On every front

A series of events in late 1949 and early 1950 gave the Cold War confrontation a more global and more threatening outlook. In August 1949 the Soviet Union, several years earlier than expected by Western intelligence analysts, successfully tested its first atomic bomb.

People's Republic of China (PRC)

The official name of communist or mainland China. The PRC came into existence in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

see Chapter 10

see Chapter 12

But there was more. On 1 October 1949 the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was formed, and its leader, Mao Zedong, soon travelled to Moscow to conclude a treaty with the Soviet Union. With the formation of the Sino-Soviet alliance and the prospect that an apparent ‘red tide' was about to sweep across the rest of Asia, the stakes were manifestly increased. The Americans, who had already taken steps to support Japanese recovery as a counterweight against communism in East Asia, chose not to recognize the PRC; instead, they began increasing aid to both the European colonial Powers and to new non-communist governments. In short, anti-communism was increasingly influencing American policy decisions, sometimes, as later became clear in Vietnam, with disastrous results.

McCarthyism

General term for the practice in the United States of making accusations of pro-communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful or irrelevant evidence.

In fact, a full re-evaluation of American priorities was under way at the time when the Soviets and Chinese concluded their alliance. Along with ordering a rapid development of the hydrogen bomb in January 1950, Truman instructed the State and Defense departments to conduct a full review of national security policy. The end result was NSC-68 (National Security Council Paper Number 68), one of the seminal documents of the early Cold War. Concluded in April 1950, this top-secret report based its recommendations on a simplistic view of the world as divided between a monolithic communist sphere under Moscow's leadership and the ‘free world' headed by the United States. It made few allow­ances for the differences within the communist bloc and made no references to the many non-democratic allies of the United States. Working under the assump­tion that the Soviet Union and its clients posed a severe military threat to the United States and the rest of the ‘free world', NSC-68 called for a massive buildup of the American military. Given the global nature of the threat, moreover, the report warned that the United States and its allies would have to counter the expansion of communism anywhere in the world.

The sentiments of NSC-68 reflected the exaggerated anti-communism that was sweeping the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This virulent anti­communism, which is known as McCarthyism after one of its leading prota­gonists, Senator Joseph McCarthy (WI, Republican), had its roots in earlier periods in American history; indeed, a ‘red scare' had raged in the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. Already in the late 1940s sensationalized spy cases, including the trial of former high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss, had raised the level of concern over domestic communists. However, when McCarthy announced in February 1950, erroneously as it turned out, that there were hundreds of ‘card-carrying’ communists in the State Department, he managed to magnify what was already a widespread attack on civil liberties into a witch-hunt.

However, even with McCarthyism in full swing in the spring of 1950 the secret recommendations of NSC-68 — effectively a tripling of the American defence budget — were going to be difficult to sell to Congress. Until a ‘real’ military threat appeared on the horizon, doomsday scenarios could only go so far in persuading the American public that they needed to bear an additional tax burden in order to defend the ‘free world’ against communism. The solution, though, was not long in coming, for the Cold War rapidly entered yet another stage.

The North Korean attack on South Korea of 25 June 1950 produced outrage in the United States and around the world, galvanizing the Western alliance and leading to the first serious ‘hot war’ of the Cold War. With the introduction of American and other allied troops into the Korean peninsula and the later entry of the PRC into the conflict, the world seemed, indeed, close to a Third World War. While the direct impact of the events in Korea was most clearly felt in Asia, its role as the first real conflict within the wider Cold War was crucial in influ­encing the course of future American policy, the relations between Washington and its West European allies, and the general mood in East-West relations. In particular, the war resulted in a rapid militarization and subsequent global­ization of the Cold War. In Western Europe conservative parties returned to power and defence budgets began to escalate. Prompted by fears that the USSR would attack in Europe while American troops were preoccupied in Korea, night­mare scenarios about another world war escalated, leading the West European governments to initiate plans for an independent EDC.

The United States, for its part, created the most wide-ranging alliance system in the history of the world. This included bilateral pacts with Japan (1951), the Philippines (1951), Spain (1952), South Korea (1953) and Taiwan (1954), and multilateral treaty organizations, such as in 1951 the Australian-New Zealand- United States Pact (ANZUS), and in 1954 the South-East Asia Treaty Organ­ization (SEATO) which committed Thailand, Pakistan and the Philippines among other states to the defence of South-East Asia. In the Middle East, the Baghdad Pact (consisting of Britain, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq), which was organized in 1955 without American membership, acted as the forerunner to the establishment of the American-led Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). With this proliferation of alliances and the acquisition of numerous military bases from Greenland to North Africa and Japan, the United States was, indeed, keeping a global watch on the assumed designs of the Warsaw Pact and the Sino-Soviet alliance.

South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)

An alliance organized in 1954 by Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States. SEATO was created after the Geneva conference on Indochina to prevent further communist gains in the region. However, it proved of little use in the Vietnam War and was disbanded in 1977.

Warsaw Pact (Warsaw Treaty Organization)

An alliance set up in 1955 under a mutual defence treaty signed in Warsaw by Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Soviet Union. The organization was the Soviet bloc’s equivalent of NATO. Albania formally withdrew in 1968. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved in June 1991.

detente

A term meaning the reduction of tensions between states. It is often used to refer to the superpower diplomacy that took place between the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the American president in 1969 and the Senate’s refusal to ratify SALT II in 1980.

That the Cold War was becoming a ‘total’ war became even clearer with the strengthening of the Western economic embargo against the Soviet bloc. In 1949 the United States and its allies had already established CoCom (Co-ordinating Committee) to underpin this process. The outbreak of the Korean War gave a strong boost to the strengthening of export control legislation and agreements. In the early 1950s CoCom became a means of synchronizing the Western powers’ trade policies so as to minimize the Sino-Soviet bloc’s ability to strengthen its military capabilities through East-West trade. Propelled mainly by the United States, the participating countries established a series of embargoes that pro­hibited the export of various goods, from arms and ammunition to petroleum and other ‘strategic raw materials’. It is important to note, though, that in this field differences between the United States and its allies were in evidence from the beginning: concerned over a political backlash from the USSR and/or possible domestic discontent due to the loss of trade with Eastern Europe, West European governments accepted CoCom merely as an informal set of ‘gentlemen’s agree­ments’. Although differences in Western policies would begin to undermine the US ability to keep a complete strategic embargo on the USSR and its allies, CoCom acted, particularly in the 1950s, as a fairly effective means of limiting East-West trade. Only in the 1960s, along with general criticism over American policies and the rise of European detente, did serious cracks in the Western embargo system begin to appear. By then, though, the general dynamics of the Cold War had dramatically shifted.