V o L u m e I : a d

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Although the Cold War began earlier and certainly was under way with the

Soviet Union’s decision to institute a blockade of the Western zones of

Berlin in June 1948, the struggle between East and West took a decisive turn

in June 1950 with the beginning of the Korean War (1950–1953), the first real

shooting war of the Cold War.

There is little doubt that Soviet leader Josef Stalin was heavily involved

in authorizing the invasion of the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) by

forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea).

North Korean leader Kim Il Sung met twice with the Soviet leader and

secured his approval for the invasion, but Stalin insisted that Kim also secure

the blessing of People’s Republic of China (PRC) leader Mao Zedong. Stalin

promised to support the invasion and supplied substantial material and mil-

itary assistance, including Soviet aircraft and pilots who actively flew against

United Nations Command (UNC) bombers and fighters in far North Korea.

Although Soviet aviators trained Chinese pilots and then turned over their

aircraft to them, Stalin never would allow the Soviet Air Force to carry out

ground support missions or protect Chinese communist forces on the ground.

Mao Zedong was bitter over this, claiming that Stalin had extended that

pledge before China’s entry into the war in October 1950.

South Korea appeared quite vulnerable in June 1950. With the Japanese

surrender, the Soviets had occupied northern Korea above the 38th Parallel,

while U.S. forces had occupied the southern half of the country. Efforts to

reunify the two halves of Korea foundered on the rocks of the Cold War, with

the Soviets refusing to allow elections sponsored by the United Nations

(UN) in their zone. Stalin and Mao undoubtedly believed Kim’s assessment

that the United States would not fight for Korea (U.S. leaders, including Far

East commander General Douglas MacArthur and Secretary of State Dean

Acheson, excluded South Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter in public

pronouncements) or that even if it did fight, the war would be over before

the United States could intervene in force. Fearful that South Korean leader

Syngman Rhee might unleash hostilities in an attempt to reunify Korea, the

United States had provided only defensive weapons to South Korea, and very

Course of the Cold War (1950–1991)

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Course of the Cold War

(1950–1991)

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few at that. The North had fighter and bomber aircraft, tanks, and heavy

artillery. The South had none of these.

U.S. military intelligence failed to give sufficient weight to the massive

North Korean military buildup. Analysts assumed that because the United

States possessed the atomic bomb, North Korea would never invade the

South. Kim almost succeeded. In what Harry S. Truman said was the most

difficult decision of his presidency, he decided to fight for Korea. American

forces arrived from Japan just in time and in sufficient numbers to stave off

defeat. The UN also intervened, thanks to the poorly timed Soviet boycott

of the Security Council demanding that the PRC receive the seat held by the

Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan). The Inchon invasion of September 1950

and concurrent UNC breakout from the Pusan Perimeter led to a UNC inva-

sion of North Korea in an effort to reunify the nation. The Truman adminis-

tration ignored Chinese warnings of possible intervention. As UNC forces

drove to the Yalu River, the Chinese entered the war, and in November they

smashed a UNC offensive and pushed south of the 38th Parallel. Gradually

UNC lines stabilized, and the Chinese were driven north again.

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Course of the Cold War (1950–1991)

Withdrawing United Nations (UN) forces cross the 38th Parallel from the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK, North

Korea) into the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) at the end of 1950 during the Korean War. (National Archives and

Records Administration)

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The war then changed from a contest of movement to one of position.

The Western powers, and especially the United States, concluded that restora-

tion of the prewar status quo would be sufficient and that reuniting Korea

was not worth the cost or risk of wider conflict. In Washington’s view, it was

the “wrong war, in the wrong place, with the wrong enemy.” Peace talks

dragged on, hampered by the issue of prisoner exchanges; the fighting finally

ended with the signing of an armistice in July 1953. Throughout the rest of

the Cold War and beyond, Korea remained one of the world’s flashpoints.

The Korean War affected the Cold War in a number of other places. It

led to the institutionalization of the military-industrial complex in the United

States and raised fears that the nation was morphing into a garrison state.

After all its previous wars, the United States had disarmed. The U.S. military

underwent a massive expansion during the Korean War, however, and re-

mained strong thereafter.

The Korean War brought the Cold War to Asia, turning the region into

one of the main battlefields of Cold War rivalry. It also led the Truman admin-

istration to extend direct military assistance to the French in Indochina,

where they had been fighting the communist-led Viet Minh since 1946. The

French claimed that their war pitted democracy against communism and

that Indochina and Korea were in this sense related. Policymakers in Wash-

ington professed to believe the French argument that they had indeed granted

independence to the state of Vietnam and that their struggle was about anti-

communism rather than recognizing the true anticolonial motivation of the

war there.

The Korean War also fed anticommunist paranoia in the United States

that found expression in McCarthyism. And it had a pronounced impact on

developments in Europe, especially the rearmament of the Federal Repub-

lic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). Many leaders saw direct parallels

between the divided Korea and a divided Germany. In this way, as in many

others, the end of the Korean War in 1953 marked a turning point in the

nature of the Cold War.

Both the Soviet Union and the United States had new leadership in 1953.

Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in January as president of the United

States, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state. Stalin died in March

and was followed by a collective leadership that ultimately gave way to rule

by Nikita Khrushchev.

Fear of thermonuclear war dominated the 1950s. The Soviet Union

exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, and Americans worried that the

Soviets might strike the American heartland with long-range bombers. Rev-

elations of Soviet spies in the U.S. nuclear program led to witch-hunts and

the belief that communist spies were everywhere. On the Soviet side, leaders

were deeply concerned about the proven strategic bombing capability of the

United States and the ring of U.S. overseas bases that surrounded the Soviet

Union. A diplomacy of stalemate, based on mutual fear of destruction through

nuclear weapons, held sway.

In January 1954 Dulles announced the Eisenhower administration’s pol-

icy of “massive retaliation” with heavy reliance on nuclear weapons in the

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