User:That Thing There/Cold War

From Encyclopedia Dramatica

The Cold War was a world-wide post WWII pissing match between USA and The USSR. The main part of the Cold War was when JFK didn't care for how close Communist Cuba was to Florida, and after the USSR began to add nukes to Cuba, JFK decided Russia needed a stern talking to. This was called The Cuban Missle Crisis. After Nixon left and Ronald Reagan came in, the Cold War marched on, reaching it's highest tensions in the mid 1980s. The Cold War officially ended in 1991, when Bush I came to power and focused on something far less important (see also: Distraction), known as Drugs.

The backstory

After the fall of Berlin and WWII, The US Government were still hell-bent on killing communism. Russia didn't care for this and began to stockpile nuclear weapons, threaten smaller nations and allies of the United States with them and race for space. The 1940s-1950s was perhaps the most boring part of the cold war, next to the Regan Administration. Some imporant events to note in that time period:

• Nuclear Warheads fine-tuned
• Ballistic intercontinental missiles developed
• Apollo 1 - First manned US Space mission
• Sputnik - First Russian Satellite

Minutes to midnight

The Doomsday Clock was invented in 1947, due to escalating tension between the United States and Communist Russia, and it reflected how close the world was to nuclear war and total human destruction. The clock was set in 1947 to 11:53pm, 7 minutes to midnight. Throughout the entire cold war the clock was adjusted accordingly, reaching it's peak (11:57pm) in 1984, the height of the Cold War.

Missle Crisis

The Americans feared the Soviet expansion of communism or socialism, but for a Latin American country to ally openly with the USSR was regarded as unacceptable, given the Russo-American enmity since the end of the Second World War in 1945. Such an involvement would also directly defy the Monroe Doctrine which prevented European powers from getting involved in South American matters.

In late 1961, President John F. Kennedy engaged Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations against Castro's government. They were unsuccessful.[2] More overtly, in February 1962, the United States launched an economic embargo against Cuba.[3]

The United States also considered covert action again and had inserted CIA paramilitary officers from their Special Activities Division. [4] Air Force General Curtis LeMay presented to Kennedy a pre-invasion bombing plan in September, while spy flights and minor military harassment from the United States Guantanamo Naval Base were the subject of continual Cuban diplomatic complaints to the U.S. government.

In September 1962, the Cuban government saw significant evidence that the U.S. would invade, including a joint U.S. Congressional resolution authorising the use of military force in Cuba if American interests were threatened,[5] and the announcement of a U.S. military exercise in the Caribbean planned for the following month (Operation Ortsac).

As a consequence, Castro and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to secretly place strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. Like Castro, Khrushchev felt that a U.S. invasion of Cuba was imminent, and that to lose Cuba would do great harm to his prestige worldwide, especially in Latin America. He said that he wanted to confront the Americans "with more than words...the logical answer was missiles."[6]

The tensions were at their height from October 8, 1962. On October 14, United States reconnaissance saw the missile bases being built in Cuba. The crisis ended two weeks later on October 28, 1962, when the President of the United States John F. Kennedy and the United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached an agreement with the Soviets to dismantle the missiles in Cuba in exchange for a no-invasion agreement. Khrushchev requested that the Jupiter and Thor missiles in Turkey be removed, but the United States did not actually remove them, and his request was ignored by the Kennedy administration and not pressed by the Soviet Union.[7]

Talking behind backs

At 1:00 p.m., John A. Scali of ABC News had lunch with Aleksandr Fomin at Fomin's request. Fomin noted that "war seems about to break out" and asked Scali to use his contacts to talk to his "high-level friends" at the State Department to see if the U.S. would be interested in a diplomatic solution. He suggested that the language of the deal would contain an assurance from the Soviet Union to remove the weapons under UN supervision and that Castro would publicly announce that he would not accept such weapons in the future, in exchange for a public statement by the U.S. that it would never invade Cuba. The U.S. responded by asking the Brazilian government to pass a message to Castro that the U.S. would be "unlikely to invade" if the missiles were removed.

At 6:00 p.m. the State Department started receiving a message that appeared to be written personally by Khrushchev. Robert Kennedy described the letter as "very long and emotional." Khrushchev reiterated the basic outline that had been stated to Scali earlier in the day, "I propose: we, for our part, will declare that our ships bound for Cuba are not carrying any armaments. You will declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its troops and will not support any other forces which might intend to invade Cuba. Then the necessity of the presence of our military specialists in Cuba will disappear." At 6:45pm, news of Fomin's offer to Scali was finally heard and was interpreted as a "set up" for the arrival of Khrushchev's letter. The letter was then considered official and accurate, although it was later learned that Fomin was almost certainly operating of his own accord without official backing. Additional study of the letter was ordered and continued into the night. Canada, the NORAD ally of the United States, was not consulted in these negotiations.

The red phone

The "Hot Line", as it would come to be known, was established following an agreement on June 20, 1963 by the signing of the "Memorandum of Understanding Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Line" in Geneva, Switzerland, by spokesmen from both the Soviet Union and the United States, after the events of the Cuban missile crisis made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two nuclear powers was a necessity. During the crisis, it took the U.S. nearly 12 hours to receive and decode Nikita Khruschev's 3,000 word initial settlement message—a dangerously long time in the chronology of nuclear brinkmanship. By the time the U.S. had drafted a reply, a tougher message from Moscow had been received demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey. White House advisors at the time thought that the crisis could have been more quickly resolved and easily averted if communication had been faster. This link was encrypted using the information-theoretically secure one-time pad cryptosystem.[1]

The actor years

Regan was a very strong supporter of JFK's agenda towards Russia, though he ended up just becoming big friends with some fat Russian who happened to be pretty high in government, thus curtailing the Cold War.

The outcome

Some 30 years later, Obama has decided to ease restrictions on travel to Cuba, as well as trade, proving that nobody cares about communism anymore. The Doomsday Clock reflects 1991 as the end of the cold war, going to it's lowest time (11:43pm) in history.