Cold War Tensions
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The first atomic bomb was used by the United States against Japan at the end of World War Two. Within four years, the Soviet Union had also developed its own version of the bomb. The threat of this development was increased by the fact that the Soviet Union was actively expanding its military influence in Eastern Europe at the time. In response to this problem, the United States adopted a policy for the containment of Soviet expansion. Related to this policy was the strategy of deterrence, which sought to protect the Western nations from the possibilty of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. The concepts of containment and deterrence were to have a strong influence on Soviet-American relations over the following decades. In order to protect its interests in the region, the United States joined with several Western European nations in 1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In 1955, the Soviet Union formed a similar alliance among the Eastern European nations known as the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The international tensions that arose between these two superpower blocs became known as the "Cold War." In the struggle to maintain a balance of power, the United States occasionally needed to use its military forces in various parts of the world. This occurred in 1948, for example, when the Soviet Union made an effort to drive the West out of Berlin by imposing a blockade on the city. In reaction to this event, the United States carried out a massiv
. . .
the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arabs, the United States provided military airlifts to the Israelis while the Soviet Union did the same for Egypt and Syria.
As noted, the major goals of U.S. policy in the Cold War were containment and deterrence. The overall role of deterrence was to discourage the Soviet Union or any other nation from attacking the United States or its allies. The strategic concept of deterrence evolved somewhat over the course of time. For example, soon after the Second World War, the idea of massive retaliation was incorporated into the strategy. Massive retaliation was designed to take into account the realities of nuclear warfare. Thus, it was based on the idea that any nuclear attack by the Soviet Union would be returned by an equally large counter-attack on the part of the United States. Since there would be no hope of ever winning this type of war, it was believed that the threat of massive retaliation provided a powerful deterrent against nuclear attack. In order to make this strategy work, the United States engaged in an "arms race," in which an effort was made to match the number of missiles being stockpiled by the Soviet Union. In the early 1960's, the concept of flexible respo
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Soviet Union, Cold War, Treaty SALT, Reduction Treaty, Henry Kissinger, Eastern Europe, World War, soviet union, Treaty Organization, West Berlin, President Reagan's, cold war, treaty organization, nuclear attack, flexible response, massive retaliation, nuclear attack soviet, containment deterrence, union actively, strategic arms, attack soviet, warsaw treaty organization, attack soviet union, soviet union actively,
Approximate Word count = 1220
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Cold War Tensions
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
