8.3 Military Alliances, Nuclear Proliferation, and Proxy Wars of the Cold War

Following World War II, the Soviet Union occupied large portions of Eastern Europe.
This geographic and political area became known as the Soviet block or the Communist Block.
Within these occupied nations, the Soviet Union installed Communist governments.
The economies of these Eastern European countries were restructured to serve the interests of the Soviet Union rather than their own domestic populations.
These developments caused significant apprehension among the nations of Western Europe and the United States, who were concerned about having Communist states in close proximity.

In 1949, Western nations established a mutual defense alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.
The primary purpose of this alliance was to provide a collective defense against the Soviet Union.
The United States served at the helm of this organization.
A core principle of the NATO agreement was that an attack against any single member state constituted an attack on all member states, requiring a collective response from all member nations.

In response to the formation of NATO, the Soviet Union formed its own military alliance in 1955 called the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviet Union served at the helm of the Warsaw Pact, which included various nations under its influence.
Similarly to NATO, the Warsaw Pact was a mutual defense agreement where an attack on one member state was considered an attack on all members, necessitating a unified military response.
The existence of these two massive, opposing military alliances significantly increased Cold War tensions.

The Cold War was characterized by the proliferation, or buildup, of nuclear weapons.
The United States pioneered the use of atomic bombs during World War II.
In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully developed its own atomic bombs, ending the American nuclear monopoly.
The United States responded to the Soviet development by creating the hydrogen bomb, a weapon significantly more powerful than the original atomic bomb.
The Soviet Union subsequently developed its own hydrogen bomb.
Over several decades of one-upmanship, both superpowers accumulated enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the world a thousand times over.

The buildup of nuclear weapons reached a crisis point in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This crisis followed a failed attempt by the United States to oust the Communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shipped a massive quantity of nuclear missiles to Cuba.
Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States meant that these missiles could potentially destroy large portions of the country.
In 1962, United States spy planes discovered the missile sites in Cuba.
This discovery caused outrage in the United States, although the U.S. had previously placed nuclear missiles in Turkey, which shared a border with the Soviet Union.
President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent further weapons from arriving.
A naval blockade of an island nation was considered a declaration of war.
For 13 intense days, there was global anxiety regarding the possibility of nuclear conflict.
Ultimately, the missiles were never fired and all involved parties backed down.

The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated to the world that the continued buildup of nuclear weapons was a significant global problem.
In 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was created.
This treaty called on existing nuclear powers to prevent non-nuclear countries from developing nuclear weapons.

Because the Cold War remained "cold," there was no direct military conflict between the two primary superpowers.
Instead, the conflict was characterized by proxy wars—small, local conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that took on global significance as the United States and the Soviet Union supported opposing sides.

Following World War II, the Allies divided Korea into North Korea and South Korea.
North Korea was occupied by the Soviet Union, while South Korea was occupied by the United States and its allies.
After occupying forces withdrew, Communist North Korea invaded anti-communist South Korea in 1950 with the goal of unifying the peninsula under one leadership.
This struggle between communism and anti-communism quickly drew in the superpowers.
The United Nations, led primarily by the United States, intervened to aid South Korea.
The Soviet Union did not send troops to aid North Korea but provided a massive amount of firearms and explosives.
By 1953, the conflict ended in a stalemate.
The borders of the two countries remained largely as they were prior to the war, but the conflict resulted in approximately 3 million deaths.

Angola was a colony of Portugal until 1975.
When colonial borders were drawn, they often enclosed rival ethnic groups within the same government.
While these groups united to fight against Portuguese rule and win independence, conflict arose over which group would hold power in the newly independent nation.
The Soviet Union backed one ethnic group, the United States backed another, and South Africa backed a third group.
The civil war became a platform for the larger superpowers to conduct the Cold War in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a self-proclaimed socialist group, seized power in Nicaragua.
The United States opposed the presence of a socialist government in the Western Hemisphere.
Two years later, the United States backed a group known as the Contras in an attempt to overthrow the Sandinistas.
The Sandinistas received support from the Soviet Union.
During the attempt to overthrow the government, the Contras committed numerous human rights violations.
The conflict eventually ended in a ceasefire, and the Sandinistas were defeated in the following election.