Cold War 'By the Beginning of the Term Paper

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cold war 'By the beginning of the twentieth century, weapons of war were themselves contributing to the outbreak of wars ... It comes as something of a surprise, then, to realize that the most striking innovation in the history of military technology has turned out to be a cause of peace and not war," (Gaddis 85). In fact, the most striking military innovation until that point, the creation of nuclear weapons, did turn out to be a cause of war, albeit the Cold War. In his book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, author John Lewis Gaddis examines the development of nuclear arms, their impact on the Cold War, and the impact of the Cold War on the development of nuclear arms. In fact, early nuclear armament closely mirrored Cold War ideology, especially the way nuclear weapons were used as a sort of political collateral. The Manhattan Project also represented the first time the United States was at the helm of new weapons development. As the author notes, the Manhattan Project was unusual in its being an American-led and British and Canadian-backed military endeavor. In Chapter Four, "Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War," Gaddis describes nuclear weapons as the ironic harbinger of a new type of world peace. The author argues that the most destructive weapons theretofore created were just so frightening as to deter those who had them from ever using them. In Chapter Eight, "Nuclear War and the Escalation of the Cold War," Gaddis takes his argument one step further to suggest that nuclear weapons "had a remarkably theatrical effect upon the course of the high Cold War," (258). The Cold War impacted the proliferation of nuclear arms because the weapons offered the semblance of absolute power and threat, while nuclear arms influenced political conduct during the Cold War with their frightening presence.

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The Cold War initially enabled the United States to secure an "atomic monopoly," (Gaddis 92). The Soviet Union under Stalin would later respond to the American monopoly in turn, with its own aggressive armament policies. During World War Two, the United States had believed Nazi Germany to be the biggest threat in terms of weapons of mass destruction. However, the Nazis never developed nuclear capabilities to the extent the Soviet Union would after the end of World War Two. The beginning of the Cold War and the dropping of the Iron Curtain marked the military, political, and economic stare-down between the U.S. And USSR. The U.S.S.R. based some of their strategic moves on materials acquired in espionage. Such information helped the soviet achieve an early edge and play into the Cold War game strategies. Gaddis states, "The American nuclear arsenal would soon be expanded exponentially; but this happened only after -- and partly because -- the American nuclear monopoly no longer existed," (99). Once the Soviets developed nuclear arms of their own, the world became truly polarized under the rubric of the Cold War and its greatest weapons: nuclear arms. Intriguingly, both the United States and the Soviet Union proudly possessed their weapons as more show pieces than as a genuine desire to use them. The result was a "double paradox: as nuclear weapons become more numerous and more powerful, they also became less usable; but as nuclear weapons became less usable, one needed more of them to deter others," (101). This was the essence of the Cold War ideology that would last for several decades.

The first sign that nuclear weapons were directly influencing the conduct of the Cold War came during the Korean War. The Korean War inadvertently set the stage for the hands-off policies toward nuclear weapons.….....

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