal alliance with the Eastern European Communist states termed the Warsaw Pact Treaty in 1955. Berlin remained divided and heavily contested. During 1961 the East Germans erected the Berlin Wall to prevent the movement of East Berliners into West Berlin.
However in the early 60’s the nuclear arms race brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev had formed an alliance with Fidel Castro after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. But in 1962 President John F. Kennedy responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade, a show of force that brought the world close to nuclear war. The United States had assumed territorial control over Guantánamo Bay on the southern end of the island under the 1903 Cuban-American Treaty, which granted the United States a perpetual lease of the area without the Cuban Government intervention. So the installation of missiles so close to home was a very provocative act. Here in the United Kingdom for almost a week at the height of the crisis the Royal Air Force V bomber force sat fully bombed with nuclear weapon, engines running and crewed round the clock. This state of readiness showed how serious the United Kingdom took the deterioration of relation between the Soviet Union and the United States; fortunately the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that neither superpower was ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other's retaliation. The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts at nuclear disarmament and improving relations. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, both the West and the Soviet Union struggled to adjust to a more complex pattern of international relations. The world was no longer divided into two clearly defined blocs controlled by the two superpowers. Since the beginning of the post-war period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s. The United States however continued to spend heavily on supporting friendly third world regimes in Asia. Conflicts most prominently in Vietnam continued. Lyndon B. Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to crush the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and their North Vietnamese allies, but his costly policy weakened the US. economy and by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations. By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the Soviet Union was suffering from an economic growth rate close to zero. This combined with the sharp fall in hard currency earnings as a result of plummeting world oil prices in the 1980s. (Petroleum exports made up around 60 percent of the Soviet Union's total export earnings) price dipped under $17 per barrel in 1986. In order to restructure the Soviet economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform perestroika (restructuring of the Soviet economy) and glasnost (openness). Reform required Gorbachev to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. As a result, Gorbachev offered major concessions to the United States on the levels of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and policy in Eastern Europe. In December 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at a summit meeting in Malta. But by then, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. In the USSR itself, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and indeed the union together. By February 1990 the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year old monopoly on state power and by December of the next year, the union-state also dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states Armenian, Azerbaijan, Byelorussian, Estonian, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Russia, Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian and Uzbek.
Since the term Cold War has
encompassed many smaller wars, conflicts, police actions, and such like,
veterans of the cold war have become a mystery to the public, or even thought to
be imaginary, due to the very nature of many classified or covert missions. No
formal British government recognition for what was the longest period military
uncertainty in British history 1946 to 1991
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