Well hey and welcome back to Heimler’s History. Now we’ve been working our way through Unit 8 of AP World History, and one of the main themes of this unit is the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now I’ve been saying that the Cold War didn’t involve any direct fighting between these two powers, and that’s true, as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole story.
So in this video we’re going to consider the effects of the Cold War and how these two powers actually did fight, but not really, I mean they sort of did… but you know, well, let’s just get to it. So the Cold War did not produce open warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it did produce the following: new military alliances, proxy wars, and the buildup of nuclear weapons. So let’s begin by considering the military alliances formed as a result of the Cold War.
I mentioned in the last video that after World War II the Soviet Union occupied much of Eastern Europe into what’s called the Soviet Bloc, or the communist bloc. In doing this, they installed commuist governments in those countries and made their economies to serve the Soviet Union and not their own populations. Now, because of this, the countries in Western Europe got a little twitchy at the thought of having all those dang communists in their backyards.
So as a result of this, these western nations decided to form a mutual military alliance called North Atlantic Treaty Organization or (NATO) in 1949. And essentially this was an alliance of nations against the Soviets that included the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, Belgium, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, Portugal, Iceland, Italy, and the Netherlands. And not to be outdone, the Soviets formed their own military alliance in 1955 called the Warsaw Pact.
And this alliance included the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Albania, and Bulgaria. Now there were other military alliances formed as a result of the Cold War, but these are the major ones. Okay, so the effect of the Cold War number one: military alliances.
Effect number two: proxy wars. Now because the Cold War was cold, that means by definition there was no direct fighting between the two powers. But there was all sorts of indirect fighting, and the name for that is a proxy war.
Now a proxy, by definition, is just when one thing that stands in for another thing. So these proxy wars were just these small, localized wars in Asia, and Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, but they took on this global significance when the United States and Russia started taking different sides of these little wars. Now, there are lots of these we could possibly consider during this time, but we’re only going to look at three: one in Korea, one in Angola, and one in Nicaragua.
So first, the Korean War. So after World War II ended the Allies divided Korea into North and South Korea. Now the north was occupied by the Soviets and the South was occupied by the U.
S. and its allies. Well in 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea in order to create a single state under its own leadership.
And the United Nations came to the aid of South Korea, and I say the United Nations, but it was mostly the United States. Now the Soviets didn’t apply any troops to the North Koreans in order to help, but they did send tons of guns and boom boom. And in this way, the United States and the Soviet Union fought each other without actually fighting each other.
And so as the war went on, the UN forces pushed the North Koreans all the way up to the Chinese border. Now China saw this and started to fear that the UN forces would then go ahead and invade China, so what they did is they sent troops to aid the North Koreans. And with that fortification, the North Koreans pushed the UN forces all the way back below the 38th parallel.
And by 1953 the conflict ended in a stalemate because everything in the two countries remained largely as they were before the war, except that three million people were dead as a result. Okay now the second proxy war we’re going to consider is the Angolan Civil War which started in 1975. So Angola was a colony of Portugal and as is the custom with imperial powers, they went ahead and drew borders around rival people groups and just threw them together under one government.
Now each of these groups fought against the Portuguese and actually won their independence. But once they were free, the real question became: which one of these rival groups is actually going to have power in a free Angola? Now again, this seems like a nice, tidy little conflict down in Sub-Saharan Africa.
They’ll figure it out for themselves, there’s no need for anybody else to get involved OH HERE COMES THE COLD WAR. And as it goes, the United States backed one of these groups, the Soviet Union backed another, and then South Africa, backed yet another. And thus the Angolan Civil War became another battle ground for the larger conflict of the Cold War.
Okay, now the third proxy war to consider is the Contra War in Nicaragua. In 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front, who were self-proclaimed socialists, seized power in Nicaragua. And at that, the United States was all like, “Ain’t no socialists gonna be on my continent.
” And so, two years later the U. S. backed a group of contras who tried to overthrow the Sandinistas, who in turn had support from the Soviet Union.
In this attempted overthrow the contras committed many human rights violations, and in the end the conflict ended in a cease-fire and the Sandinistas were handily defeated in the next election. Okay, now the third effect of the Cold War that we need to talk about is the proliferation, or the buildup of nuclear weapons. Now I already mentioned the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the last video.
But the crisis moment for this race came in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. So after a failed attempt by the United States to oust communist leader Fidel Castro in Cuba, the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev shipped a whole buttload of nuclear missiles to Cuba. Now I mentioned in the previous video that the Soviets had already developed missiles that were capable of carrying nuclear warheads and could hit targets in the U.
S. And that was fearful enough, but now these missiles were right in our backyard. I mean, look at it.
There’s Cuba. There’s the United States. From here, you could blow all this up.
And so in 1962 U. S. spy planes discovered these missile sites, and understandably the U.
S. was outraged. But back up that outrage train just a little bit.
It’s not as though America’s hands were clean in this respect. They had basically done the same thing by placing nuclear missiles in Turkey which shared a border with the Soviet Union. But anyway, after the discovery of these missiles, U.
S. President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to surround the island of Cuba. Now just to be clear, if you’re Fidel Castro and the U.
S. navy send warships to surround your island, that is not a neutral action. In fact, it is nigh unto a declaration of war.
And so for thirteen intense and anxiety filled days, everybody in America, and around the world was starting to wonder: is this the day I’m going to get blown up? Well, I’m happy to report that they never actually fired those missiles and that everybody eventually backed down. But what this event did was to show the world that the buildup, or proliferation of nuclear weapons was a real problem.
Therefore in 1968 we see the creation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And what it did, among other things, was to call on nuclear powers to prevent non-nuclear nations from developing such disastrous weapons. Alright, that’s what you need to know about Unit 8 Topic 3 of AP World History.
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