Cold War - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... Third, the world quickly turned into polarized and bipolar. Fourth, two superpowers appeared in the world with military and economic power which gave them a significant advantage over the others. Plus, the interests of Western countries in different parts of the globe began to come up against the interests of the Soviet Union. The new political conditions, formed after World War II, were quickly understood by Churchill, who announced the new realia and called them the Cold War1. The defeat of such powerful monsters as Germany and Japan testified that the balance of power in the world was changed. The Allied forces of the Four Powers - the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France occupied the territory of Germany and Austria in accordance with the decisions of the Potsdam Conference. The political influence of the Soviet Union extended to Poland, part of Germany, occupied by Soviet forces, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania. Though the country was exhausted by war, it badly needed to recover economic and human resources, it still had the most powerful and experienced army of about 11 million soldiers2. On the other hand, the U.S. became the dominant global power after the Second World War, which has enormous economic, air, sea and nuclear power. As a result of the effective strategy the United States increased the gross national product by 1.7 times (excluding inflation) during the war and lost only 300 thousand soldiers. The U.S. dollar became the most stable currency and New York - the largest financial market in the world. The country quickly overcame inflation, raised wages and had the world’s highest productivity. Economic power of the United States, its industrial and financial expansion, contributed to the fact that the United States got the role of global hegemon3. Growing distrust among the former Allies led to the fact that the countries of Western Europe and the U.S. joined forces against the USSR. The Soviet Union, in an effort to protect its borders, created a kind of a buffer of the countries which formed pro-Soviet government after the war. Thus, the world was divided into two camps: capitalist and socialist. Both established the so-called systems of collective security - military blocs. On 4 April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed and the world saw a new military organization - NATO, which included the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. In May, 1955, the Warsaw Pact was signed as a countermeasure. It included (that year) Albania (later, in 1968, it denounced the pact), Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania, USSR, Czechoslovakia. The polarization of the world was over4. The created coalitions, led by their leaders, began to struggle for influence in third world countries. One of the most memorable results of the Cold War is Arms Race Its start was related to atomic weapons. In 1945 the United States was the only nuclear power in the world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki got “informed” about that. That strategic superiority fostered the U.S. military begin to build a variety of plans of pre-emptive strikes on the Soviet Union. But the American monopoly on nuclear weapons remained only four years. In 1949 the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. This event was a real shock to the Western world and an important milestone of the Cold War. So, any global wars, like in Orwell’s 1984, became very dangerous for all and unnecessary for the ruling regimes as undermined their ...Download file to see next pagesRead More