Expert of Eastern European and Russian affairs and Director of the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute Dr. Michael Kimmage joins WIRED to answer the internet's questions about the "Cold War" contested by The Soviet Union and United States. Why was it named "the Cold War?" Was the threat of communism overblown by the United States? What is a proxy war? Why did the United States and USSR make so many nuclear warheads? Did the Soviets have technologies that surpassed those of NATO? Are we in a new Cold War today? Answers to these questions and many more await on Cold War Support.
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Michael Kimmage
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer
Talent Booker:
Camera Operator: Constantine Economides
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Charlie Jordan
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Michael Kimmage
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nick Sawyer
Talent Booker:
Camera Operator: Constantine Economides
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00One of the great Cold War theories for the United States was the so-called domino theory.
00:04I'm historian Michael Kimmage. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is Cold War Support.
00:13First question. When did the Cold War start and when did it end?
00:16To get to the bottom of this question, I think we should talk about a timeline of the Cold War.
00:211945, that's the date of the Potsdam Conference on the outskirts of Berlin.
00:25That was Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Harry Truman.
00:27And what you can see is that the two big superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, are beginning to divide up the world in a certain way.
00:33You can also see in 1945 the fault lines of disagreement between Stalin and Truman.
00:38Let's jump forward to 1960. That's the date that Gary Powers gets intercepted over the Soviet Union.
00:43And Khrushchev and Eisenhower, the American president in the 50s, were supposed to have a summit meeting in 1960.
00:48That gets blown off course by the U-2 spy incident. So the Cold War is put back on track.
00:52And then in the early 1960s, we get the construction of the Berlin Wall, which is the ultimate symbol of the Cold War.
00:58Divided Berlin, divided Germany, divided Europe.
01:00Let's fast forward all the way to 1985.
01:03That's the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Soviet Union.
01:07Gorbachev is a reformer that sets in motion a series of revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.
01:12They culminate in 1989, when Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary break free from Soviet control.
01:18Two years later, 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapses, when the Soviet flag is taken down over the Kremlin, and the Russian flag is put up.
01:26That's on Christmas Eve, 1991. And with that, the Cold War is definitely over.
01:30Writer Jason from Reddit asks, what was the height of the Cold War?
01:34The height of the Cold War was definitely the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place in the fall of 1962.
01:40U.S. Oversight spy photography got a missile launch site that was being created on the island of Cuba.
01:46This map shows us the scale of what the Soviets and the Cubans had in mind in terms of making Cuba into a Cold War nuclear installation.
01:54This wasn't just one or two weapons. This was a pretty big shift.
01:57And when you think of how close Cuba is to the U.S., 90 miles from the tip of the state of Florida,
02:02you can understand why this was of such grave concern to American military planners.
02:05So it was no small step.
02:07What Khrushchev was undertaking in 1962 in Cuba, it was a pretty big provocation.
02:11This caused a huge crisis in the White House, where there was a sense that the U.S. absolutely had to respond.
02:16And there was a debate and discussion in the White House about the different options available to President Kennedy at the time.
02:21One of them was the outright invasion of Cuba.
02:23Another was a kind of diplomatic negotiation discussion with the Soviet Union.
02:27The U.S. opted for the latter course.
02:30And we know now, if the U.S. had invaded, that the likelihood of a nuclear strike on the United States is very, very high.
02:35The reason that we know that the Cuban Missile Crisis could have gone nuclear really comes from the memories of Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader.
02:41He was pressuring the Soviets to respond with nuclear force if the U.S. would have invaded the island.
02:45So this is a time when the two superpowers came to the very edge of the abyss, to a nuclear confrontation.
02:51The reason the Soviets put the missiles in is they wanted to gain advantage in Europe, not so much in the Caribbean.
02:57The Soviets felt that the U.S. was encroaching on the Soviet Union in West Berlin.
03:00Khrushchev thought he could get an advantage in the Cold War by doing this.
03:03He did it against the advice of his staff.
03:05Khrushchev is going to be pushed from power a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis because of how he behaved during it.
03:11It's a Soviet embarrassment, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's something of an American success.
03:15Kaleji12 wants to know, was the American fear of worldwide communist domination a legitimate fear?
03:20I think the U.S. had a lot of legitimate concerns with Soviet power in Europe, but the U.S. blew out of proportion the whole communist story.
03:28Let's take a look at this map of the world.
03:30It helps us to see that the world divided up in the Cold War into three basic camps.
03:34You have the Soviet-Chinese camp on the one hand, you have a U.S.-led camp on the other, and in between you had what were called the non-aligned states.
03:41One of the great Cold War theories for the United States was the so-called domino theory.
03:45And this was the idea that countries were lined up in some kind of sequence, and if one of them would fall to communism, the rest would fall after the first one fell.
03:54So the domino theory is something that dominates thinking about American Cold War policy for the first two, three decades of the Cold War.
04:02It is a very simplistic theory, and it contributed to a lot of misunderstandings in American foreign policy.
04:07The biggest one is in Vietnam, that's the ultimate domino, where the U.S. feared that if Vietnam fell to communism, Laos, Cambodia, and other neighboring countries would fall as well.
04:16And so the U.S. pushed itself into an unnecessary war because of this theory.
04:20It's not a footnote or a side note to the Cold War, the domino theory.
04:23It's the cause of some of the biggest mistakes that the United States makes during the Cold War.
04:27Molten07 asks,
04:28I think that this person is referencing the show Fallout and the video game Fallout, and absolutely there were Fallout shelters that were built during the Cold War.
04:38You can still find some of them in the vicinity of Washington, D.C.
04:41You can find lots of them in Europe, and you can certainly find them in the Soviet Union.
04:45With the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the U.S. came within a hair's breadth of actually having a nuclear war.
04:49It was one of the realities that people had to live with then.
04:52So governments did all kinds of planning.
04:53They had contingency plans.
04:54They built places to make government conceivably possible during a nuclear war.
04:58But there's something crazy about it at the same time, because if there had been a nuclear war, these Fallout faults would give you 10, 12 hours of peace, security, and safety, and then the game would still be up.
05:07So it was a psychological device, like the duck and cover exercises where students were given instructions of what to do during a nuclear war.
05:14It helps us to understand the strange psychology that I guess all of us need to have while we live in the nuclear age.
05:19First Reformer asks, was Stalin really as evil as people claim?
05:22Yes.
05:23You could say that Stalin is a gifted statesman for the Soviet Union.
05:26He wins the Second World War for the Soviet Union.
05:28You could also say that Stalin is a far-thinking state builder for the Soviet Union.
05:32It's really Stalin who builds the whole Soviet state, and that's no small matter.
05:36But he does so at incredible cost to the peoples of the Soviet Union and to peoples on the periphery of the Soviet Union.
05:42This is millions upon millions of lives that were reordered through violence and coercion, through incarceration, and through execution.
05:49So he's one of the great 20th century villains.
05:51At LSTrip44 asks, WTF, how did the Berlin Wall work?
05:56The Berlin Wall worked in the following way.
05:58We have a depiction of it here.
05:59This is the city of Berlin.
06:00And after the Second World War in 1945, Germany and Berlin alike were occupied by the Soviet Union, by France, by Britain, and by the United States.
06:08And the city of Berlin is divided up into four zones.
06:11But really, the French, the British, and the U.S. zones are one zone.
06:14You could describe that as the western zone of the city.
06:16And the Soviet zone was the other part of the city.
06:19The Berlin Wall is put up when a lot of East Berliners are flowing into West Berlin.
06:23There was a joke at the time, will the last East Berliner turn out the light bulb when they leave the country?
06:27Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviets decide that the Berlin Wall has to be there.
06:31You could almost describe it as one of the big mistakes that the Soviet Union makes because it symbolizes a part of Europe, a part of Germany, a part of Berlin, where people have to be held in.
06:40So it becomes this big Cold War symbol.
06:42John F. Kennedy goes to Berlin and gives his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech to show that West Berliners were free and East Berliners were not.
06:49The Berlin Wall runs through the center of the city.
06:51At the same time, it runs around the whole western part of Berlin.
06:55It was concrete. It was a tall wall with watchtowers.
06:58It looked very menacing.
06:59It's full of barbed wire as well.
07:01And you also have East German border guards with the right to shoot who were there at the wall to prevent people from crossing it.
07:06And there were quite a few people who died at the Berlin Wall who were shot or killed when they were trying to escape.
07:11So what goes up can also come down.
07:13In 1989, you have a press conference where an East German official bungles what he was supposed to say.
07:19He was supposed to talk about eventual travel rights.
07:21He talks about immediate travel rights.
07:23That evening, people rush out to the Berlin Wall and cross over it.
07:26And they dance and party at the Berlin Wall, November 1989.
07:30This is one of the great, great symbolic moments of the Cold War.
07:32It's not until two years later, 1991, that the Soviet Union collapses.
07:36But emotionally, the Cold War ends when the Berlin Wall is breached.
07:39This next question is from the AskHistorian subreddit.
07:42Why was the downing of Gary Power's U-2 such a major international incident?
07:46Gary Power's U-2 spy plane was flying over the Soviet Union.
07:49It got detected. It got intercepted. Gary Power's parachuted out of the plane.
07:54He didn't commit suicide, as his instructions may have required him to do.
07:58And he was captured as a trophy by the Soviet Union and paraded before world media to show that the United States was doing its dirty business in Soviet airspace.
08:07And the Soviet Union was the victim, protecting itself, defending itself from American aggression.
08:11The Cold War was, at its very core, a battle over images, perception, and narrative.
08:16So this was a propaganda victory for the Soviet Union.
08:19There were a ton of spy planes during the Cold War.
08:21The Soviets, of course, had many, and the United States had many.
08:24What they were trying to figure out was what the nuclear facilities were in the other country.
08:28And especially, they were trying to figure out how many nuclear weapons the other country had and where they were stationed.
08:33This is before you really have satellite technology.
08:35At that time, U-2 spy planes and the like were the state of the art.
08:38Rex Saved asked, how did the Red Scare and McCarthyism affect U.S. politics during the Cold War?
08:44Was it reasonable?
08:45The Red Scare really was not reasonable.
08:47This is around 1950.
08:48Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin.
08:50Sitting next to him is Roy Cohn, who was one of his assistants from 1950 to 1954, when McCarthy's reign of terror was in full effect.
08:57Roy Cohn is a famous figure in American history, second half of the 20th century,
09:01because he would end up being a mentor to Donald Trump when Donald Trump was on the rise in New York City.
09:05Roy Cohn is depicted in a recent film, The Apprentice.
09:08The Red Scare was a response to something real.
09:11The Soviet Union had some success infiltrating the State Department in the 1930s,
09:15and most consequentially, the Soviet Union got a few nuclear secrets from Julius Rosenberg in the 1940s,
09:21with the access that Julius Rosenberg had to Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was being worked on.
09:26So those were facts, but they were created into something really monstrous by Senator Joseph McCarthy,
09:31when he accused all kinds of people who had nothing to do with this espionage of communist affinity and communist affiliation.
09:37And these people could be in academia, they could be in journalism.
09:39And sometimes just to be accused of doing something wrong, even if there were no facts behind it, was enough to ruin people's reputation.
09:45That means you could become unemployable.
09:47And the most famous examples of that are in Hollywood, where various directors and creative people were denied jobs,
09:53careers were interrupted or, in some cases, outright ruined by being blacklisted.
09:56It was a technique of creating fear, of making people intimidated, making them afraid to speak their minds,
10:02and in a way, trying to guarantee consent or guarantee support for the U.S. government.
10:06It's a very unfortunate episode in American politics.
10:09Agent P501212 asks,
10:12I don't understand the collapse of the Soviet Union.
10:14How does a government fall without any violence?
10:16It's one of the most mysterious historical events.
10:18It's the collapse of a huge nuclear-powered, affluent-up-to-a-point empire in 1991,
10:24for really no apparent or obvious reason.
10:27If I had to give an explanation, I would say that the Soviet Union was a very strange patchwork quilt of different ethnicities and nations.
10:34What held it together when Stalin assembled the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s was coercion and violence.
10:40Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in 1985 and basically says,
10:43we want to run the Soviet Union without power and violence.
10:46And what happens is that the nation-states of the Soviet Union, including the Russian nation-state,
10:51basically say, we no longer wish to be a part of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union collapses.
10:55It was oddly constructed, could only be held together through violence and coercion.
10:59When that violence and coercion was lifted, the whole thing went up in a puff of smoke.
11:02Blondlady2024 asks,
11:04So what did we really learn from the JFK files?
11:07Now, there was no huge breakthrough with the JFK files,
11:09but I think that we learned that there was actually quite a bit of back and forth between the United States and the Soviet Union
11:14about the figure of Lee Harvey Oswald.
11:16We think of the Iron Curtain as this wall that you couldn't cross between East and West, but it wasn't the case.
11:21These are two countries that often enough did diplomacy with one another,
11:24the big summit meetings and the gatherings,
11:26but also behind the scenes, they seem to have been in touch and been communicating with one another.
11:30That's a bit of a Cold War surprise.
11:31Lee Harvey Oswald is fascinating, not just because he's the assassin of John F. Kennedy,
11:35but because he's one of these in-between figures of the Cold War.
11:38He was an American citizen, but he lived in the Soviet Union.
11:40He had a Russian wife.
11:41Lee Harvey Oswald was an international man of mystery,
11:43and he was definitely noticed by both the United States and the Soviet Union.
11:47I think they may have had suspicions that he was on the other side,
11:50that he was an American spy for the Soviets or a Soviet spy.
11:52And I guess you could come up with all kinds of arguments that make both of those theories seem plausible.
11:57We've never had a biographer or historian exactly explain what he was up to.
12:01And there's just a lot of tidbits in the JFK files about who he was,
12:04what the Soviets knew, what the U.S. government knew.
12:07And although both governments knew a lot, it seems never to be enough.
12:10Salmanella on YouTube asks,
12:12How historically accurate is the Americans?
12:15I think the Americans is pretty historically accurate.
12:17There are a lot of those sleeper cells that were implanted in the United States and in other countries
12:21and never quite activated.
12:22There are a few literary liberties that the Americans takes.
12:25First of all, I think all the sex and violence that you see in the Americans
12:28was not really what the experience of the actual sleepers was.
12:31And also what historians have noted about these different sleeper cells
12:34is that they delivered very little usable information for the Soviet Union.
12:38So the best moles for the Soviet Union were not really from the Soviet Union,
12:41as you see depicted in the Americans.
12:42What they were were sympathizers and loyalists to the Soviet Union
12:45who were actual American citizens.
12:47And the most important example of this would be Julius Rosenberg,
12:50who did steal nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union.
12:52His wife, Ethel Rosenberg, the two of them were executed for nuclear espionage.
12:56Also in the 70s and 80s, you have a few moles as well.
12:59They weren't really sympathetic to the Soviet cause,
13:01but they were taking money and in return giving the Soviet Union secrets.
13:04Famous example of an American mole is Aldrich Ames, who was working in the FBI.
13:09The Soviet Union was giving money to him.
13:10He was giving secrets to the Soviet Union.
13:12At extension 4159 asks,
13:14Every time I mention Ronald Reagan to my father,
13:16he says that he quote unquote arguably won the Cold War.
13:19Was Reagan's presidency an important factor in ending the Cold War?
13:23Reagan opened the door to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.
13:26He conducted a lot of diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev.
13:28And Reagan was careful not to push too far,
13:30to push the Soviet Union beyond a threshold
13:32where it might have responded with war or military force.
13:35Technically speaking, it's George Herbert Walker Bush
13:37who's president when the Cold War comes to an end.
13:39And George Herbert Walker Bush was also good at giving a peaceful ending to the Cold War.
13:43So I would say that the Soviet Union falls apart
13:45for reasons that are internal to the Soviet Union.
13:48It's not that the U.S. was really able to pull the plug,
13:50but the U.S. plays a big role in navigating and managing that moment
13:53and making sure that the end of the Cold War was not a bloody war or a disaster,
13:58but a surprisingly peaceful event.
14:00Anti-imperialist Marie asks,
14:01Why did Gorbachev betray socialism despite growing up under socialist conditions?
14:06Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union in 1985,
14:08really wanting to save socialism.
14:10Mikhail Gorbachev really believed in the teachings and the writings of Vladimir Lenin.
14:14He wanted to bring the Soviet Union back to what he felt were its glorious beginnings.
14:17The only way he felt he could do so after 1985 was through reform.
14:22Gorbachev's reforms quickly run out of his control.
14:24The economy continues to unravel and get worse
14:27while he's the general secretary of the Soviet Union.
14:29That creates a lot of discontent within the Soviet Union,
14:31but it's really not for reasons of socialism or capitalism or economics
14:35that the Soviet Union falls apart.
14:37It's because Gorbachev couldn't manage the different nationalities within the Soviet Union.
14:41There were two buzzwords that were associated with Gorbachev.
14:43One is perestroika, restructuring,
14:45and the other is glasnost, giving people voice and agency.
14:48But what's interesting about both of these things
14:50is that people started to pull the economy in a free market direction,
14:53which is not what Gorbachev wanted.
14:54And with glasnost, with voice and agency,
14:56people began to articulate across the Soviet Union
14:59a desire to break free from the Soviet Union itself.
15:01This is Russians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and others.
15:04And so Gorbachev wanted to give people a measure of power.
15:07He bungles the question of nationalities within the Soviet Union,
15:09and the Soviet Union falls apart.
15:11It's an incredible case of unintended consequences.
15:14But let's remember Gorbachev for what he was trying to do,
15:17and that, for better or worse, was to save the socialist idea.
15:20Nate Nandoz 21 asks,
15:21why did the CIA destabilize so many governments during the Cold War?
15:25The official mandate of the CIA in the 1940s and 50s was to be very aggressive.
15:29Regime change, coup d'etats, high degrees of espionage, manipulation, and domestic politics
15:34was par for the course.
15:35And what the CIA would have said,
15:36if they had been able to answer the question in the 40s and 50s,
15:39is that the Soviet Union was doing the same thing.
15:41So what the Soviet Union was doing, we had to do as well.
15:44There are three good examples of governments that the U.S. interfered with,
15:48meddled with, manipulated during the early stages of the Cold War.
15:50The first is Italy, where the U.S. put its thumb on the scales
15:53and tried to get the non-communist political parties elected after World War II.
15:57Second is Guatemala, where the CIA was actively involved in overthrowing the government.
16:01And the third is Iran.
16:02The overthrow of the government in Iran that the CIA and British intelligence was a part of
16:06creates a very strongly anti-American mood in Iran in the 1960s and 70s,
16:11and that culminates in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
16:14So a famous term that's connected to CIA overthrow operations is blowback,
16:18the bad things that happen when you overthrow foreign governments.
16:20And the most spectacular example of blowback in modern American history is Iran.
16:25We're living with the effects of that in the present day.
16:27At Creatively asks, where did the hammer and sickle come from?
16:30This question takes us back into the early part of the 20th century.
16:33You have the Russian Revolution in 1917.
16:36That topples the empire of the czars.
16:38When the Soviet Union was created, it needed to show to itself and to the outside world what it represented.
16:42And so the Soviet Union came up with the hammer and sickle that you see on this flag.
16:45The hammer and the sickle represented the two pillars of the Soviet economy.
16:49The sickle was agriculture.
16:50The hammer was industry.
16:51Now, in reality, these were two parts of the Soviet experiment that didn't always fit very well together.
16:56But symbolically, the idea was to show that these were two integrated, harmonious parts of the Soviet economy.
17:01And this is what was lifting up the Soviet Union into a great world power and a great superpower.
17:06I'd like Korn asks, were China and Russia allies?
17:09Hashtag fenemies.
17:10China and Russia were both.
17:12They were allies for quite a while during the Cold War.
17:14China models itself on Stalin's Soviet Union and was a close partner of the Soviet Union in the 1950s
17:19in ways that drove the United States absolutely crazy.
17:21And then in the early 1960s, you get something called the Sino-Soviet split.
17:25And this was Chairman Mao separating himself from the Soviet Union, becoming more autonomous.
17:29It was a border dispute between the Soviet Union and China.
17:33And that really issued in a lot of tension between these two countries.
17:36And so you get Richard Nixon going to China in the early 1970s to triangulate the Cold War,
17:41not make it a U.S.-Soviet binary, but make it a U.S.-Soviet-Chinese triangle.
17:45But that's only possible because the Soviet Union and China became really frenemies or enemies in the early 1960s.
17:52Here's one from the AskHistorian subreddit.
17:54Why is Kissinger considered a foreign policy genius?
17:56First thing to say is not everybody considers Kissinger a genius.
17:59There are some people who think of Kissinger as one of the villains of the Cold War.
18:02This has to do with the aggressive policies that Kissinger supported, especially in Latin America.
18:07What Kissinger was trying to do is to buy the United States time after the Vietnam War and diplomacy was the answer.
18:13So there's a lot to argue about with Kissinger and people have been arguing about him ever since he was national security advisor and secretary of state.
18:19But for those who admire him, it's for his diplomatic skill.
18:23Malice6708 wants to know, why did the USSR invade Afghanistan?
18:27So this is one of the things that sinks the Soviet Union.
18:29It invades because it had a communist partner in Afghanistan.
18:32It invades because Afghanistan is, as we've learned in the last couple of decades, a pretty strategic country.
18:37And it invades because it could.
18:39It had the military power.
18:40None of this is great reasoning on the Soviet part.
18:42Soviet Union is very quickly led into a quagmire in Afghanistan.
18:46The U.S. supports the Mujahideen on the other side and incurs a lot of costs on this part of the Soviet Union.
18:51And most importantly, the Afghanistan war creates a lot of discontent within the Soviet Union.
18:56People in the Soviet Union really do not want to fight in Afghanistan.
18:59Many of them come home and they start to push against Soviet rule.
19:02So in the end, it's a disaster for the Soviet Union.
19:04There's also a big blowback for the United States in Afghanistan because the Mujahideen forces that the U.S. supports in the 1980s in Afghanistan,
19:10this is a CIA-run operation, later become linked to Osama bin Laden and the 9-11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
19:18That's, of course, long after the Cold War.
19:20But it's another reminder that the world of the Cold War, it's ancient history in one respect, but it's also the world that we're still living in in another.
19:26Ventrin asks, what is your favorite Cold War movie?
19:29My favorite Cold War movie by far is a movie called 1-2-3 by Billy Wilder.
19:33I wish it was better known.
19:34It's a really funny movie.
19:35It's a comedy about Berlin and it's filmed before the Berlin Wall goes up.
19:38So you see people going in cars and taxis between East and West Berlin.
19:41It satirizes the United States, which is trying to sell Coca-Cola in Europe.
19:45And it satirizes the Soviet Union, which is this very heavy-handed dominant military force in Germany and in Berlin.
19:51And basically what it does is turn the whole Cold War into a series of really funny jokes about how the two sides make some of the same mistakes and do some of the same stupid things.
19:59One fascinating movie that takes us back to the spirit of the 1980s is a movie called Red Dawn, which is about a Soviet invasion of the United States.
20:06I don't know if it's a great movie in cinema terms, but it helps us to understand the fears and the anxieties that were such an important part of the history of the Cold War.
20:13But also the Cold War classic Dr. Strangelove, which takes the whole story of nuclear weapons actually in a very careful, considered, and thoughtful way and makes us realize that a lot of the people who could control these weapons could also be crazy.
20:25But it also spins a certain tragedy from the fact that it's humans who are in control of nuclear weapons.
20:30And that's one of the scariest things about these weapons.
20:32Here's a question from Quora.
20:34Is NATO a Cold War relic?
20:35It certainly represents a world that existed in the Cold War and no longer exists.
20:40NATO was created in the late 1940s to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union.
20:45The Soviet Union had its own structure on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and that was called the Warsaw Pact.
20:50So originally NATO was a handful of countries in Western Europe, and that's how it remained until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
20:57After that, NATO expanded to a lot of new countries in Eastern and Central Europe.
21:00Now NATO has still not been attacked, all the way down to 2025, but what you have now is a hot shooting war right on the border, flush up against NATO at the present moment in Ukraine.
21:11Ukraine borders Romania, Slovakia, and Poland.
21:13Those are all NATO states, and so NATO is much closer to an active war in the present moment than it ever was during the Cold War.
21:19At Geopolitics 101 asks, are we in a new Cold War today?
21:23Absolutely.
21:24We have some of the same fault lines.
21:26The East-West dichotomy is there.
21:28Washington on one side and Moscow on the other.
21:30We've got all kinds of tensions, and there are a lot of global consequences of the current tensions that are felt in Latin America, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa.
21:38The thing that reminds us most of the Cold War at the present moment is that there is a nuclear component to these tensions.
21:43There's a roller coaster at the present moment when it comes to U.S.-Russian relations.
21:46You have summit meetings. Joe Biden met with Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2021, and in recent weeks, you've seen a fair amount of conversation, phone calls, and also symmetry between Putin's Russia and the United States.
21:56But this is not unlike the Cold War, one has to say, because the Cold War was a roller coaster.
22:01You had lots of back and forth between the United States and the Soviet Union, and you had periods of really bleak confrontation, followed by phases of diplomacy.
22:08That's very similar to the present moment.
22:09At the same time, you could argue that the moment that we're in now is, in fact, worse than the Cold War,
22:14because you never really had a shooting war where the U.S. and the Soviet Union were as directly involved as both the U.S. and today's Russia are involved in the war in Ukraine.
22:22And so it's the Cold War today, but it's possibly worse than the Cold War was back in the day.
22:26PhantomDrive asks,
22:27During the Cold War, did the Soviet Union possess any technologies that surpassed those of NATO and the United States?
22:33Absolutely.
22:34Soviet Union was a powerhouse in science, engineering, mathematics.
22:38The biggest moment in this case is the Sputnik satellite that was launched in 1957, the first satellite to be put up in space.
22:44And this caused a tremendous commotion in the United States when it was clear that, in at least a few areas, the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States technologically.
22:52The U.S. response to that was to pour money into science research, into universities, and into education.
22:58The National Science Foundation is connected to this effort.
23:00And so that's a turning point in the Cold War in 1957.
23:03The U.S. does certainly catch up by 1969 with the moon launch.
23:07But really where the U.S. begins to outpace the Soviet Union technologically is in the private sector.
23:12And that's with microchip technology and computing technology.
23:15So that by the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union is way behind and just unable to catch up, especially where microchips are concerned.
23:21And if the Soviet Union loses the Cold War, if you can put it that way, it loses for that reason.
23:26Fat Cat 9000 wants to know, why did the USA and USSR make so many nukes?
23:30This question takes us to the heart of the Cold War.
23:33Cold War was always about perception of the other side.
23:36So if the U.S. had a new weapon, the Soviet Union had to take note, and it felt that it had to compete.
23:41By the early 1950s, both sides have the capacity to completely destroy the other.
23:45But they feel the need for more, more, more nuclear submarines, nuclear weapons that you can deliver with airplanes.
23:50So you have a massive arms race between these two countries where huge amounts of money and scientific research goes into nuclear weaponry
23:57because each side was always afraid of the other gaining an advantage.
24:00It was deeply irrational.
24:01It sinks the Soviet Union into a kind of relative poverty by the 1970s, 1980s.
24:06And that's one of the reasons that the Soviet Union collapses.
24:08The U.S. is more fortunate in this regard, but you can think of a lot of better purposes that the federal money could have been spent during the Cold War than on nuclear weapons.
24:15We live in the world that's created by the Cold War in this respect, and it's a world that has far too many nuclear weapons for its own good.
24:22At Hootner wants to know, does anyone understand why it was called the Cold War?
24:25I'd imagine no one does.
24:27Well, At Hootner, actually, we do know the answer to this question, somebody named Walter Lippmann.
24:31And he published a book of essays in the mid-1940s about what was happening in the world, and he called it the Cold War.
24:36I think he had in mind that this was a real military conflict.
24:40The United States and the Soviet Union were going head-to-head, but because of nuclear weapons, they were going to hold back somewhat, and that's what made the war cold.
24:47But I also think that Walter Lippmann may have had the Soviet Union in mind, which is a cold place, and that also contributed to this idea of it being a Cold War.
24:54At Pocket Butter wants to know, was the Cold War actually about the economic ideologies of capitalism versus communism, or is there evidence to suggest that this was a false pretense for a simple power struggle between two superpowers?
25:05I think it was both.
25:06The Cold War was very much a struggle about capitalism and communism.
25:10These were two systems of governance, two systems of economics, and the Soviet Union and the United States were always trying to show that their system was the best system.
25:17But behind this, there was a geopolitical struggle for preeminence in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America, and in Africa.
25:24But the way that they competed was through this language of communism and capitalism.
25:27At Alice F. Short asks, what is a proxy war?
25:30What were some proxy wars during the Cold War?
25:32Although the Soviet Union and the United States had their daggers drawn, they never fought actively against one another.
25:37Instead, what they did was fight proxy wars.
25:39They encouraged conflicts and got involved in conflicts where they would be on the opposite sides of each other, but the proxies were there to wage the wars themselves.
25:46The most important is the Korean War at the beginning, where you have North Korea and South Korea as the two proxies.
25:52We have Afghanistan, and then, of course, the Vietnam War is also a classic proxy war.
25:56Lots of U.S. military infiltration of the countries of Latin America, South America, that are there to combat the influence of the Soviet Union.
26:04Those are proxy wars.
26:05You have, in Africa, proxy wars around Angola and Mozambique.
26:09They were costly.
26:10They were very bloody.
26:10They were often inconclusive.
26:12They created huge resentment across the world from people who suffered from these wars.
26:16And we live often in the legacy and the history of those grievances and those resentments.
26:21The first time that the U.S. really knocks off several hundred Russian soldiers, not Soviet, but Russian, is actually in Syria in 2018.
26:28And, of course, the U.S. is very directly involved in the war in Ukraine, and it's U.S. weaponry and military assistance that's resulting in the death of Russian soldiers.
26:35But that's, of course, something that begins in 2022.
26:37So the world that we live in now is less of a proxy war world than the world of the Cold War.
26:41It's Jesus asks, how come we don't talk about the Korean War as much?
26:46The reason is that the United States didn't win the Korean War, and it didn't lose the Korean War.
26:51And, in a sense, the Korean War never comes to an end.
26:53The Korean War is the first big, hot war of the Cold War.
26:57It begins in 1950 when you have disputes between the United States on the one hand and China and the Soviet Union on the other.
27:02That breaks down in a geographic way where the Chinese and the Soviets support the northern part of Korea and the U.S. supports the south.
27:09So today's North Korea and today's South Korea are direct legacies of that conflict.
27:13It's not over, but you're right.
27:15It's not talked about as much as it should be.
27:17Roberto Carlos asks, why was the Hungarian uprising of 1956 significant to the Cold War?
27:23Hungarian uprising in 1956 is when Hungary, which was under Soviet control, tried to break free,
27:28and Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and other places in Hungary to keep Hungary within the Soviet fold.
27:33It's really important, not because the Hungarians won, they didn't, and not because the U.S. supported Hungary directly, the United States didn't.
27:39It's important because this is the first big break from Soviet control in Eastern and Central Europe.
27:45It's only 20, 25 years later that the rest of the countries of Eastern Europe are going to break free from the Soviet Union.
27:50It's the first Soviet domino to fall in a certain sense.
27:53Hungary wobbles in 1956, but all of the dominoes begin to fall in 1989.
27:58To Robert asks, why was the KGB more successful than the CIA?
28:02If the KGB really was more successful, and it's hard to say that the KGB achieved really great things for the people of the Soviet Union or anywhere else,
28:08it was because the KGB had more firepower and certainly within the Soviet Union, more repressive tools than the CIA.
28:14I think that the KGB was also a little bit more shameless in pursuing what are called active measures, efforts to instill disinformation, manipulate media information.
28:23Throughout the Cold War, the CIA did some of that, but then there were restrictions, things like a free media,
28:27and congressional oversight, which didn't always rein in the CIA by any means, but at times curtailed its power.
28:33So the CIA did have to contend with revelations that came sometimes from the U.S. government and sometimes from the U.S. media.
28:38KGB was able to operate under a much, much thicker cloak of secrecy.
28:42From the Ask History subreddit comes the question, how did America taking away all the radios in Europe and making a radio-free Europe help its Cold War efforts?
28:50Radio-free Europe wasn't about taking people's radios away.
28:53What it was about was using radios in Eastern and Central Europe to give them a message and to provide them with media coverage that they couldn't have gotten in their own countries or gotten from Soviet media apparatuses.
29:03So it's part of the Cold War struggle, and from the U.S. side, it was felt that this paid a lot of dividends.
29:08It created discontent within the Soviet side and also encouraged various dissident and opposition movements, especially in the 70s and 80s.
29:15And radio-free Europe has been in the media in the last week because the U.S. is either going to defund it or seriously limit its funding.
29:21It's very much not a priority of the Trump administration.
29:24And so if we're looking for ways to talk about how the Cold War ended, radio-free Europe survives a couple of decades after the Cold War, but not forever.
29:30It's coming to an end now.
29:31So those are all the questions for today.
29:33Thanks for watching Cold War Support.