PROTECTING AMERICA:

COLD WAR DEFENSIVE SITES

A NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK THEME STUDY

Prepared by:

John S. Salmon, Historical Consultant

Produced by:

The National Historic Landmarks Program

Cultural Resources

National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior

Washington, D.C.

October 201

Contents

Historic Contexts

Foreword

Introduction

Part One: The Cold War to the Death of StaHn

Part Two: From Deep Freeze to Detente

Part Three: The End of the Wall

Time Line: The Cold War

Associated Property Types

Types of Properties Associated with the Cold War

Registration Requirements for National Historic Landmark Designation

Methodology

Study Results

National Historic Landmarks

National Historic Landmarks Study List

Bibliography

Appendices

A. Registration Requirements for Listing in the National Register of Historic Places

B. National Register Properties and Study List

C. Cold War-Related National Park Service Units

D. Preliminary National Inventory of Cold War-Related Sites and Resources

Historic Contexts

Foreword

On January 6, 2009, Congressman Rush Holt introduced H.R. 146, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, in the House of Representatives. The bill was entitled "An act to designate certain land as components of the National Wilderness Preservation System, to authorize certain programs and activities in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and for other purposes." Cosponsors included Congressmen Earl Blumenauer, John Dingell, Eni Faleomavaega, Maurice Hinchey, James Langevin, James McGovem, Gary Miller, Patrick Murphy, Steven Rothman, and Peter Welch. The bill was referred to the House Natural Resources Committee, which reported it favorably to the House of Representatives on March 5. The House already had approved the bill on March 3, and the Senate approved it with changes on March 19. The House voted to approve the amended bill on March 25. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law (P.L. 1 1 1-11) on March 30, 2009.

Section 72 1 0 of the Act authorized a Cold War Sites Theme Study. The study was first proposed by Representative Joel Hefley (H.R. 107) and Senator Harry Reid (S. 1257) in 2001, but the legislation had not passed then. Section 7210 contained the same language as the 2001 bills: "The Secretary [of the Interior] shall conduct a national historic landmark theme study to identify sites and resources in the United States that are significant to the Cold War." The Act directed the Secretary to consult with federal and state historic preservation officers, among others, and to consider the following resources while gathering information and conducting the study:

(A) The inventory of sites and resources associated with the Cold War compiled by the Secretary of Defense under section 8120(b)(9) of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 1991 (Public Law 101-511; 104 Stat. 1906; and

(B) Historical studies and research of Cold War sites and resources, including —

(i) Intercontinental ballistic missiles;

(ii) Flight training centers;

(iii) Manufacturing facilities;

(iv) Communications and command centers (such as

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado); (v) Defensive radar networks (such as the Distant

Early Warning Line); (vi) Nuclear weapons test sites (such as the Nevada

test site); and (vii) Strategic and tactical aircraft

During the course of the study, tribal historic preservation officers were contacted, as well as federal and state historic preservation officers. Communications with the

Department of Defense revealed that no single inventory of Cold War sites had been compiled; rather, since 1991 several topical surveys and inventories have been conducted and prepared. Several of them, including historic contexts, are available on Web sites and are listed in the Bibliography in this theme study.

Because the Cold War era (1945-1991) is so recent, and the universe of potentially related properties is so vast, relatively few such properties have been identified, designated as National Historic Landmarks, or listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The majority of properties are fewer than fifty years old, and many have been demolished as sites have been deactivated or have been so altered as to be lacking in sufficient integrity for designation or listing. Although a few surveys have been made and several historic contexts have been written, there is an urgent need for more because the resources are disappearing.

The historic contexts section of this study is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the origins and evolution of the Cold War from World War II until the death of Josef Stalin in 1953. This section discusses the ideological differences between the two principal adversaries, the dawn of the atomic age, and the weapons systems that each side developed. The second part concentrates on the Cold War at its coldest, as the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to settle into a period of endless provocations and proxy wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation often seemed likely to become a reality. By the end of this period, both sides had come to accept that matters could not be allowed to continue in these patterns, that a new way of dealing with each other had to be found. Detente was the first step. The third part brings the history of the Cold War to its conclusion, from the end of the Vietnam War and the beginnings of a thaw in relations because of presidential diplomacy, the rise of dissent in the Soviet Union (especially in Eastern Europe), and the fmal collapse of the Soviet economic and political structure.

This historic context should enable the researcher to understand the basic developments and the ways in which the weapons systems and defense programs of the United States were affected by international affairs and the political and military challenges of the Cold War era.

Although the Cold War touched virtually every aspect of life in the United States and abroad, the principal focus of this theme study is on the types of sites and resources described in Section 7210 of H.R. 146. Other important themes outside the scope of this study could be mentioned only briefly here — the home front, the influence of consumerism, the nuclear weapons complex, the civil defense system, the antiwar movement, and the movements for civil rights and other forms of social change, to name but a few. It is suggested that they be considered for future studies related to the Cold War.

Introduction

As World War II ended, the world entered what has become known as the Cold War — a term that financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch first used in a speech on April 16, 1947, to describe the increasingly chilly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In fact, although the two great powers were allied against Germany during World War II, relations between them had never been warm. The Soviets continued to resent the fact that America supported the Whites over the Reds during the Russian Revolution, when the United States invaded Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok in 1918, engaged Soviet forces in combat, and remained on Russian soil until 1920. In America, Soviet communism was immediately seen as a threat to capitalism (the "Red Menace") and sparked the infamous Palmer Raids against suspected revolutionaries in 1920. The raids were just the first of several attempts by ambitious American politicians to whip up anticommunist hysteria during the twentieth century. Mutual suspicion and ideological opposition, then, typified the relations between the Americans and the Soviets from the beginning. The alliance of World War II was largely a marriage of convenience to oppose Hitler's fascism, which both sides agreed was the larger threat at the moment. Once the hot war ended, the United States and the Soviet Union resumed their previously distant relationship, but with new and dangerous elements to consider.

Two facts dominated the Cold War Era, which is defined for the purposes of this theme study as the period between 1 945 and 1 99 1 : the United States and the West vied against the Soviet Union and its satellites in a global political and military struggle for supremacy, and the threat — sometimes seemingly the promise — of nuclear obliteration hung over all the Earth like the Sword of Damocles. Day in and day out for four and a half decades, the two sides maneuvered. Puppet states, proxy wars, espionage and counterespionage, overt and covert operations, subtle intimidation and raw violence, threats and bluster, public pronouncements and secret treaties, alliances and betrayals, paranoia and credulity, lies mixed with truth, smoke and mirrors — each side toyed with reality and illusion to gain advantage. To many people, the greatest delusion of all was the belief that mere mortals could somehow control the means of annihilation and keep the finger hovering over the button from ever pushing it. The world watched with white knuckles as time after time, each side slipped and slid closer to the fatal moment in a clumsy danse macabre. Would this be the day that one or both made a final miscalculation? In America, children gasped whenever television screens went black in the middle of an evening sitcom, the word BULLETIN dropped into view, and a grim voice intoned, "We interrupt this program for a special announcement." Were the missiles on their way? To most Americans, the Cold War was an era of constant low-grade fear and worry punctuated by unforgettable moments of sheer terror.

Outside the relatively safe haven of the United States, with its protective shield of missiles and long-range bombers and Distant Early Warning stations, however, much of the world's population experienced numbing fear every day. The grinding oppression of Soviet life, the secret police, the disappearances, the Gulag, the wars of "revolution" and "liberation," the episodes of wholesale slaughter, the trading of one despot for another.

crushed the spirits or took the lives of millions. For most of the Cold War, it appeared to Americans that the advantage lay with the Soviets, whose leaders plotted and schemed behind the Iron Curtain, safe from observation, and who supposedly orchestrated the International Communist Conspiracy, directed events at the minutest level, and always seemed a step ahead of the West. To them most Americans ascribed almost supernatural strength and confidence, the result of their steadfast faith in the unifying theory of communism and their unshakable conviction that history was on their side. The West, in contrast, seemed a mishmash of conflicting interpretations of "democracy," governments that operated in a chaotic spectrum ranging from constitutional monarchies to socialist states, and national leaders who squabbled openly with their peers as often as they cooperated with each other. The West, with its vaunted concern for the individual, its openness, and its reluctance to resort to violence, often appeared weak in contrast to the Soviets, with their alleged esteem of the group, their blatant lies and bluster, and their casual brutality. When Nikita Khrushchev appeared to brag, "We will bury you," behind the eruption of Western outrage lay the secret fear that he might be right.

And yet, as we know now, so much of what appeared as Soviet strength was a sham — a flimsy facade rotting from the inside out. With the perspective of hindsight and the revelations offered by declassified Soviet and Western archives, it is the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union that seems almost preordained, not the end of the West. The apparent strengths of the Soviet system — centralized control and a unified political and economic philosophy — were in fact its weaknesses. The end of the Cold War came swiftly in a cascade of unforgettable images as the Soviet edifice toppled. Television viewers around the world watched cheering East Berliners attack the despised Wall with sledgehammers and bare hands, while East German guards merely looked on instead of machine-gunning them to death. Russian president Boris Yeltsin stood atop a tank denouncing a coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and when the plotters, half drunk, held a press conference to announce that they had taken over because Gorbachev was "indisposed," the crowd laughed and the plotters' imminent failure was obvious in their stunned expressions. Another shocking image: Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was booed and hissed off the podium by a throng of supposed supporters, his eyes wide in disbelief before the state-run television suddenly stopped transmitting. And in Wenceslas Square in Prague, a televised image quite the opposite: Alexander Dubcek walked onto a balcony to thunderous cheers, the personification of the triumph of hope over despair, back from the dead after Soviet tanks ground his Prague Spring into the dirt so many years earlier. The prelude to these scenes occurred, perhaps, in June 1 979, when Pope John Paul II made his first visit home to Poland after his election and told the millions who flocked to see him despite Soviet disapproval: "Be not afraid." When the people ceased being afraid, the end came quickly.

Such scenes were unimaginable in 1945, of course, as World War II ground to an end and the Cold War began. Of the three great Allied commanders, only one — Soviet leader Josef Stalin — remained alive or in office when the Potsdam Conference began in July 1945. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died in April, and his successor, Harry S Truman, probably knew less about America's atomic bomb than Stalin did. Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill was voted out of office in the midst of the conference,

replaced by Clement Atlee. It was Stalin who was best prepared of the three by experience and cunning to influence the postwar world. Because he considered the expansion of that influence as essential to the survival of the Soviet Union and the communist system in the face of perceived Western hostility, he was prepared to act. Atlee and Truman, however, were primarily concerned with rebuilding Europe and avoiding massive unemployment as their armies demobilized. Stalin had the initiative.

The United States, however, had "The Bomb," and that fact dominated everything else. Diplomatic pushing and shoving is common among the victors after a war as they seek to satisfy their constituencies' desire for revenge, reconstruction, and fiiture security. The jousting is carried on with some recognition of semi-equality: all have suffered from the effects of war, all have challenges facing them on the home front, and all want to attain some semblance of peace and normality. The atomic bomb, however, made the United States "more equal" than the others, a fact that Stalin could not abide. First he had to get the bomb for the Soviet Union, and then he had to ensure that it was at least as threatening to America as its bomb was to his country, to restore the balance that the bomb had upset. Thus, as World War II ended, the Cold War era began.

The next four and a half decades comprised a period during which each side suspected that the other was preparing for preemptive nuclear attack, or at least was considering the possibility. Each new weapon and delivery system, each new defensive radar network, and every advance in technology was developed in reaction to or in anticipation of a similar program on the other side. Uncertainty bred fear and paranoia among leaders as well as among ordinary people. Each side assumed that ulterior motives were behind any action by the other side, and that nothing was as straightforward as it appeared. Propaganda and slogans frequently took the place of meaningfiil dialogue. To the United States, the Soviets appeared philosophically unified and willing and able to crush even the slightest dissent with sledgehammer brutality. Surely such a system had as its ultimate aim world domination and our imminent destruction? And even more fearsome than the outside threat was the enemy within: spies, real and imagined, who fed the anticommunist hysteria and witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC).

On their side, the Soviets feared that America and its allies, while eschewing overt violence, intended to surround, "contain," and finally smother them under the guise of "spreading democracy" around the globe. Stalin, then, when accused of seeking world domination, could suggest with some justification that the Americans sought the same goal for themselves. Stalin had a counterstrategy: dominate as much of Europe as possible, wait for the inevitable war to erupt among the capitalist nations (as communist theory predicted), watch as one European country after another adopted the communist ideology, and then pick up the pieces. The story of the Cold War from the Soviet side is about the slow failure of this strategy, which the Soviet leaders clung to for far too long in the face of reality. The war among the capitalists never happened; given the choice, one European nation after another chose capitalism (in some form) over communism; and as the decades rolled by, citizens of communist countries made the same choice, leaving

Soviet authorities with nothing but tanks and bullets to enforce their will, even among their satellites. In the end, the West clearly had won the war of ideas.

The West also won the military side of the Cold War — the arms race — even though the Soviet Union eventually reached parity in numbers of missiles. Despite early American fears of missile and bomber "gaps" (more imagined than real), and the shocking Soviet launches of the first satellite and the first human into orbit, the vibrant American economy could support weapons and missile development as well as produce an abundance of consumer goods. The centrally controlled Soviet economy could not do both, much to the chagrin of its leaders as its shortcomings became obvious to Soviet consumers. The Soviet leaders abandoned the "space race" early, and American innovations in technology as well as in weapons and rocketry eventually gave the United States such a lead in the arms race that although the Soviets reached missile parity, they could not catch up on technological matters. President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, the "Star Wars" defense system, derided by many in America as unrealistic, was realistic enough to panic the Soviet leadership. Reagan insisted that SDI would make nuclear weapons obsolete, and if they were obsolete, then why not destroy them all? Shortly thereafter, Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader who also favored a world free of nuclear weapons, took Reagan at his word and the two men ended the arms race essentially on American terms.

The final act of the Cold War came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as one satellite state after another declared its independence and replaced or reformed its government. Most of these changes took place without bloodshed — Romania being an exception — and the Soviet leadership accepted the inevitable. There was no repeat of the bloody crushing of the Hungarian rebellion of 1956, or the suffocation of the Prague Spring of 1968. Gorbachev did not have the stomach for raw force. Finally, on Christmas Day 1991, acknowledging reality, Gorbachev signed a decree officially dissolving the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over.

The United States as well as the Soviet Union created a vast infrastructure to support a complex of offensive and defensive weapons systems during the Cold War. This infrastructure included facilities and sites for developing, testing, manufacturing, and storing the weapons; expanded military installations for use as staging and training centers; a network of defensive radar and communications stations; and a host of command and control centers. Not all of these sites survived the Cold War, being scrapped or greatly altered as strategies and weapons systems changed. Those that did survive are now mostly obsolete, although some have been modified for other uses. This theme study is intended to help with the identification and evaluation of Cold War resources.

Part One: The Cold War to the Death of Stalin

In May 1945, the European phase of World War II came to an end. On May 7, German military leaders surrendered unconditionally to the Allies at Rheims, France. Because the Western nations were, in the opinion of the Soviets, overrepresented at this first surrender ceremony, a second one was held in Berlin, Germany, the next day. With the Soviets more or less satisfied, the attention of the Allies turned to the Pacific, where training was underway for the invasion of Japan. The cost of that invasion in terms of Japanese and Allied lives was estimated in the millions. Based on the Americans' experience during more than three years of war in the Pacific, as well as on Japanese propaganda and exhortations, there was no reason to believe that Japanese soldiers and civilians would defend their home islands with any less zeal than the troops who died almost to a man on Iwo Jima and elsewhere. A vast slaughter seemed imminent.'

The Americans, however, had a supposedly secret weapon, the atomic bomb. Working in collaboration with the British and benefitting from scientists who had fled anti-Semitism in Europe, they had succeeded where the Germans had failed. The Soviets, engaged in a fight to the death with the Nazis in the heart of Russia, had not had the wherewithal to make a serious effort to build their own bomb. On July 16, one day before the opening of the Potsdam Conference, the United States successfiilly exploded an atomic bomb in a test code-named Trinity, at the White Sands Proving Ground near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Josef Stalin, who had a nest of spies embedded in the principal research and development site at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was less than surprised when President Harry S Truman informed him of the test, since he had learned of the Manhattan Project long before Truman did. Stalin did profess to be surprised and appalled a short time later, however, when he learned that the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6. A second bomb followed on August 9, at Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrendered on August 14, ending World War II.

The end of the war left many nations in a shambles, with economies demolished, infrastructures destroyed, industries ruined, cities and towns in rubble, political systems in chaos, and populations on the verge of starvation. Although America emerged relatively unscathed by comparison, and as the strongest country on the planet, Truman was not alone in his uncertainty about the nation's future. Would the economic recovery — the end of the Great Depression — secured by massive wartime spending continue? Would unemployment rise as the armed forces demobilized? Would the United States be able to maintain its dominance over an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union, which soon made clear its interest in controlling much of Europe and the Far East? Everywhere Truman looked, he encountered unanswerable questions. At a time when America might have exuded confidence about the fiiture, instead it felt insecure. To safeguard the country's future, Truman believed that he could not allow any

' John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, NY: The Penguin Press, 2005), 5-8. ^ Charles R. Loeber, Building the Bombs: A History of the Nuclear Weapons Complex, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque, NM: Sandia National Laboratories, 2005), 63-76. For a selected inventoi^ of research and development sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00. For a selected inventory of test sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00.

potentially hostile power to gain control of the resources of other nations through military, economic, or political means. Likewise, to avert future conflicts, all nations needed to be able to acquire what they needed on open markets. It would fall to America to guarantee that access while also looking out for its own interests, Truman realized. At least, he could reflect, it had the atomic bomb to aid in that undertaking.

Stalin, on the other hand, feared that the United States would employ nuclear blackmail against the Soviet Union, probably because he would have used the same strategy had the Soviets developed the bomb first. Although Truman hoped that America's possession of the bomb would pressure Stalin, the Soviet dictator instead initiated a policy of "tenacity and steadfastness" to avoid appearing weak. And he redoubled his efforts to acquire his own bombs. Soviet scientists, assisted by spies in America and urged on by Stalin, worked frantically to catch up. On August 29, 1949, the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in a desert in Kazakhstan. Stalin made no official announcement, but the United States discovered evidence of the event on September 3. Now, Stalin believed, the balance of power had been restored. The Americans did not see it that way.

To the United States and its allies, the communist world appeared unified, militant, and determined to expand its sphere of influence. In contrast, to the diverse Western nations, preoccupied with recovering from the war and expanding their consumer-driven economies, America's sole possession of the bomb seemed largely a security blanket rather than an overt threat against the powerful Soviet Union and its ambitions. To them, the bomb in Stalin's hands upset the balance and required a response. The arms race began in earnest.

In reality, of course, the Soviet Union and international communism were not nearly as monolithic as the Americans feared. In Yugoslavia, Josef Tito ran the country as a Soviet ally, not as a puppet. In China, Mao Zedong cooperated with Moscow but agreed to focus on Asia while the Soviets concentrated their influence on Europe. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung cultivated a cult of personality that rivaled Stalin's and Mao's. In North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh launched his long war against the French with Soviet support but with his own objectives, which included little subservience. These nuances were mostly lost on Americans, especially when spies were discovered giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets and anticommunist hysteria reached a fever pitch early in the 1950s.^

Although the Soviet and Western "spheres of influence" had existed before World War II, the boundaries were redrawn at the end of the conflict. In Europe, Stalin secured a foothold that he had lacked before. Germany was divided, while Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were Soviet satellites, and communist parties thrived in several Western European countries. In Asia, mainland China became communist as Chiang

^ Melvyn P. Leffler, "The emergence of an American grand strategy, 1945-1952," in Melvyn P. Leffler and

Odd Ame Westad, eds., TIk Cambridge Histoiy of the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 2010), 1:67-68, 74-75.

^ David Holloway, "Nuclear weapons and the escalation of the Cold War, 1945-1962," in ibid., 379-380;

Gaddis, Cold War, 34-36.

^ Gaddis, Cold War, 7-8.

^ Gaddis, Cold War, 33-37, 39^0, 43^4.

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Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan. The United States occupied Korea south of the 38th parallel and the Soviets supported the north. In addition to the new lines mandated at the end of the war, or the alignments created by occupation or revolution, some nations chose to align themselves either with the United States or with the Soviet Union. Most of Western Europe sided with America while Egypt and India, for example, took the path of "non-alignment."^

In 1946 and 1947, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman gave important speeches that delineated the lines. Stalin, in Moscow on February 9, 1946, reiterated communist ideology: that capitalism distributed wealth unevenly; that the capitalist countries were destined to fight a war among themselves; and that world peace would come with the triumph of communism. Churchill gave his speech the same year in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, and famously declared that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent" and that the Western democracies must stand united against Soviet expansion. A year later, on March 12, 1947, Truman asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey to help those nations combat the spread of communism, thereby creating the Truman Doctrine of opposing Soviet expansion.^

Truman earlier had offered the Soviets carrots as well as sticks. On June 14, 1946, the United States had proposed to the United Nations the creation of an International Atomic Energy Authority (the Baruch Plan) to control the bomb and other nuclear activities potentially lethal to human survival. Stalin vetoed the idea. And then, in June 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) for the reconstruction of the continent. Eastern Europe was invited to participate, but Stalin closed that door emphatically when the Czechs expressed interest. Stalin likewise had earlier refused to join the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which were created to strengthen capitalism. He had accepted membership in the United Nations primarily because the Soviet Union would have a veto in the Security Council, which he employed against the Baruch Plan.^

The United States and Western Europe implemented the Marshall Plan and linked it to the democratization of West Germany in the hope of eliminating any possibility of a return to dictatorship there. Likewise, America imposed its will on Japan, creating a democracy there under the terms of the occupation and the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur. In both cases, the United States gave the defeated countries massive aid in reconstruction to ensure economic growth, employment, and future prosperity, as well as to preclude the possibility that communism could take root. The Soviets challenged the West with the blockade of West Berlin beginning on April 1, 1948, but did not impede airlifts to the city; the blockade ended the next year, on May 12. Residents of East Germany left for the West by the thousands, an exodus that continued and increased throughout the next dozen years. '°

' Gaddis, Cold War, 20-22, 37, 124-128.

' Gaddis, Cold War, 94-95.

' Gaddis, Cold War, 30-32, 54-56; Loeber, Building the Bombs, 81; Holloway, "Nuclear weapons," in

Leffler and Westad, Cambridge Histoty, 1:378.

'° Gaddis, Cold War, 33-34, 101-102,1 13.

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During the years following the end of World War II, Truman and his advisors groped their way toward a policy regarding the Soviet Union. It became known as "containment," a term that diplomat George Kennan first expressed in his famous "long telegram" from the United States embassy in Moscow in February 1946. In its simplest form, containment meant confining Soviet expansion to Eastern Europe and encouraging other nations to support the strategy. By the time Truman left office in 1953, however, he had moved beyond mere containment to a policy of actively defeating Soviet expansion, using diplomacy, military and economic assistance, and the threat of the bomb to reach that objective. In his farewell address, Truman said, "I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the 'cold war' began to overshadow our lives. . . . But ... it will also say that in those 8 years we have set the course that we can win it.""

The Cold War did indeed cast a shadow over the lives of Americans and manifested its influence in several ways. The rise of virulent anticommunism, the occasional capture of real communist spies such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the fear that communists would infiltrate government and the media culminated in the witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and United States Senator Joseph McCarthy. "McCarthyism," however, became institutionalized to some extent, beyond the antics of McCarthy himself, for example in the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was obsessed with ferreting out communists both real and imagined. The hunt for Soviet agents became a theme in popular entertainment, as did the effects — also real as well as imagined — of exposure to atomic radiation, which generated motion pictures about giant irradiated monsters rampaging about the planet. Fear of the bomb, as with fear of communist spies, was part of the background noise of life in the Cold War for most Americans, however. Few families constructed private bomb shelters, for example, and aside from occasional "duck and cover" drills, the threat of atomic war only came into focus periodically when crises erupted.

With regard to nuclear weapons, both Truman and his successor. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, confirmed the policy of presidential control. Truman, having used the bomb twice to end the war in the Pacific and to intimidate the Soviets, refused to define the conditions under which it might be used again, frustrating his policy-makers. Eisenhower at first encouraged the development of tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons but then slowly backed away, adopting the view that once employed, such weapons would inevitably lead to escalation and worldwide devastation. Tactical nuclear weapons, such as nuclear artillery shells, were nonetheless deployed in Europe beginning in 1953.'^

The fear of the consequences of using nuclear weapons (a fear that Stalin shared but kept to himself) of course did not impede the race on both sides to develop and improve not only more powerful atomic bombs but also better defense and delivery systems, including

" Leffler, "American grand strategy," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 1:76-89. '-Ibid., 1:420-441.

Gaddis, Cold War, 54-56, 66-68; Loeber, Building the Bombs, 90-92; Holloway, "Nuclear weapons," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 1 :376.

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aircraft and missiles. The production of nuclear and nonnuclear bomb components was spread over more than a dozen facilities in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Sandia, Hanford, Rocky Flats, and several others.'"

Research on more-powerfiil bombs continued, especially on the so-called hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Little Boy, was a relatively simple enriched-uranium bomb. The Nagasaki bomb. Fat Man, was a very complicated plutonium weapon. Both bombs were exploded through a fission chain reaction. The potentially far more powerful hydrogen bomb depended on fusion, which is the joining of two light nuclei to form a single, heavier nucleus — a process that thereby releases an enormous amount of energy in its explosion. On May 9, 1 95 1 , the United States tested the world's first thermonuclear bomb in the Marshall Islands. A second thermonuclear bomb was tested there on October 31, 1952. Because of the logistical complexity of conducting tests in the Pacific, however, most nuclear weapons were tested at the Nevada Test Site; the first such test occurred there on January 27, 1951 . Also, because of the potential risks to civilians and cities should an aircraft with fially assembled bombs crash in the United States, top-secret teams of "weaponeers" were trained at Sandia Base (Kirtland Air Force Base), outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, to fly with the bombs and complete their assembly en route to the target.'^

At the end of World War II, both the West and the Soviets depended on aircraft for accurate bombing, because rocket development was in its infancy. America's B-29 bomber was the most advanced long-range model of the time. The Soviets manufactured a near-replica, the Tu-4. As with the bombs themselves, research and development continued on the construction and testing of ever-more powerful, longer-range bombers. More important, the research and development of long-range, accurate missiles began, under the leadership of both American scientists and engineers and former German adversaries such as Werner von Braun. In anticipation of the threat from Soviet long- range bombers, American scientists also began to develop advanced radar technologies to produce an early warning system. Significantly, the United States looked for ways to use nuclear technology in ways other than for weapons; on June 14, 1952, Truman laid the keel of USS Nautilus, the first atomic-powered submarine.'^

In the immediate postwar years, the United States reorganized its armed services and the command structure to coordinate the national defense and the control and deployment of the new weapons system. On March 21, 1946, the Strategic Air Command, the Tactical Air Command, and the Air Defense Command were created within the Army Air Forces.

Loeber, Building the Bombs, 81-89, 98-101 . For a selected inventory of manufacturing facilities, see Appendix D, pages 00-00.

Loeber, Building the Bombs, 1 13-1 16; personal communications, Toni S. Turner to author concerning "weaponeers" program, in e-mails (Aug. 10, 22, 23, 24, Nov. 1 1, 2010, and Jan. 24, 201 1) and telephone conversation between author and the late Marion R. Turner, Jr., Lt. Col. USAF (Ret.), on the same subject, Aug. 23,2010.

'* BDM Corporation, History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, 1945-1972, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2005), 1 :9-10; Loeber, Building the Bombs, 106-109. For a selected inventory of strategic and tactical aircraft sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00.

13

The Atomic Energy Act, which Truman signed on August 1 , 1 946, created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and transferred the responsibility for nuclear weapons design and development from military to civilian control. On July 26, 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act, which created the Department of Defense and the new and separate departments of the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force, as well as the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Numerous reorganizations followed over the next dozen years as interservice rivalries erupted in competition for the advance weapons systems.

On June 25, 1950, America's new military organization received its first shooting-war test when Kim Il-sung's North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel in a surprise invasion of South Korea. The anticommunist Republic of South Korea had been founded on August 15, 1948, and the Soviets created the Korean People's Democratic Republic in North Korea a few weeks later, on September 9. Each side sought reunification at the expense of the other, and South Korean Syngman Rhee had threatened to march north. The United States, like the Soviet Union, had withdrawn its postwar occupation troops, but China's Chairman Mao was encouraging Kim to act. When he did, Truman led a United Nations coalition in defense of South Korea, under command of General Douglas MacArthur. The general executed a brilliant flank attack, landing forces at Inchon to cut off the North Korean army, and then he marched north. As he approached the Yalu River — the border with China — the Chinese army counterattacked and soon had his army in retreat. When the Chinese attack first occurred, Truman seemed to suggest in a press conference that nuclear weapons might be used in defense, but he quickly retracted his words. The war settled into the conventional mode (attack and counterattack with conventional weapons), and dragged on for two more years. It was the first proxy war, in which a Soviet satellite lured a Western nation into armed conflict. It would not be the last.'^

'^ Loeber, Building the Bombs, 79-80, 102-103; BDM, Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, 12, 47, 125-126. For a selected inventory of command and control sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00. '^ Gaddis, Cold War, 40-46.

14

Part Two: From Deep Freeze to Detente

On January 20, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated President of the United States. Less than two months later, on March 5, Josef StaHn died in Moscow. His successor, Lavrentii Beria, was the notoriously murderous chief of Stalin's secret police. That the accession of such a man followed the death of an absolute dictator was anything but reassuring to the West, particularly in the midst of the Korean War. As if to underscore the elevated risk, on March 15 Soviet MIG-15 fighter jets fired on what the Americans called a "weather plane" (in reality a B-50 Superfortress reconnaissance plane) off the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia. Tensions eased slightly, however, when on July 27 an armistice was signed that ended the fighting in Korea and created a demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the 38th parallel, thereby largely restoring the balance that existed before the war.

Almost immediately, however, the nuclear balance was upset (as far as America was concerned) when the Soviet Union exploded its first thermonuclear bomb a few weeks after the Korean armistice, on August 12, 1953. Both sides had been apprehensive about detonating hydrogen bombs because of concern among some scientists that the explosive power was uncontrollable. Their fears were confirmed on March 1, 1954, when a U.S. Navy test of a deliverable thermonuclear bomb was held at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. An explosive yield of five megatons was predicted; the actual yield was almost fifteen megatons, a thousand times as large as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The blast spread fallout for hundreds of miles downwind — enough to kill a Japanese fisherman — and radiation detectors were set off around the world. If one hydrogen bomb could produce such a result, what would a thousand do? Winston Churchill went public with his fear that worldwide annihilation was a distinct possibility; Eisenhower echoed it; and the Soviet leaders voiced the same fear, but only among themselves.

The end of the Korean War afforded only a brief release fi"om international tensions. During the 1950s, nationalist and "liberation" movements arose in many countries, especially those in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia that formerly had either been colonies of European countries or had been dominated by them. In some cases, communists led nationalist insurgencies, as in Vietnam, while in other instances nations such as Egypt chose to align themselves with the Soviet Union without installing a communist government. The Eisenhower administration suspected that most if not all nationalist movements were communist-inspired. The administration did not develop an effective way of harnessing nationalist energy to the Western cause and instead relied on propaganda campaigns, counterinsurgency efforts, and propping up pro- Western regimes

0 1

to counter Soviet military and economic assistance to Third World nations.^

" Gaddis, Cold War, 59-60, 104-105.

^° Gaddis, Cold War, 62, 64; Loeber, Building the Bombs, 1 13-1 16; Holloway, "Nuclear weapons," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 1 :383.

"' Robert J. McMahon, "US national security policy from Eisenhower to Kennedy," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge Histoiy, 1 :300-302.

15

Proxy wars and wars of liberation were alternatives to all-out war between the Soviets and the West. Eisenhower's advisors, while agreeing that an all-out nuclear war would doom mankind, tried to convince him to plan for limited nuclear warfare, an approach that the president at first seemed to embrace. Soon, however, he changed his mind and insisted that the nation plan only for an unlimited nuclear war. He shared Truman's assessment that the restricted use of tactical nuclear weapons on a conventional battlefield would quickly escalate. And if the Soviets launched a surprise attack against the United States, Eisenhower reasoned, they would likely use every weapon at their disposal. America would fight back in similar fashion ("massive retaliation"), and the end of civilization would be the result. If that was true, then the only hope of avoiding it was to prepare for unlimited warfare, which would inflict incomprehensible damage on each side, regardless of who started it. In such a war there could be no victor: stalemate. The new strategy was nuclear deterrence, and the Cold War evolved into a war of

22

nerves.

The research and development of bombers and missile systems to deliver guaranteed obliteration, as well as aircraft and missiles to defend against it, continued apace in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Because the primary and most sophisticated bomb-delivery system in existence at the end of World War II was the long-range bomber, each side sought to construct bigger, faster aircraft capable of delivering more and bigger bombs. In America, the most advanced bomber at the end of the war was the B-29. By the mid-1950s, following a succession of more advanced bombers, it had been replaced by the B-52. The Soviets had their own advanced bombers, the Bear and the Bison, and when American planners overestimated their numbers, the fear of a "bomber gap" grew in the United States. Besides strategic bombers, both sides developed and manufactured ever-more-sophisticated jet fighters and interceptors. Begirming in 1961, the Strategic Air Command operated Looking Glass, an airborne command center from which the president could conduct nuclear war and direct the firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles if the ground-control centers were knocked out.^^

In the United States, research on the first system of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) dated to 1945. Based on the German V-2 rocket, the first American version was called Atlas, a liquid-fuel rocket with a 6,000-mile range that could carry an 8,000- pound nuclear warhead to within 1,000 yards of the target. A series of Atlas missiles, A through F, were tested and deployed between 1954 and 1962. The missiles were at first installed above ground on launch pads, but later were maintained and ftieled in belowground silos and then lifted to the surface for launch. They were installed at Air Force bases, including Vandenburg (California), Forbes and Schilling (Kansas), Offiitt and Lincoln (Nebraska), Walker (New Mexico), Plattsburg (New York), Altus (Oklahoma), Dyess (Texas), Fairchild (Washington State), and Warren (Wyoming). The Atlas system was phased out by April 1965.^"*

" Gaddis, Cold War, 63-65; Holloway, "Nuclear Weapons," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History,

1:384-386,392.

J' BDM, Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, 1 :28, 2:32.

^^ Mark Berhow, U.S. Strategic and Defensive Missile Systems, 1950-2004 (Oxford, UK: Osprey

Publishing, 2005), 6, 62. For a selected inventory of Atlas sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00.

16

The Titan system replaced the Atlas. Development began in 1954 1955, even as the Atlas rockets were being tested and deployed. Titan's fueling system was simpler and safer than Atlas's, and the range of later Titan models improved to 9,000 miles. The rockets were stored and maintained in "super-hardened" silos buried deep underground, and the operational, guidance, and maintenance facilities were likewise below ground. There were differences between the arrangement of the facilities for the Titan I and Titan II systems, however. In the case of Titan I, the missiles and the facilities were close together; for Titan II, the missiles were spaced at least seven miles apart. The Titan Is, with a range of 6,300 miles, were installed at Air Force bases in California (Beale), Colorado (Lowry), Idaho (Mountain Home), South Dakota (Ellsworth), and Washington State (Larson). The Titan lis, with a 9,000-mile range, were installed at bases in Arizona (Davis-Monthan), Arkansas (Little Rock), and Kansas (McConnell). The Titan I system was phased out in 1965; the Titan II system was retired between 1984 and 1987.

Minuteman missiles replaced the Titans. Although the Air Force began research as early as 1 954 on solid fuels as an alternative to the more- volatile and -complicated liquid-fuel systems of Atlas and Titan, at first such fuels were not powerful enough to deliver the heavy payloads to their targets. Later in the decade, as more-powerful solid fuels were designed and the payloads became lighter, what was called the Minuteman rocket was tested successfully. In October 1962, the first Minuteman missiles were activated. They were deployed at Air Force bases, including Whiteman (Missouri), Malmstrom (Montana), Minot and Grand Forks (North Dakota), Ellsworth (South Dakota), and Warren (Wyoming). The facilities, including control and maintenance centers and silos, sprawled over thousands of acres. During the 1960s, Minuteman II and Minuteman III joined the system; production ended in 1978, but Minuteman missiles remained deployed until the end of the Cold War.^^

The first American antiaircraft system, operational by 1954 and fully deployed under U.S. Army control by 1956, was called Nike Ajax. Each radar-directed, liquid-fuel rocket carried a conventional high-explosive warhead to defend against single Soviet bombers. It was tested at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, and then the system was installed around major American cities under U.S. Army control; the first battery was installed at Fort Meade, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in December 1953. Nikes also protected Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Hartford, Milwaukee, New York, Norfolk, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as other cities. Each installation consisted of three areas: integrated fire control, launcher and magazine, and administration. For missile control and tracking, the control area was typically more than a thousand yards from the launch site. Because most installations were near cities and not on military posts, typically one or more tracts of land had to be acquired.

Even before the Nike Ajax was deployed, research began in 1953 on the next generation of Nike missile, dubbed Hercules. Larger and powered with solid fuel, the Nike Hercules could carry a nuclear device capable of destroying entire formations of Soviet bombers,

Berhow, Missile Systems, 6, 62. For a selected inventory of Titan sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00. '^ Berhow, Missile Systems, 6, 62.

17

not just a single aircraft. First tested at White Sands in 1955, the early Hercules had a range of 50 miles and an altitude capability of 70,000 feet; alterations eventually increased the range to 90 miles and the altitude to 1 00,000 feet. The conversion of selected sites from Ajax to Hercules began on June 30, 1958, at Site C-03 in the Chicago Defense Area, and was completed in 1962. Entirely new Hercules sites were added to protect Anchorage, Cincinnati, Dallas, Fairbanks, Kansas City, Little Rock, Minneapolis- St. Paul, Oahu, St. Louis, and Thule Air Base in Greenland, among other locations including foreign countries. As the anticipated threat changed from Soviet bombers to ICBMs, however, the missiles became obsolete. By the end of the 1960s, the Hercules sites had almost all been deactivated. By October 1 , 1 974, all of them had been

97

deactivated.

In the 1950s, yet another interceptor missile was developed, the BOMARC (named for the two research participants, Boeing and the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center), under control of the U.S. Air Force. It could carry either conventional or nuclear warheads, rise quickly to 60,000 feet, and then cruise like a jet aircraft for 230 nautical miles. The A model was liquid-ftieled; the B model, developed in 1959-1960, was solid- fueled and had a range of 440 nautical miles. The BOMARC A was deployed in 1959 at McGuire (New Jersey) and Suffolk County (New York) Air Force bases, and in 1 960 at Otis (Massachusetts), Dow (Maine), and Langley (Virginia) Air Force bases. The BOMARC B was deployed beginning in 1 960 at McGuire, Otis, Langley, Kinross/Kincheloe (Michigan), Duluth (Minnesota), and Niagara Falls (New York) bases, as well as at North Bay (Ontario) and La Macaza (Quebec). Plans to install them at other sites were cancelled for the same reason as the deactivation of the Hercules sites: obsolescence in the face of Soviet missiles as the primary nuclear-weapon delivery system. The Air Force began closing the BOMARC sites in 1 964; the last one, McGuire, was closed in 1972.^^

Antiballistic missile (ABM) research began in 1945, as the Allies sought ways to knock down German V-2 rockets, and then dwindled in importance in America as Soviet bombers posed the primary threat early in the 1950s. When the Soviets improved the range and accuracy of their ICBMs by mid-decade, however, ABM research resumed in earnest. The result was the Nike Zeus, which carried a five-megaton nuclear warhead, had a range of more than 250 miles, and could ascend to an altitude of 200 miles. It acquired and tracked its targets using an array of four radars. The U.S. Army first test- fired the Nike Zeus on December 14, 1961, at Kwajalein Atoll in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Concerns over the radar's ability to distinguish between incoming real and decoy warheads, however, led to the cancellation of the program and the commencement in 1964 of research into a replacement. Instead of one missile system, the new system had two: a primary ABM named Spartan and a backup named Sprint, which was intended to intercept any ICBMs that evaded the Spartan defense. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced plans to deploy the new missiles as the Sentinel ABM program. The Nixon administration put the plan on hold, then reconfigured it in 1969 as the Safeguard ABM system, and assigned it the mission of protecting American

^ Berhow, Missile Systems, 6, 60. For a selected inventory of Nike sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00. ^^ Berhow, Missile Systems, 5, 62.

18

ICBM fields. Construction began at two Safeguard sites, Malmstrom (Montana) and Grand Forks (North Dakota) Air Force bases, and other sites were authorized, but the Antibalhstic Missile Treaty signed in 1972 halted construction. The treaty allowed each side two ABM sites, one to protect an ICBM field and the other at the national capital, so the Grand Forks site was completed while the Washington, D.C., site was never begun. On October 1, 1975, the Grand Forks site (renamed in 1974 the Stanley R. Mickelson Safeguard Complex) was declared operational. The next day, however, the U.S. Congress voted to terminate it; the complex was mothballed in February 1976.

Whether nuclear attack from the Soviet Union came in the form of missiles or bombers or both, the United States considered the construction of an effective early-warning-radar system as necessary to provide a chance of defending against such an attack or reducing its destructive effect. Although numerous radar systems were employed during the Cold War years, the earliest and most ambitious was the DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line, a string of stations stretching across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland several hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. Begun in 1957 and essentially completed in 1960, the DEW Line was supplemented by other, similar lines farther south. To improve communication among DEW stations and other facilities, the Air Force constructed the White Alice telecommunications system, which employed new technology including microwave radio links, at about the same time. Within two decades, satellite communications rendered the White Alice system obsolete and it was dismantled.^^

Each side spied on the other, determined to assess its adversary's capabilities and plan for unexpected threats. Because it was difficult for the United States to penetrate the Iron Curtain, a special aircraft was developed to fly over it: the U-2. Designed to fly at 70,000 feet, well above the limits of Soviet S AMs (surface-to-air missiles), the U-2 carried advanced photographic equipment. Lockheed manufactured it for the Central Intelligence Agency, and the first flight took place at Groom Lake (Area 5 1 ) on August 1 , 1955. The first flight over the Soviet Union occurred on July 4, 1956, and many others followed over the next four years. Among other discoveries made was the fact that the "bomber gap" did not exist, and neither did the "missile gap." The Soviets had far fewer of each delivery vehicle than had been thought. On May 1 , 1 960, however, the Soviets avenged the discovery of their secrets by shooting down a U-2 with an advanced SAM, scavenging the wreckage, and capturing the pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Khrushchev also caught the Eisenhower administration in a lie when the State Department first claimed that the aircraft was a weather flight gone astray: he gleefiilly displayed the wreckage, the camera, and the photographs that had been taken. A furious Eisenhower was forced to acknowledge the falsehood. Khrushchev made the most of his propaganda coup, using the episode to wreck the previously scheduled summit meeting with Eisenhower in Paris two weeks later.^'

'^ Berhow, Missile Systems, 6, 62; BDM, Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, 2:1 79-1 96.

^° BDM, Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, 1 : 1 29-1 32, 2: 1 38-1 40, 1 50-1 5 1 . For a selected inventory of

defensive radar networks such as DEW, as well as White Alice sites, see Appendix D, pages 00-00 and 00-

00.

'' Gaddis, Cold War, 73-74, 167-168.

19

Throughout the decade preceding the U-2 Incident, the West and the Soviets had taken steps to strengthen alhances with other nations around the world to foil what they each saw as the military ambitions of the other side. On April 4, 1949, the United States joined with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for mutual defense. Greece, Spain, Turkey, and West Germany subsequently joined as well. China and the Soviet Union signed a bilateral defense commitment, the Sino-Soviet Pact, on February 15, 1950. The United States signed a mutual defense assistance agreement with Vietnam on December 23, 1950. The next year, on September 8, the United States and Japan signed a treaty allowing an American military presence in Japan to defend the nation. The United States also negotiated a mutual security agreement with the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand called the ANZUS Pact. On September 7, 1954, eight nations formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) — the United States, Australia, Britain, France, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand — to oppose Soviet military aggression. In response, the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact alliance on May 14, 1955, to provide for the mutual defense of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and the Soviet Union. All of these pacts and alliances were essentially for mutual defense in case of conventional attacks and warfare, since total nuclear war would obliterate most of the world regardless of alliances. They also failed to deter either side from taking actions short of general war, particularly in Third World nations. ^^

In addition to weapons, threats, and alliances, both the United States and the Soviet Union utilized propaganda in various forms to present their messages to the world (especially the Third World) as well as to their own citizens. Through the United States Information Agency, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, the Western message was broadcast to Soviet radios despite attempts to jam the transmissions, and later, as the number of televisions in the Soviet Union increased. Western programs were beamed there. The cultural exchanges that Khrushchev encouraged late in the 1950s worked both ways. The Soviet message got out (but was taken with a grain of salt in the West), while Soviet citizens were stunned to see evidence of the higher standards of living, abundant consumer goods, and so on in the West, in contrast with what their leaders had been telling them. Motion pictures and novels not only featured the other side's spies as the enemy, but also played to fears common to each side about the possibility of catastrophic nuclear war.'^^

By the mid-1950s, tentative and ineffective steps had been taken to reduce the nuclear threat despite the saber-rattling on both sides. At the first summit conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 18, 1955, Eisenhower proposed the mutual aerial reconnaissance of the United States and the Soviet Union ("open skies"), so each country could keep an eye on the other. Khrushchev rejected the idea, unaware that the U-2 flights would soon begin and provide the United States with

^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 34-35, 108-109; McMahon, "US national security policy," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 1 :299-300.

Nicholas J. Cull, "Reading, viewing, and tuning in to the Cold War," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 2:438-455.

20

the truth about Soviet bombers and missiles anyway. And then, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world, in addition to shaking American confidence that the U- 2s were providing all necessary information about Soviet missiles, by launching Sputnik, the first manmade satellite to orbit the Earth. A month later, on November 3, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, which carried a living creature (a dog), into orbit. The fact that the United States responded quickly, launching Explorer I into orbit on January 3 1 , 1958, did little to deflate renewed fears of a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. The Soviets had changed the strategic equation with Sputnik, opening the door on spying by satellite and, theoretically, on launching attacks by satellite. On September 13, 1959, the Soviets again demonstrated their dominance in the "space race" by crashing a spacecraft on the Moon. In 1960, the United States launched the military reconnaissance satellite Midas II on May 24, and then on July 20 fired the first ballistic missile from a submerged submarine, off Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nuclear tensions did not appear to be declining, and to many Americans it appeared that the Soviets had achieved technological superiority over the United States.^"*

Appearances — over the long haul if not in the short term — were deceiving, however. It was true that the Soviets, by making an almost superhuman technological effort in one field at the expense of other undertakings, could achieve remarkable success. But it could not be sustained. Although both the Soviets and the Americans devoted considerable resources to weapons and rocket development, the Soviets compartmentalized their efforts, segregating scientists, declaring certain lines of inquiry off-limits, and allowing for no cross-pollination of ideas and research. In the United States, however, research scientists were not only located at government facilities but also in public universities and corporations. The constraints of national security and necessary secrecy aside, there was no cover on the pot. Private-sector inventions were adapted for military use and vice versa. Transistors and computer chips helped achieve the miniaturization necessary to pack multiple functions in a single satellite, for example. Great advances in personal computing later in the Cold War were developed by youthful American hobbyists working in their garages and clubs, which would have been unthinkable in the Soviet Union. The apparent Soviet supremacy in technology was a fleeting illusion, and that particular race was over almost before anyone in the United States realized it.^^

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States. Ominously, on December 20, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), organized the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF). On May 1 1, 1961, Kennedy authorized American advisors to aid the South Vietnamese government in its fight against the NLF. The new president had many other matters to concern him in addition to a small war half a world away. On April 12, 1961, in one of the last Soviet technological "firsts," astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth; Alan B. Shepard quickly became the first American to make a suborbital flight on May 5, but it was not until February 20, 1 962, that John Glenn became the first American to orbit

'■' Gaddis, Cold War, 68, 72-73.

^^ David Reynolds, "Science, technology, and the Cold War," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge Histoiy, 3:378-399.

21

the Earth. The president soon declared a national goal of sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the decade.

The first non-space-related crisis to hit the new presidency was the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba on April 17, 1 961 . Authorized by the Eisenhower administration and approved by Kennedy, the invading force of a thousand CIA-trained Cuban refiigees were supposed to spark a rebellion to overthrow Fidel Castro, but instead they were killed or captured soon after they landed at the Bay of Pigs. When Khrushchev and Kennedy met at the Vienna Summit Conference on June 3, the Soviet leader used the invasion to bully the younger president, threatening to make the division of Germany permanent (the possibility of reunification had long been a debating point). On August 13, East Germany closed the Brandenburg Gate, the principal crossing point between East and West Berlin, in preparation for constructing the Berlin Wall. Nuclear weapons testing, which both sides had held in abeyance for some time, resumed in September both in the atmosphere and underground.

Then, on October 14, 1962, a U-2 flying over Cuba photographed Soviet bases capable of launching nuclear missiles against U.S. cities, thereby precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the next two weeks, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war as the president demanded that the missiles be removed. When Khrushchev refiised (he considered them a counterbalance to American missiles stationed in Turkey close to the Soviet border), Kennedy ordered a "quarantine" of shipping to Cuba and announced that a nuclear attack from the island would be considered a Soviet attack requiring full retaliation against Russia and the Soviet Union. At Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, a flight of Minuteman ICBMs were placed on operational alert. A Soviet ship was stopped at sea and turned away, technically an act of war, but the incident passed quietly. Finally, on October 28, Khrushchev agreed to remove all missiles from Cuba and Kennedy agreed to make no more Bay of Pigs-type incursions and (secretly) to remove missiles from Turkey. Most Americans regarded the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a victory for the United States, but the Soviets had secured some concessions that were important to them as well. The crisis marked a turning point in the Cold War in that neither superpower ever again took such deliberate risks or came quite so close to disaster.

Kennedy had claimed during the 1 960 election campaign that a large "missile gap"' existed between the United States and the Soviet Union. In a way he was right, but the gap was on the Soviet side, not the American side as he had asserted. The Soviets knew that the Eisenhower administration knew of their shortfall, as did the Kennedy administration that followed, and both sides knew that there was a good deal of Soviet bluffing during the Cuban Missile Crisis. To avoid being at such a disadvantage ever again, the Soviets launched a massive nuclear weapons buildup and the United States responded in kind. Over the next decade, America fielded more than a thousand ICBMs,

^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 74-75, 129.

" Gaddis, Cold War, 74, 76, 84, 1 14-1 1 5.

^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 75-78; Holloway, "Nuclear weapons," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 1:394-397.

22

several hundred submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and multiple-warhead missiles (MIRVs). Eventually, by early in the 1970s, the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States. That result, which both sides understood, was that neither side could survive nuclear war. Given the vast numbers of both strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, however, it increased the likelihood of accidental or inadvertent disaster. Nevertheless, both sides continued to press on with their war of propaganda and low-grade confrontation, especially in the Third World of unaligned or teetering nations. ^"^

The Kennedy administration adopted a different approach to the Third World and Soviet adventurism there than had the Eisenhower administration. Taking a more proactive approach to challenging the lure of Soviet assistance, Kermedy and his advisors developed the Peace Corps, which sent young, idealistic Americans to Third World countries to assist in a variety of ways from teaching to helping plant crops to advising emerging corporations. The goal was to counter Soviet propaganda about "ugly Americans" and it was largely successful. Less successful, however, was another Kennedy program, the Alliance for Progress. Using American fiinding, it was designed to help Third World nations fight poverty and disease, improve infrastructure, and boost education. Always underfunded, the program fell short of its lofty goals.'*"

Kennedy also modified the previous administration's "massive retaliation" doctrine, with which he disagreed, preferring to institute a range of nonnuclear options dubbed "flexible response." Some European allies worried that the new approach signaled that America was backing away from its mutual defense commitments. Kennedy had to spend time convincing them that such was not the case.'"

In June 1963, Kennedy visited Berlin and made his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech to signify American solidarity with the city's residents — and by extension, with the rest of Europe. In the same month, a teletype link between the White House and the Kremlin, the Hot Line, was established to improve communications between the adversaries and lessen the chance of misunderstandings leading to nuclear war. With no one happy about the pollution and other dangers of aboveground nuclear testing, on October 7 Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, in which the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain agreed to ban tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space. Underground tests were allowed to continue. Then, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. When it was discovered that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in the Soviet Union, both the Russians and the Americans wondered if there was any connection. Much to the Soviets' relief, a check of KGB files revealed that although Oswald had been approached by the spy agency, he was determined to be too unstable to be of use, and no attempt had been made to turn him into an agent.'*^

William Burr and David Alan Rosenberg, "Nuclear competition in an era of stalemate, 1963-1975," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 2:88-1 1 1 .

''^ McMahon, "US national security policy," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge Histon; 1 :306-307. ^' Ibid., 303-305, 308-309.

" Gaddis, Cold War, 81; Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (NY: Random House, 1993), 54-56.

23

The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, planned to concentrate on domestic issues, such as civil rights and a "war on poverty," but soon Vietnam dominated foreign affairs. When North Vietnamese vessels allegedly attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, on August 2, 1964, Johnson ordered retaliation. Five days later, the U.S. Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the president the power to take "all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States, and to prevent further aggression." The resolution gave Johnson carte blanche to carry on war with North Vietnam, an opportunity he exploited until the end of his presidency on the grounds that if South Vietnam fell to the communists other countries in Southeast Asia would also tumble (the "domino theory" that Eisenhower first expounded and Kennedy subsequently endorsed).

In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, a silent, bloodless coup took place on October 15, 1964, when Politburo members Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin ousted Khrushchev from his leadership position. They cited a list of grievances, including the national humiliation suffered over the Cuban missile disaster and the embarrassment over the Berlin Wall (which was obviously constructed to keep East Berliners in, not to keep West Berliners out), and Khrushchev went quietly. He even professed to be pleased that his removal was accomplished with no loss of life, unlike what would have happened if a similar attempt had been made against Stalin a dozen years earlier. It was an odd sort of change in which to take pride — that the Soviet system and its leaders had become slightly less brutal and murderous — but Khrushchev's successors would soon reverse the trend as the satellite nations began to take the change seriously.

Johnson, meanwhile, became bogged down in Vietnam, in a seemingly endless escalation of troop insertions, bombing campaigns, and inflated enemy "body counts." Determined, as he put it, not to be the first American president to lose a foreign war, Johnson faced growing opposition in the United States. On January 30, 1968, however, despite the bombing and almost half a million American troops in Vietnam supporting or conducting "search and destroy" missions. North Vietnamese and NLF troops launched the Tet Offensive all over South Vietnam. Although the result was a communist defeat, the fact that such an offensive could be launched at all destroyed the administration's credibility."*"^

Adding to the perceived dangers that America faced, China had joined the nuclear club on October 1 6, 1 964, with the explosion of its first atomic bomb. It exploded its first hydrogen bomb on June 1 7, 1 967, not even three years later. Between the two events, in April 1 966, the Chinese began their Cultural Revolution, sparking several years of dangerous chaos there. In the spring of 1968, in Czechoslovakia, communist party leader Alexander Dubcek initiated reforms, including greater freedom of expression, to create "socialism with a human face." Once unleashed, however, such reforms led to others, and before long Brezhnev and the other Soviet leaders had had enough. On August 20,

"^ Gaddis, Cold War, 168-170, 173. "" Gaddis, Cold War. 1 19-120. '^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 170.

24

Soviet tanks and infantry rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring, while courageous Czechs confronted the armor and soldiers with verbal abuse and signs proclaiming, among other things, "Hide your mothers and sisters — the Russians are coming!" (alluding to the mass rapes that Russian soldiers perpetrated in Germany at the endofWorldWarll).^^

For the United States, 1968 was a year of notable deaths. In Vietnam on March 16, the My Lai massacre occurred when an American platoon gunned down unarmed villagers including old men, women, and children, creating a national scandal. On April 4, the renowned civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, on June 5, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, California, while campaigning for the Democratic nomination to seek the presidency. Johnson, on March 31, had shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection. In Paris on May 1 0, peace talks began between the United States and North Vietnam but made little progress. Later in the year, on October 31, Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam and invited South Vietnam to the peace talks, which continued to drag on."*^

On November 5, 1968, Richard M. Nixon was elected President of the United States. A brilliant, divisive, and ultimately inscrutable politician, Nixon had first risen to prominence late in the 1940s as a staunch anticommunist. He had campaigned for the presidency on a platform of "peace with honor" in Vietnam, assuring the American people that he had a "secret plan" to bring the war to an end. After taking office, however, and having inherited more than half a million troops in Vietnam, in March 1 969 he ordered the bombing of Cambodia to foil North Vietnamese attacks. And then, on June 8, he ordered the first American troops out of Vietnam under a "Vietnamization" plan. Over the next three years, Nixon mixed bombing halts and starts and troop reductions as well as the invasion of Cambodia with lengthy, on-and-off negotiations at the Paris peace talks."*^

In the meantime, American antiwar fervor reached its height in 1 970, especially on college campuses, but the killings of students at Kent State University and Jackson State College during protests sobered the nation. The protest movement was part of a larger Cold War phenomenon called the counterculture. Although antiwar protests were largely identified with college students, the counterculture permeated American society and reflected dissatisfaction with aspects of American life ranging from expectations of domesticity to racial segregation to what many saw as a needless war. Arising in quiet opposition to the social and political conformity of the 1950s, the counterculture manifested itself most notably in the women's movement, the Civil Rights movement, and in the youth-driven antiwar movement (with which the counterculture was most closely identified). Similar countercultural movements arose in both other Western countries and in the Soviet Union. Invariably, wherever there was a counterculture there

46

Gaddis, Cold War, 147-148, 185, li

^^Gaddis, Cold War, 169-171. "^^ Gaddh, Cold War, 172.

25

was also a backlash, sometimes violent. Having gained momentum over more than a decade, the counterculture did not expire when America's role in Vietnam ended.

On January 27, 1973, the Paris Accords were signed, establishing a ceasefire and a political settlement to American involvement in the war. The last American combat forces left the country on March 29, 1973, bequeathing the fight to the Vietnamese. Two years later, communist forces occupied Saigon on April 30, 1975, as the Americans hastily evacuated the embassy and left thousands of refugees to the mercy of the communists. The final scenes, with helicopters evacuating embassy staff members and a handful of loyal Vietnamese, epitomized the chaos of war. American television showed the desperate Vietnamese pressing against the embassy gates, being punched as they tried to climb aboard the last helicopter, and watching sadly as it flew away. Ho Chi Minh did not live to see the end of the war, having died on September 3, 1969.^°

Ironically, it was Nixon, the staunch anticommunist, who succeeded in toning down for a time the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviets. On November 1 7, 1969, the two sides began the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). A Non- Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons treaty went into effect on March 5, 1970; it proscribed the transfer of nuclear weapons to nonnuclear nations and the production of nuclear weapons in those nations. The negotiations and the nonproliferation treaty did not prevent the Minuteman III ICBM system from becoming operational in August, however.^'

Early in 1 972, Nixon stunned his critics when he announced that he would go to China to negotiate directly with Mao Zedong — something only the anticommunist president could have done without earning the enmity of his political party. The visit took place February 17-27, 1972, and Nixon promised to withdraw American forces from Taiwan. On May 26, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the SALT I agreement, which restricted the development of antiballistic missiles and froze the numbers of ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) for the next five years.^^

To many Americans, it seemed counterintuitive to limit the number of ABMs to protect against missile attack. It was, however, a logical extension of the policy of planning for nothing less than total nuclear war (which had evolved into the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction under Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara): a nation essentially defenseless against nuclear attack or retaliation would do everything possible to avoid nuclear war. With both the Soviet Union and the United States in the same posture, so the thinking went, the possibility of such a war was near zero.^^

"*' Jeremi Suri, "Counter-cultures: the rebellions against the Cold War order, 1965-1975," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 2:460-481.

50

51

^° Gaddis, Cold War, 172-173.

Gaddis, Cold War, 199-200. " Gaddis, Cold War, 149-152, 200. "Gaddis, CoWffar, 80-81.

26

On May 29, 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed an agreement on the "basic principles of detente,'' the philosophy put forward to justify the new arrangements. Detente essentially was the acceptance of the political status quo in the world, especially in Eastern Europe, and the commitment on the part of both sides to continue to work together to reduce nuclear tensions. It also recognized reality, in that for all of America's objections to the way in which the Soviets enforced their will in Eastern Europe, the United States had never taken any action to put a stop to it. Some in the United States, however, were not comfortable with silence in the face of Soviet oppression, even at the price of stability. Senator Henry M. Jackson and Congressman Charles Vanik, for example, secured passage of an amendment to a trade bill worked out with the Soviets, denying them most- favored-nation status because of their limitations on emigration. Angered, the Soviets cancelled the deal. Although detente would be the dominant approach to American- Soviet relations for most of the rest of the decade, the road would be full of such bumps.^^

On November 7, 1972, Nixon was reelected president. Over the next year and a half, a minor burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington would grow into perhaps the worst constitutional crisis the nation had faced since the Civil War. On March 1, 1974, a Washington grand jury returned an indictment against seven former presidential aides and named Nixon an "unindicted co-conspirator." The House Judiciary Committee opened presidential impeachment hearings on May 9; the existence of secret Oval Office tape recordings was revealed, triggering a battle over access to them; the president defended himself on national television, famously declaring, "I am not a crook"; and on July 27 the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of impeachment. To avoid the humiliation of a trial and likely conviction and removal from office, Nixon endured the humiliation of being the only president in American history to resign. On August 9, 1 974, he left the White House and Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office as president."^

The Soviets were both puzzled and stunned, like many other foreigners, by this turn of events. What perhaps amazed them even more was that the nation had not collapsed into chaos during the crisis. Ford put the country's sigh of relief into words when he declared, "Our long national nightmare is over." The Cold War, however, continued.

Gaddis, Cold War, 180-184.

27

" Gaddis, Cold War, 155-158.

Part Three: The End of the Wall

The policy of detente continued from 1972 until the end of the Ford administration in 1976. On the surface, detente smoothed the way for cooperation in such matters as the space exploration, exemplified on July 17, 1975, when American and Soviet astronauts in Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft linked up in orbit. Negotiations also continued between the Soviets and the United States not merely to limit the spread and deployment of nuclear weapons but also to begin reducing their numbers in a very real way. The status quo remained seemingly strong, with the Soviet leaders dealing with their internal issues in their own way despite periodic protests from human-rights supporters on the outside. Inside the Soviet Union, however, the structure supporting the facade slowly began to crumble.

Communism had long claimed historical infallibility and the role of supreme supporter of workers' rights. The actions of the Soviet leaders from the 1950s and thereafter, however, began to undermine those claims. Perhaps this process began on February 25, 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his crimes — the enslavement and murder of millions — in detail to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Khrushchev took this action, which shocked the delegates to their cores, to justify party reforms, but his words created problems for himself and for the international communist movement. How could a party that claimed infallibility be subject to reform? The contradictions between dogma and reality became ever more obvious over the years: the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, the notorious Gulag that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exposed to the world in the 1 970s, the blatant lies of Soviet leaders during conflicts with the West, and the rising chorus of dissent within the Soviet Union all contradicted, to say the least, the official image of the workers' paradise. The Soviet Union, no less than any other form of government, relied ultimately in the faith of the governed to sustain it. Infallibility is a high standard to live up to; when the failure to attain it becomes obvious even to the most ardent supporters, structural collapse becomes almost inevitable.^^

The contrasts between Western and Soviet rhetoric and ideals manifested themselves most clearly, perhaps, in the consumer-oriented economies that the centrally controlled Soviet countries lacked. Derided — often with justification — as mere crass materialism, consumerism was the engine that powered the economies of the United States and most other countries outside the Soviet bloc. Consumerism was not just a desire for more things, but for things that freed people from drudgery, that encouraged a more interesting life, that offered more choices, and that promoted leisure activities. While the West could have both guns and butter thanks to its diverse, capitalist economies, the Soviets could only choose one or the other. Soviet consumers, therefore, always got the short end of the budget stick. No amount of propaganda could offset the obviously lower Soviet standard of living, which became all the more obvious when travel and cultural-exchange restrictions were eased. Even in Moscow, the most prosperous city in Russia, residents carried plastic bags at all times, and when they saw a long line outside an official Soviet shop, they only asked what was for sale after they joined the line. Usually it was some

^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 84-87, 263-264.

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product that had not been available yesterday, and would not be available tomorrow, or even in a few hours. In contrast. Western consumers faced an overabundance of choices and products that even many of them regarded as ridiculous excess. Late in the Cold War, Russian president Boris Yeltsin visited a standard American supermarket. The plenitude of cans and boxes on the shelves so stunned him that he later wrote that he felt "sick with despair for the Soviet people." The Soviets might achieve parity with, or even surpass the United States in numbers of missiles, but they would never be able to meet the demands of their own expanding and complaining consumer society. This was just one of the disparities between Soviet mythology and reality that contributed to growing dissatisfaction with the regime and contributed largely to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union."

This dissonance and anger developed slowly, but it gained momentum in August 1975 with the signing of the Helsinki Accords. The Soviet Union had, since 1 954, sought almost annually some official recognition by the West of the division of Europe, and the resulting Soviet sphere of influence there, that had come into effect at the end of World War II. The West, particularly the United States, routinely rebuffed the Soviet demand but under detente the Western refusal to recognize reality seemed futile. Europe was divided, after all, and seemed likely to remain that way. The Western nations, however, did not make it too easy for Brezhnev to get his document signed; they insisted on adding clauses about the peacefial change of international borders, the joining and leaving of alliances, the promotion of Western-Soviet contact through cultural exchanges (including music concerts), and, to some Soviet consternation, the recognition of human rights in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. On reflection, however, Brezhnev assumed he could ignore those clauses when it came to the Soviet Union's internal affairs, just as he ignored similar statements in the Soviet constitution. They were mere words, after all, and the Soviets had always been quick to assert that for all of America's alleged devotion to human rights, the record was tainted by Native American genocide (both physical and cultural), the failure to grant fiill civil rights to minorities until forced to do so, and the support of Third World tyrants who oppressed their peoples. So, he signed the Helsinki Accords, little realizing that they would also lead to exposing Soviet economic failures and human rights hypocrisies to the world. Within the Soviet Union, however, there were those who took the mere words seriously. They included Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, and many others who were willing to risk their necks to hold their leaders accountable. Brezhnev had finessed himself into a trap.'

The situation, from the Soviet point of view, soon got worse. On October 16, 1978, white smoke floated from a stovepipe above the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, signaling the election of a new pope to take the place of Pope John Paul, who had recently died. When the new pope emerged onto a balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square, the crowd and the world gasped. His given name was Karol Wojtyla, and he was a Polish cardinal, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, the first Slavic pope, and the

" Emily S. Rosenberg, "Consumer capitalism and the end of the Cold War," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 3:489-513.

'^ Gaddis, Cold War, 186-191; Cull, "Reading, viewing, and tuning in," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge History, 2:455-458.

29

first pope whose native land was a communist country. To honor his two immediate predecessors, he took the name John Paul II. He also soon took much of the world by storm with his charisma and charm, his sense of humor and wit, his brilliant intellect and common touch, his fierce love of Poland, and the sly and subtle ways in which he demolished what little remained of communist credibility.'

In Moscow, Brezhnev and the Politburo were shocked, outraged, and frightened by what had happened — a pope from officially atheistic Poland! Their fears only increased when John Paul II made his first visit home to Poland in June 1979. At every stop he made, the crowds increased from the hundreds of thousands to the millions (between two and three million in Krakow), chanting his name and proclaiming "We want God!" The contrast between the joyfijl crowds in Poland and the typical Soviet "spontaneous" assembly of dour party functionaries could not have been more obvious. The images were broadcast around the world, along with the pope's message to all mankind, within and without the Soviet Union: "Be not afraid." This was the message most devastafing to the Soviet authorities, for by this time they had little with which to prop up their system except fear. The pope's message not only gave moral support to the Solzhenitsyns, Sakharovs, and Havels of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it also gave hope and courage to the billions of people who lived under other forms of tyranny around the world. The age of the tyrant was coming to an end, he declared, and the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union would foreshadow similar collapses in other nations.

There were still reasons for concern if not fear, however. The end of detente arrived about a year and a half after Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977. First, he announced that foreign aid from the United States would be dependent on the applicant nation's commitment to human rights. Then, on May 30, 1978, he recommended that NATO increase and modernize its military resources, signaling the end of detente — the status quo — through this shift in policy. In addition, the deployment of tactical nuclear missiles in Europe continued, putting additional pressure on the Soviets to respond with improved weapons systems of their own. In the Soviet Union, however, not only had technology not kept pace with the West, but the country was also facing near-bankruptcy after years of mismanagement of the centrally planned economy. On June 18, 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II agreement to limit long-range missiles and bombers. In December, NATO announced the deployment of intermediate- range nuclear weapons in Europe to counter Warsaw Pact SS-20 missiles, again putting pressure on the Soviet Union. Brezhnev had other matters weighing on him, however, such as the ongoing rebellion in Afghanistan against Soviet control. On December 20, the Soviets invaded the country, beginning a multiyear, ultimately fruitless war reminiscent of the American involvement in Vietnam. In protest, Carter cancelled American participation in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the SALT II treaty. Under detente. Carter would have reacted to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with words of objection, not direct actions.^'

^'^ Gadd\s, Cold War, 192.

*° Gaddis, Cold War, 192-195.

^' Gaddis, Cold War, 202-203, 210-211.

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In August and September 1980, an electrician named Lech Walesa organized an independent trade union at the Gdansk shipyard in Poland. As in the case of the election of Karol Wojtyla as pope, this event shook the Soviet leadership. Why would there be a need for a trade union if the communists were the protectors of workers? The Soviet leadership responded by trying to crush the trade-union movement, which Walesa and the members had named, ironically, Solidarity (communists continually expressed their "solidarity" with oppressed workers in capitalist countries). Protests and clashes with the police arose, and — again ironically — workers in capitalist countries expressed their solidarity with the Gdansk shipyard laborers by marching with Solidarity banners held high. After the Soviet leaders had convinced General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's new president, that they were about to intervene, he declared martial law and arrested Solidarity's leaders including Walesa on Decemberl3, 1981.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, in January 1 98 1 Ronald Reagan had been inaugurated President of the United States. A movie actor who had recently served as governor of California, Reagan was notable for single-minded anticommunism tempered by a sunny, optimistic disposition and a folksy demeanor. Many critics considered him an intellectual lightweight, but they underestimated his determination and stubbornness. Like Pope John Paul II, Reagan exuded charisma and was a very effective and rousing speaker.^^

Although the foreign press liked to portray him as a "cowboy," or an independent, tough- talking gunslinger, in fact Reagan did not operate alone against the Soviets. Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Solzhenitsyn and Havel, among many others, had been at the forefront of the movement long before Reagan was inaugurated president. As the leader of the United States, however, he immediately assumed a position of strategic importance. He quickly forged strong ties with Thatcher; they shared similar, conservative political philosophies, but they also found that they thought alike when it came to dealing with the Soviets.^'*

What was missing, however, was a Soviet counterpart with whom to negotiate. Brezhnev was becoming increasingly feeble and died on November 10, 1982. Yuri Andropov, the cold and aloof former head of the KGB, succeeded Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Soviet Union two days later. Andropov fell ill and died in a Soviet hospital on February 9, 1984, and Konstantin Chemenko took over on February 13. The decrepit, aged Chemenko died on March 10, 1985. Reagan, exasperated, wondered aloud how he could ever deal with the Soviet leaders when they kept dying on him.^^

The Soviet general secretaries were not the only leaders who faced death early in the 1980s. Barely two months into his first term as president, Reagan was shot by John Hinkley, a deranged man, on March 30, 1981, in Washington. The president survived, thanks to successflil surgery. A month and a half later, on May 13, Mehmet Ali Agca

"- Gaddis, Cold War, 196-197, 218. ^' Gaddis, Cold War, 217-218. '' Gaddis, Cold War, 223. " Gaddis, Cold War, llA, 228.

31

shot Pope John Paul II as he rode in his "popemobile" among the faithful in St. Peter's Square. The pope also survived, and the assassination attempt was quickly linked to Bulgarian intelligence. Soviet complicity was strongly suspected, given the Soviet leaders' fear of the pope, but never proved.

Thatcher and Reagan soon found themselves with a Soviet leader with whom they could do business — Mikhail Gorbachev, who succeeded Chemenko on March 13, 1985. Middle-aged, well-educated, articulate, bright, and friendly, Gorbachev charmed Vice President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State George Schultz when they met him at Chemenko' s fiineral. Reagan met Gorbachev for the first time in November 1985 at the Geneva summit conference and also liked him, although the summit ended inconclusively over one of Reagan's ideas, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which he offered to share. ^

Reagan first proposed SDI in a speech on March 23, 1983, thereby essentially repudiating the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction. Instead, he proposed using satellite, computer, and laser technology to destroy ICBMs immediately after launch. If such a system were employed, Reagan said, nuclear missiles would be obsolete and should be scrapped. He was proposing, in other words, the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. In the Kremlin, Andropov and the Politburo scoffed publicly but privately were panicked. Although the Soviet Union had caught up with the United States in the production of ICBMs, the country was hopelessly behind in computer technology and the sciences that might enable it to counter SDI. Andropov became convinced that Reagan's proposal was merely a prelude to a surprise nuclear strike, and when a Korean Air Lines passenger jet strayed into Soviet territory on September 1, 1983, the nervous Soviets shot it down. Later, in November, when NATO forces carried out their annual fall military exercises (Able Archer 83) but at a higher level of leadership participation than usual, Andropov again convinced himself that a nuclear attack was imminent and put the country on alert. It was the closest brush with nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Gorbachev learned that Reagan was sincere in his determination to implement SDI and eliminate the nuclear stockpile. Gorbachev also believed that Reagan and the United States would never launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Another turning point in Gorbachev's thinking occurred on April 26, 1986 — an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that spread contamination over a wide area. Investigations showed that the disaster was partly the result of incompetence, shoddy work, and carelessness, further convincing Gorbachev that fundamental changes were necessary (glasnost, or publicity, and perestroika, or restructuring) within the Soviet Union if there was to be any hope of retaining the people's faith in the communist system. When Reagan and Gorbachev met at the next summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, both men seemed eager to find a way to eliminate the nuclear-weapons threat. The meeting ended unhappily, however, when Gorbachev kept pressing Reagan to confine SDI to the research laboratories instead of developing and deploying it, and Reagan refused. Negotiations

^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 218-219, 222. ^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 229-233. ^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 226-228.

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continued nonetheless, and at the next summit meeting, in Washington in December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe.

Reagan not only pressed for the abolition of nuclear weapons, he also urged Gorbachev to relax restrictions and increase freedoms in the Soviet Union. Most famously, in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, Reagan pointed at the Wall and demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Gorbachev ignored the request, but he was at the time letting the world know that he would not oppose change with the use of force. In a speech to the United Nations on December 7, 1988, Gorbachev denounced force or even the threat of force as instruments of foreign policy. Fundamental change indeed had come to the Soviet Union.

In China, however, the situation was different. Mao Zedong had died on September 9, 1976, setting off a long struggle for the succession. The eventual winner of that struggle, by the end of 1978, was Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese Communist Party leader whom Mao had purged several times. The resilient Deng, once in power, praised many of Mao's accomplishments, including making China a great power and opening relations with the United States, but repudiated the disastrously managed central economy. Instead, Deng embraced capitalism while maintaining the other elements of Mao's legacy. As a result, the Chinese economy had become one of the largest in the world by the time Deng died in 1997. His determination to restrict freedoms in the political arena, however, led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing on the night of June 3-4, 1989. Students had been demonstrating there for more democracy — Gorbachev had even paid them a visit when he was in the city — but Deng finally had seen enough and ordered a brutal military crackdown. An unknown number of students were killed. As tanks rumbled out of the square on June 5, their work accomplished, a man carrying two shopping bags walked into the street and blocked their path. For several moments, the man harangued the tank commander before bystanders hustled him away. A video camera in a nearby hotel captured the episode, which was soon broadcast around the world and became an iconic image of individual courage.^'

Individuals were continuing to have an effect in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as well. After George H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan as president on January 20, 1989, he and Gorbachev eyed each other warily, with Bush concerned that the Soviet leader's disarmament promises might be a sham. Over time they grew to trust each other, although there was never the warmth between them that Gorbachev and Reagan shared. In Hungary, the government dismantled the fence along the border with Austria, and soon East Germans began flowing through Hungary to the West. In Poland, Jaruzelski recognized Solidarity and allowed its candidates to participate in an election of delegates to a new bicameral legislature. Solidarity won all the seats it contested in the lower

*' Gaddis, Cold War, 231-234. ™ Gaddis, Cold War, 235-236. ^' Gaddis, Cold War, 242-243.

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house and lost only one in the upper house. In each case, Gorbachev made it clear that the countries were on their own; there would be no Soviet intervention.

The East German government, under the hard-line communist ruler Erich Honecker, was extremely displeased over the Hungarian situation. When Gorbachev attended a parade during the East German government's fortieth anniversary celebrations on October 7-8, 1989, however, the marchers cheered him, not Honecker. On October 9, in Leipzig, antigovemment demonstrations almost resulted in a version of Tiananmen Square until an orchestra leader stepped from the crowd and persuaded the security forces to leave. Honecker resigned on October 1 8 and his successor, Egon Krenz, decided to ease the pressure by relaxing but not eliminating the rules for travel to the West. On November 9, a government official misread the hastily drafted decree at a press conference and announced instead that East Germans who wished to leave could do so at any border crossing, effective immediately. Seemingly within minutes, crowds assembled at the crossings, including along the Berlin Wall, where the guards had no instructions. Finally, the guards at one crossing took it on themselves to open the gate, and East Berliners poured through into West Berlin. That night, television viewers around the world were stunned to see East and West Germans atop the Wall, dancing on it and attacking it with hammers, while the guards stood by, machine guns slung on their shoulders, and merely watched.

Thus began the cascade. On November 10, 1989, the ruler of Bulgaria since 1954 announced that he was stepping down, and the communist party there began negotiating with the opposition for free elections. On November 1 7, prodemocracy demonstrations erupted in Prague, and within weeks Alexander Dubcek was installed as chairman of the national assembly and Vaclav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia. In Romania, the brutal dictator Nicolai Ceausescu decided to follow Deng's example and on December 17 ordered his troops to gun down demonstrators. When he addressed a throng of supposed supporters on December 21, they booed him off the podium. He and his wife attempted to flee, were captured and tried for murder, and were executed on Christmas Day. The end of East Germany came the next year, when the two Germanys were reunified on October 3, 1990. On February 19, 1991, Lithuania voted to become an independent nation.^'*

In July 1991, Bush arrived in Moscow to sign the START I treaty — the strategic arms reduction treaty that had been the subject of multiple negotiations and meetings since Reagan had first proposed it in 1983. Gorbachev, exhausted, left the capital early in August for his annual Crimean vacation. On August 1 8, his communication links were severed and a delegation arrived at his dacha to inform him that he had been deposed. Over the next few days, however, the conspirators discovered to their chagrin that they had neglected to secure the support of the police and the army, that the rest of the world was reftising to take them seriously, and that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had greater

^' Gaddis, Cold War, 239-241. " Gaddis, Cold War, 244-246. ^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 246-247, 249-252.

34

power than they did, or that Gorbachev had, for that matter. When Yehsin climbed on a tank in Moscow to announce that the coup was a failure, it failed

75

Yeltsin abolished the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, confiscated its property, disbanded Gorbachev's Congress of People's Deputies, and recognized the independence of the Baltic States and several other republics. On December 8, 1991, Yeltsin signed an agreement with the Ukraine and Byelorussia to form the Commonwealth of Independent States and called Bush to inform him. Gorbachev protested, but then on Christmas Day he acknowledged reality by signing a decree that transferred the Soviet nuclear supply to Russia and abolished the Soviet Union. Without a pair of adversaries to confront each other any longer, the Cold War truly was over.^^

In the United States, the trend toward "standing down" in response to Gorbachev's concessions had begun the previous year. On July 24, 1 990, the Strategic Air Command's Looking Glass emergency airborne command post was taken off continuous alert. Beginning September 18, 1991, all Strategic Air Command bombers and the Minuteman II missiles were likewise removed from alert status. Between 1 99 1 and 1 997, the Minuteman II silos were deactivated and imploded. Minuteman Ills will remain operational until 2020.

At the beginning of the Cold War and the nuclear age, the chances that mankind would survive the next half-century appeared slim. The most-devastating war in human history had ended with the creation of the greatest weapon ever known. Its effects frightened everyone on either side of the Iron Curtain, because everyone knew that weapons were made to be used and because never yet had the fear of a weapon, much less human willpower, restrained men from waging war. The weapon itself was viewed and described in apocalyptic terms: "Now I am become death, the shatterer of worlds"; doomsday; the end of the world. Many scientists and ethicists believed that people had created something that outstripped their ability to control it. Science run amok became a

7R

recurring theme in popular literature, especially in American motion pictures.

In addition, two diametrically opposed political systems each controlled the bomb and half the world. On the one side in the early years stood the United States and its allies, seemingly disorganized, with a variety of capitalist governments based on the will of their peoples. On the other side, under one of the most bloody-handed tyrants in history, stood the Soviet Union and its supposedly monolithic communist empire. Each was engaged in a struggle for domination, each wished for the end of the other, and each waged a relentless race for arms superiority over the other. The result, in both countries, was the expenditure of enormous amounts of national treasure to construct complicated systems of aggression and defense. Each side used subterfuge to create uncertainty and fear to keep the other side guessing. The chances of a misstep that would be fatal to both sides seemed almost guaranteed.

^^ Gaddis, Cold War, 256. ^'' Gaddis, Cold War, 256-257. ^' Berhow, Missile Systems, 6, 63. '* Loeber, Building the Bombs, 35.

35

And yet, it did not happen. In part this was because neither side was controlled by nihilists. Each wanted to outlive the other, knowing that any attempt to destroy the other would lead to self-destruction. Even when the threats seemed the greatest, each side trod carefully, not daring to push the other too far. Because luck (sometimes bad luck) can trump skill, however, leaders on both sides came to understand that the equation had to change, that a way had to be found out of the armament thicket that had grown out of control.^

In the end, the Cold War ceased to exist in part because rational leaders became convinced that what people had created they could also change. Pope John Paul II encouraged millions, regardless of national borders, to reject the idea that fear and brutality must always dominate the human spirit, and the people of Eastern Europe rose to his challenge. Ronald Reagan proposed a defense system that would logically lead to abolishing nuclear weapons altogether — an idea that even the Soviets could accept with some relief And Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of Earth's last great empire, decided to dismantle that empire in the name of sanity and human survival. And after almost five decades of living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, all of this had been accomplished without the explosion of a single atomic bomb. In a sense, then, although the Cold War ended with the bankruptcy of communism and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, among mankind there were no losers.

Since then, debates have raged over just what brought the end of the arms race, the seemingly sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Some have argued that Reagan's SDI and his hard-line approach to communism turned the tide, but SDI was confined to the drawing board and Reagan moderated his approach considerably after 1983. Others give most of the credit to Gorbachev and his reforms, which, once unleashed, took on a life of their own. Pope John Paul II and his spiritual leadership, as well as the boldness of Dubcek and Walesa and Havel, deserve their due. Then there were the nameless, courageous millions who marched, faced down tanks, broke through borders and demolished walls, put their lives on the line and told their erstwhile Soviet leaders that it was all over, that they no longer were believed, that they had no authority. Perhaps the answer is that all of these people and factors together created the perfect storm that blew down the Iron Curtain, rendered nuclear war between the powers impossible except by accident, and brought the Cold War to an end.^*^

There was hope, in the United States at least, of a "peace dividend" — that the end of the Cold War would enable the nation to refocus its treasure on domestic programs instead of weapons systems. It was not to be. The Cold War ended but not without consequences. Fifty years of fighting proxy wars that resulted in millions of deaths, interfering in the affairs of other nations, propping up tyrants for temporary and questionable gains, shuffling the distribution of political power, raising and then dashing hopes, suppressing dissent, creating powerful groups and cliques devoted to their interests at the expense of

^' Gaddis, Cold War, 262.

Beth A. Fischer, "US foreign policy under Reagan and Bush," in Leffler and Westad, Cambridge Histoty,

3:267-288.

36

others — all practices that each side was guilty of at one time or another — left a legacy of resentment and frustration in many countries around the world. Many of our current conflicts, such as the 9/1 1 attacks and the resulting "war on terror," have their roots in the Cold War and can be considered as among its legacies.

37

Time Line: The Cold War 1945

May 7: German military leaders surrender to Western Allies at Rheims, France.

May 8: German military leaders surrender to Soviets and Western Allies at Berlin,

Germany.

July 3: Allied troops complete occupation of Berlin.

July 16: United States explodes first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in a

test code-named TRINITY.

July 17-August 2: President Harry S Truman, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and

Clement Atlee, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin meet in Potsdam and refine postwar

division of Europe.

August 6: U.S. drops first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

August 9: U.S. drops second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

August 14: Japan surrenders.

August 26: U.S. announces its intention to occupy Japanese-held Korea south of the 38th

parallel; Soviet Union to occupy the north.

September 2: Ho Chi Minh's troops seize power in Hanoi and proclaim an independent

Vietnam.

September 22: French forces return to Vietnam.

November 5: Communist Party wins only 17 percent of the vote in Hungarian election.

Stalin moves to eradicate opposition and consolidate Soviet position there.

November 29: Yugoslavia becomes a federated republic under Marshal Josef Tito.

1945-1946: America and Great Britain withdraw their troops from Iran; the Soviet Union

does not.

February 28: Secretary of State James F. Byrnes introduces new "get tough with Russia"

policy at Overseas Press Club, New York.

March 5: Winston Churchill, in a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, says

an "iron curtain" has descended across Europe.

March 21: Strategic Air Command, Tactical Air Command, and Air Defense Command

are created within the Army Air Forces.

June 14: Bernard Baruch presents Truman's international atomic energy control plan to

United Nations. Plan would place fissionable materials under control of a U.N. agency

equipped with inspection powers and exempt from the great-power (Security Council)

veto. Soviet Union objects to American domination of any U.N. agency and is unwilling

to surrender its veto or accept inspection within the Soviet Union.

July 1: U.S. atomic bomb tests, using the Nagasaki-type implosion bomb, held at Bikini

Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands.

August 1 : Truman signs Atomic Energy Act, creating Atomic Energy Commission

(AEC) and transferring nuclear weapons design and development from military to

civilian control.

December 20: Viet Minh forces clash with French forces in beginning of 8-year French

Indochina war.

1947

March 12: Truman asks Congress to support "free peoples who are resisting attempted

subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures" (Truman Doctrine). Congress

grants $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey to defend against Communist guerrillas.

38

April 16: Bernard Baruch coins the term "Cold War" in a speech in South Carolina May 31: Communist government takes over Hungary.

June 5: Secretary of State George C. Marshall calls on European nations to draft plan for European economic recovery, offering aid in planning and "later support" (Marshall Plan). Eastern Europe walks out of initial Paris meeting at Soviet behest. The following March, Congress votes to fund the Marshall Plan to aid 1 6 European nations. July: George F. Kennan, writing anonymously in Foreign Affairs, articulates America's policy to block peacefully the expansion of Soviet political and economic influence into vulnerable areas around the world ("containment).

July 26: National Security Act creates Department of Defense and several new agencies, including the National Military Establishment with three separate departments of the Army, the Navy, and the new U.S. Air Force, National Security Council (NSC), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff October 29: The U.N. authorizes the creation of the State of Israel. December 30: Romania's monarchy is replaced by a communist regime. 1948

During the year, Truman decides that nuclear weapons shall be under the direct control of the president; for the first time, battlefield commanders are denied the right to decide to deploy a weapon.

February 25: Communist coup in Czechoslovakia.

March 17: Brussels Treaty, signed by Belgium, Britain, France, Holland, and Luxembourg, creates an Atlantic regional mutual-defense pact, the Brussels Pact, in part a response to the Czechoslovakian crisis.

April 1: Soviet Union blockades all highway, river, and rail traffic into Western- controlled West Berlin to force the Western powers out of Berlin. The West responds by airlifting supplies to West Berlin beginning June 2 1 and counter-blockading East Germany. The Soviet blockade ends after 321 days.

May 14: Israel declares independence. Five Arab states invade Israel in the first Arab- Israeli war.

July 26: Truman issues executive order desegregating the armed forces. August 3: Whitaker Chambers accuses Alger Hiss of having been a key member of the communist underground in Washington. August 15: Republic of South Korea is founded.

September 9: The Korean People's Democratic Republic is founded in North Korea. 1949

January 29: Foreign aid policy announced by Truman.

April 4: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for mutual defense. Greece, Spain, Turkey, and West Germany later join. In 1955, Soviet Union forms competing Warsaw Pact. May 12: Berlin blockade ends.

August 29: The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb in a desert in Kazakhstan. September 3: During a Japan-to-Alaska reconnaissance flight, an Air Force RB-20 on patrol off Siberia detects evidence of the Soviet nuclear test.

39

September 21: German Federal Republic established as Allied High Commission

relinquishes control of the administration of the American, British, and French

occupation zones.

September 23: Truman announces that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb

sometime during the latter half of August.

October 1: People's Republic of China is established.

December 7: The Chinese Nationalist government retires to Taipei, Taiwan.

1950

January 21: Alger Hiss convicted of perjury.

January 31: Truman approves the development of the hydrogen bomb.

February 7: The U.S. recognizes the state of Vietnam and the kingdoms of Laos and

Cambodia.

February 9: Senator Joseph P. McCarthy delivers speech to Republican Women's Club

of Ohio County, Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claims to have a list of "known"

Communists "making policy" in the State Department.

February 15: Sino-Soviet Pact creates a bilateral defense commitment, settles historic

territorial issues between China and the Soviet Union, and initiates modest program of

Soviet aid to China.

April: NSC reappraises America's strategic position and redefines the Cold War as

military rather than political, postulating a Soviet "design for world domination." NSC

68 called for both a buildup of nuclear weapons and for enlarged capacity to fight

conventional wars whenever the Russians threatened "piecemeal aggression." It also

called for a reduction of social welfare programs and other services not related to military

needs and for tighter internal security programs.

May 9: Truman announces U.S. military aid to French in Indochina.

June 25: North Korean troops cross the 38th parallel in a surprise invasion of South

Korea.

September 23: Congress passes McCarran Internal Security Act to monitor domestic

communist activities.

October 19: Chinese units cross the Yalu River into Korea.

December 23: U.S. signs a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with Vietnam.

1951

May 9: AEC explodes thermonuclear device at Enewetok, Marshall Islands.

May 27: Tibet ends resistance to Chinese takeover.

September 8: U.S. and Japan sign peace treaty with U.S. military presence for defense of

Japan. U.S. also negotiates mutual security agreement with Philippines, Australia, and

New Zealand (ANZUS Pact).

1952

January 31: Truman denounces McCarthy for "anti-Communist tactics."

June 14: Truman lays keel of USS Nautilus, first nuclear submarine.

November 1: AEC explodes hydrogen bomb at Enewetok, Marshall Islands.

November 4: Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president.

1953

January 20: Eisenhower inaugurated as president.

March 5: Josef Stalin dies in Moscow.

40

March 15: Soviet MIG-15 fighters fire at U.S. WB-50 weather plane near the

Kamchatka Peninsula.

July 27: Armistice is signed ending the Korean War. Korea remains divided at the 38th

parallel, creating the DMZ (De-Militarized Zone).

August 1: U.S. Information Agency (USIA) is established.

August 14: Soviet Union explodes a hydrogen bomb.

August 16: Shah of Iran flees to Rome after attempting and failing to dismiss Prime

Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry.

August 22: U.S. -backed coup overthrows Mossadegh and restores Shah of Iran.

1954

March 1: U.S. explodes hydrogen bomb in Marshall Islands (BRAVO); yield far greater

than expected.

May 1: Soviet Union unveils M-4, its first jet-propelled long-range bomber.

May 8: French army is defeated in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu.

May 30: First operational NIKE Ajax missiles deployed at Fort Meade, Maryland.

June: First Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) tested.

July 17-28: Geneva Accords end French colonialism in Indochina; Vietnam divided at

the 1 7th parallel.

August 24: Communist Party outlawed in U.S. as Eisenhower signs Communist Control

Act.

September 7: Australia, Britain, France, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, New

Zealand, and the United States form the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO),

an anticommunist alliance against "massive military aggression."

September 27: U.S. and Canada agree to construct the Distant Early Warning (DEW)

line of radar stations from Alaska across Canada to Greenland to warn of surprise attack.

October 13: U.S. approves production of first supersonic bomber, the B-58

October 23: West Germany is invited to join NATO and becomes a member on May 5,

1955.

December 2: Senate condemns McCarthy, ending the McCarthy era.

1955

April 14: Nike Ajax missile at Fort Meade, Maryland, accidentally launched, injuring

one crewman; the missile fell apart in the air, causing no damage.

Mid-year: Nikita Khrushchev consolidates his power in the Soviet Union as Stalin's

successor.

May 14: Warsaw Pact signed, calling for the mutual defense of Albania, Bulgaria,

Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and the Soviet Union.

June 15: U.S. stages its first nationwide civil defense exercise.

June 29: B-52 intercontinental bomber deployment begins in the United States.

July: Fear of a "Bomber Gap" ensues after Soviets fly Bear and Bison long-range

bombers multiple times past American visitors at an air show, causing an exaggerated

assessment of Soviet inventories.

July 18: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Eden discuss disarmament and European security

at Geneva Summit Conference. Eisenhower proposes "Open Skies," which would allow

aerial reconnaissance of each other's territories. Khrushchev refuses to allow it.

July 31: DEW Line begins operation in Alaska and Canada.

41

November 19: Baghdad Pact signed by Great Britain, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. U.S.

pledges military and political liaison.

1956

July 27: Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal in

retaliation for the U.S. and the World Bank's withdrawing financial support for the

Aswan Dam.

October 29-31: Britain, France, and Israel attack Egypt.

October 23-November 4: Hungarians revolt against communist rule and make futile

pleas for U.S. assistance as Soviet forces crush the resistance.

November 6: Eisenhower reelected.

November 17: "We will bury you" statement made by Khrushchev to Western

diplomats.

1957

January 5: Eisenhower Doctrine presented to Congress, allowing the president to

commit troops to the Middle East to thwart communist aggression there.

January 20: Eisenhower is inaugurated president for a second term. He insists on

plarming for total nuclear war (eventually called "mutual assured destruction"), rather

than limited nuclear war, as a means of avoiding total war altogether because of the

consequences for mankind.

March 25: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany

agree to form the European Economic Community (EEC), or the Common Market.

August 26: Moscow announces its first successful ICBM test.

September 19: First underground nuclear test takes place in a mountain tunnel near Las

Vegas.

October 4: Soviet Union launches Sputnik, first satellite to orbit Earth, prompting U.S.

fears of a "missile gap."

November 3: Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2, which carries the first living creature (a

dog) into space.

December 17: First successful test of Atlas. ICBM.

December: Gaither Report to the NSC states Soviet Union has achieved superiority in

long-range ballistic missiles, adding to fears of a "missile gap." In reality, this gap does

not exist.

1958

January 31: U.S. Army launches American satellite. Explorer I, into orbit.

March 5: Radar tracks first-known Soviet long-range bombers flying a reconnaissance

mission over Alaska.

March 27: Khrushchev becomes Soviet Premier in addition to being First Secretary of

the Communist Party.

March 30: Soviet Union suspends atmospheric nuclear testing.

May 22: Accidental explosion at Nike site NY-53 near Middletown, New Jersey,

destroyed 8 Nike Ajax missiles, kills 10 men, and injures 3 others.

June: First Titan I ICBM delivered; will replace Atlas missiles.

June 30: First U.S. Nike Hercules missile, with increased range capabilities, declared

operational.

October 1: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is formally

established.

42

October: U.S. and Britain suspend atmospheric testing.

November: Khrushchev delivers uhimatum: Begin East- West talks over the future of Germany (a reunified, neutral, denuclearized Germany) or face the permanent division of Germany; Khrushchev soon backs down. 1959

January 6: Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, becomes premier. March: Nike Hercules batteries at Fort Richardson, Alaska, become operational. April: Aleutian DEW Line stations become operational.

July 24: U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon visits the Soviet Union, takes on Khrushchev in the "kitchen debate" (while the two were touring a model kitchen) on the merits of capitalism vs. communism.

September: First successful launch of Minuteman solid- fuel ICBM booster rocket. September 9: Atlas ICBM becomes operational. September 13: Soviet spacecraft reaches the moon and crashes there. September 15: Khrushchev visits United States, meets Eisenhower at Camp David, and agrees to summit meeting in Paris, May 16, 1960.

December 1 : Antarctica Treaty signed in Washington; 1 2 nations agree to reserve Antarctica for scientific research, free from political and military uses. 1960

March: Eisenhower agrees to CIA proposal to train Cuban exiles to subvert Castro regime.

May 1: U-2 reconnaissance plane shot down over central U.S.S.R. Pilot Gary Powers is held by the Soviet Union. Khrushchev announces incident on May 5, after Eisenhower has issued a contradictory statement, thereby catching the president in a falsehood. May 16: East- West summit conference in Paris collapses over U-2 incident. May 24: U.S. launches Midas II satellite for military reconnaissance purposes. July 20: U.S. fires first ballistic missile from a submerged submarine off Cape Canaveral.

August 19: U-2 pilot Gary Powers sentenced by the U.S.S.R. to ten years in prison; he is exchanged for a Soviet spy in 1 96 1 . November 8: John F. Kennedy elected president.

December 20: Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Republic of Vietnam, organizes the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF). 1961

January 3: Eisenhower Administration breaks diplomatic relations with Cuba. January 17: Eisenhower warns of potential "unwarranted influence ... by the military- industrial complex" in his farewell address. January 20: John F. Kennedy inaugurated as president.

February: First successful launch of complete Minuteman ICBM, at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

March 13: Kennedy proposes the Alliance for Progress, a 10-year plan of economic aid to Latin America.

April 12: Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin is the first man to orbit the Earth. April 17: Bay of Pigs landing by more than 1,000 CIA-trained Cuban refugees fails in its attempt to "liberate" Cuba.

43

May 5: First American in space, Alan B. Shepard, makes suborbital flight aboard a

Mercury capsule.

May 11: Kennedy authorizes American advisors to aid South Vietnam against the forces

of North Vietnam.

May 25: Kennedy pledges to put man on the moon before decade ends.

June 3: Vienna Summit: Khrushchev reissues uhimatum to begin talks on Germany

within 6 months or face a permanent the division of Germany. Kennedy responds with

call for military buildup, beginning of civil defense program.

August 13: East Germany closes the Brandenburg Gate, sealing the border between East

and West Berlin in preparation for building the Berlin Wall.

September 1 : Soviet Union resumes atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

September 15: U.S. resumes underground testing of nuclear weapons.

1962

January 29: East- West Conference on Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests, begun in

October 1958, collapses in deadlock at Geneva.

February 20: John Glenn becomes first American to orbit the Earth.

April 25: United States resumes atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

October: Minuteman I became operational; ICBMs deployed in silos for blast protection.

October 14: U-2 flying over Cuba photographs Soviet bases capable of launching

nuclear missiles against U.S. cities, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis.

October 22: Kennedy armounces the naval "quarantine" of Cuba in response to the

construction of Soviet missile bases there. Kennedy warns that a nuclear attack launched

from Cuba would be considered a Soviet attack requiring full retaliation.

October 22: First flight of Minuteman ICBMs placed on operational alert at Malmstrom

AFB, Montana.

October 28: Khrushchev agrees to remove offensive weapons from Cuba and the U.S.

agrees to remove missiles from Turkey and end Cuban-exile incursions.

November 20: Kennedy announces end of Cuban blockade, satisfied that all bases are

removed and Soviet jets will leave the island by December 20.

1963

June 26: Kennedy visits West Berlin, declares American solidarity with residents in "Ich

bin ein Berliner" speech.

June 10: Kennedy, in speech at American University, calls for reconsideration of Cold

War as "holy war."

June 20: "Hot Line" established as a direct teletype link between the White House and

the Kremlin, to begin service on August 30.

July 24: Cuba seizes the U.S. embassy in Havana.

October 7: Kennedy signs Limited Test Ban Treaty. Britain, Soviet Union, and United

States agree to outlaw tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space.

October 11: Kennedy endorses his Commission on the Status of Women's report on

gender discrimination.

November 1 : South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem is assassinated.

November 22: President Kennedy is assassinated; Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson

becomes president.

1964

44

January 8: Lyndon Johnson calls for war on poverty and greater efforts on civil rights in

his first State of the Union Address.

February 2: Unmanned U.S. Ranger VI lands on the Moon.

July 2: Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1964.

July 18: Riots break out in urban ghettoes of New York City and Rochester, the first of

the series of African American riots.

August 2: Johnson orders immediate retaliation for the alleged North Vietnamese attack

on U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin.

August 7: Congress approves Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President power to

take "all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United

States, and to prevent further aggression."

September 27: Warren Commission report on the assassination of President Kennedy is

released; confirms no Soviet involvement.

October 15: Khrushchev is ousted, replaced by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin.

October 16: China detonates its first atomic bomb.

November 3: Lyndon B. Johnson elected president.

1965

March 8: First U.S. Marines in Vietnam wade ashore at Da Nang.

April: Last Atlas ICBMs are phased out; replaced by Minuteman missiles.

May 2: Johnson sends troops to the Dominican Republic to "prevent another Communist

state in this hemisphere."

November: Battle of the la Drang Valley, the first major clash between the U.S. and the

North Vietnamese Army.

November 29: Atomic Energy Commission conducts 80-kiloton underground nuclear

test. Long Shot, the first of three on Amchitka Island, Alaska.

December 24: U.S. forces in Vietnam number 184,300.

1966

January: ICBM Minuteman II, with improved accuracy, enters service.

February: Senate hearings on the Vietnam War chaired by Senator J. William Fulbright

begin.

March 25: Anti-Vietnam War rallies staged in seven United States and European cities.

April 30: Chinese Cultural Revolution begins with Chou En-lai's call for antibourgeois

struggle.

June 2: Sun^eyor I xmkQS perfect soft landing on moon.

December: U.S. forces number 362,000 in Vietnam.

1967

January 27: Outer Space Treaty limits military uses of space, signed by the U.S.,

U.S.S.R., and 60 other nations.

February 14: Treaty of Tlatelolco, signed in Mexico by all Latin American states except

Cuba, prohibits the introduction or manufacture of nuclear weapons.

June 17: China explodes its first hydrogen bomb.

October 18: Soviet Venus /^ probe lands on Venus.

December: U.S. forces in Vietnam number 485,000.

1968

January: Alexander Dubcek leads Prague Spring reforms in Czechoslovakia to bring

about "socialism with a human face."

45

January 30: Tet Offensive, attacks on South Vietnamese cities by North Vietnamese and

National Liberation Front troops.

March 16: My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

March 31: Johnson hahs bombing of North Vietnam (later resumed) and announces that

he will not seek re-election as president.

April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated.

June 5: Robert F. Kennedy assassinated.

July 1: Nuclear Arms Nonproliferation Treaty signed by the United States, U.S.S.R., and

58 other nations.

August 20: Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ends Dubcek experiment.

October 31: Johnson halts bombing of North Vietnam, invites South Vietnam and the

Viet Cong to Paris peace talks.

November 5: Richard M. Nixon elected president.

December: U.S. forces in Vietnam number 535,000.

1969

January 20: Richard M. Nixon inaugurated president.

March: U.S. bombing of Cambodia begins.

June 8: "Vietnamization" of war begins. Nixon orders first troops out of Vietnam. U.S.

forces number 475,200.

July: Nixon reaffirms U.S. commitment to defend its allies, but calls on Third World

nations to assume primary responsibility for their security (Nixon Doctrine).

July 20: Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin land on the Moon.

September 1 : Muammar Khadaffi comes to power after coup in Libya.

September 3: Ho Chi Minh, communist leader of North Vietnam, dies.

November 15: March on Washington draws record 250,000 antiwar protesters.

November 17: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) begin between U.S. and

U.S.S.R.

1970

February: Paris Peace Talks begin between U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger and North

Vietnamese diplomat Le Due Tho.

March 5: Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons between the U.S. and the

Soviet Union goes into effect, preventing transfer of nuclear weapons to nonnuclear

nations or production of nuclear weapons in those nations.

April 29: U.S. troops invade Cambodia.

May 4: Four Kent State University students killed by National Guardsmen while

protesting Vietnam War.

May 15: Two Jackson State College students killed by police while protesting Vietnam

War.

August: Minuteman III ICBM with multiple warhead capacity enters service in United

States.

September 15: Nixon authorizes U.S. -backed coup in Chile, according to a 1975 Senate

Intelligence Committee report.

December: U.S. forces in Vietnam number 334,600.

1971

February 15: The New York Times begins serial publication of the Pentagon Papers.

November 15: The People's Republic of China joins the U.N.

46

1972

February 17-27: Nixon visits China, pledges to withdraw U.S. forces from Taiwan. May 8: Nixon orders the mining of Haiphong Harbor and intensive bombing of all military targets in North Vietnam.

May 26: SALT I agreement signed restricting development of ABMs and freezing numbers of ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) in place for 5 years.

May 29: Nixon and Brezhnev sign agreement on the "basic principles of detente" which produces a relaxation on the tensions, recognizes the Soviet Union as the military- political policeman of Eastern Europe, and opens economic markets between the two countries.

June 17: Watergate burglary.

August 12: U.S. bombers deliver largest 24-hour bombing of the Vietnam War on North Vietnam.

October: Moscow Summit between Nixon and Brezhnev. November 7: Nixon reelected.

December 7: Apollo 77 makes final maimed lunar landing. December 13: Paris Peace Talks break down.

December 17-30: Linebacker II bombing of Hanoi and North Vietnam. December: Nixon orders renewed bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, North Vietnam. 1973

January 23: Nixon announces Vietnam War will end on January 28 and troops will be removed within 60 days.

January 27: Paris Accords establish cease-fire and political settlement of Vietnam War. March 29: Military Assistance Command Vietnam closes, last U.S. soldiers leave. May 11: East and West Germany establish formal diplomatic relations. August 15: U.S. bombing of Cambodia ends.

September 11: Chilean Government of Salvador Allende overthrown in a violent coup. Allende dies.

October 6: Yom Kippur War begins with Egypt and Syria fighting Israel. October 17: Arab oil producers begin embargo against the United States. November 6: War Powers Act passed by Congress limits power of president to wage undeclared wars. 1974

March 1: Indictment returned against seven former presidential aides in the Watergate conspiracy. Nixon named an unindicted co-conspirator. March 18: Arab oil embargo ends.

May 9: House Judiciary Committee opens presidential impeachment hearings. May 18: India announces it has held an underground nuclear test. July 27: House Judiciary Committee votes to recommend Nixon's impeachment. August 8: Nixon announces his resignation. August 9: Gerald Ford sworn in as 38th President. 1975

April: ABM: U.S. deploys Safeguard, an ABM system, at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota.

47

April 12: United States ends official presence in Cambodia as Marines evacuate

diplomats in wake of Khmer Rouge victory.

April 30: Saigon falls to North Vietnamese troops as Americans evacuate.

May 14: Ford orders rescue of cargo ship captured by Cambodian Khmer Rouge (the

Mayaguez incident).

July 17: U.S.-Soviet astronauts in Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft link up in space.

July: Helsinki Accords signed, pledging the United States and Soviet Union to accept

European borders, protect human rights, and promote freer transnational trade and

cultural exchanges.

December 21: Palestinian terrorists raid OPEC meeting in Vienna, killing three.

1976

May 28: U.S. and Soviet Union sign treaty limiting size and nature of underground

nuclear tests.

July 2: Socialist Republic of Vietnam is proclaimed.

July 20: Viking I robot spacecraft lands on Mars.

September 9: Mao Zedong dies, setting off succession struggle in China.

November 2: Jimmy Carter elected President.

1977

February 24: Carter aimounces linkage of foreign aid to human rights.

July 18: Vietnam admitted to U.N.

August 10: United States and Panama agree to transfer Panama Canal to Panamanian

control by year 2000.

1978

April 7: Carter announces postponement of neutron bomb production.

May 30: Carter recommends that NATO modernize and increase alliance's military

forces. Signals end of detente.

September 17: Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel, with Carter's

assistance, setting timetable to end the 30-year state of war between Israel and Egypt in

exchange for Israel's return of Sinai to Egypt.

October 16: Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla elected pope, the first Slavic pope in history;

adopts the name John Paul II. His election shocks and alarms Soviet leaders.

December 15: United States and China announce restoration of fiill diplomatic relations

on January 1 , 1 979.

1979

January 16: Shah of Iran flees Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile to

establish ftindamentalist Shiite government in Iran on February 26.

March 26: Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt sign Camp David

Peace Treaty in White House ceremony.

May 4: Margaret Thatcher becomes British prime minister.

June: Pope John Paul II makes triumphal visit to Poland, igniting nationalist and

religious fervor that highlights the moral bankruptcy of communism.

June 18: SALT II agreement to limit long-range missiles and bombers signed by Carter

and Brezhnev.

July: In Nicaraguan Revolution, leftist Sandinista forces overthrow Somoza dictatorship.

October 15: Civil war breaks out in El Salvador.

48

November 4: Iranian militants seize U.S. Embassy in Teheran, take 63 Americans

hostage, demanding return of Shah of Iran, then in United States for medical treatment.

December 4: Carter calls for a major military buildup to counter Soviet military power.

December 20: Soviet army invades Afghanistan. U.S. sanctions against the U.S.S.R.

include a grain embargo, decreased scientific and cultural exchanges, a boycott of the

1980 Moscow Olympic Games, and failure to ratify SALT II.

December: NATO announces "Dual-Track" deployment of intermediate-range nuclear

forces (INF) in Europe to counter Warsaw Pact SS-20 missiles.

1980

January: Carter Doctrine calls Persian Gulf a U.S. "vital interest."

April 24: U.S. military fails in attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, eight servicemen die in

crash.

July: Carter signs Presidential Directive 59 calling for capacity to wage limited and

protracted nuclear war.

September 19: Missile explosion in the silo at Titan II Launch Complex 374-7, Van

Buren County, Arkansas, kills one airman and injures another.

September 22: Solidarity labor union formed in Poland under leadership of Lech

Walesa.

November 4: Ronald Reagan elected president.

1981

January 20: Reagan inaugurated as Iranians release hostages.

January 26: Walesa leads Polish workers in illegal strike for 5-day workweek.

March 30: John Hinkley shoots Reagan in assassination attempt; Reagan has surgery and

survives.

April 12: Space shuttle Columbia makes maiden voyage, landing with wheels rather than

splashing down.

May 13: In St. Peter's Square, Mehmet Ali Agca shoots Pope John Paul II, who survives;

assassination attempt is quickly linked to Bulgarian intelligence, and Soviet complicity is

strongly suspected.

October 6: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat assassinated.

November: Protest over NATO INF deployment draws 400,000 in Amsterdam.

November 18: Reagan proposes significant reductions in strategic forces, called the

"zero option," which would eliminate an entire class of nuclear missiles.

December 13: Martial law imposed in Poland.

1982

April 2: Britain begins 74-day battle with Argentina for control of Falkland Islands.

May 9: Reagan outlines U.S. Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) proposal, to

reduce the number of ICBMs and arrive at verifiable agreement to reduce risk of war and

number of strategic nuclear weapons on both sides.

June 12: New York march against nuclear arms attracts 800,000 protestors.

June 29: START negotiations open in Geneva.

November 10: Leonid Brezhnev dies.

November 12: Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB, succeeds Brezhnev as General

Secretary of the Soviet Union.

1983

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March 23: Reagan proposes SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star

Wars) to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles.

April 6: Scowcroft Commission Report calls for modernizing U.S. strategic weapons,

undertaking negotiations leading to balanced arms control agreements with meaningful,

verifiable reductions.

May 24: Congress authorizes MX missile procurement and development.

July 21: Poland lifts martial law.

August 21: Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino is assassinated as he returns to

Manila from self-imposed exile.

September 1: Korean Air Flight 007 shot down by Soviet jet fighter in Soviet airspace.

All 269 aboard are killed.

October 23: Terrorist attack on U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, kills 241.

October 25: United States invades Grenada.

November 22: U.S. begins deployment of INF missiles (Pershing II) in West Germany

after protracted political fight.

December 28: U.S. withdraws from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific,

and Cultural Organization), charging mismanagement and political bias.

December: Soviet Union suspends START talks.

1984

February 7: American Marines withdraw from Lebanon.

February 9: Yuri Andropov dies.

February 13: Konstantin Chemenko succeeds Andropov as General Secretary of the

Soviet Union.

September 20: U.S. Embassy in Beirut bombed, killing 12.

September 24: Reagan proposes to U.N. General Assembly a broad "umbrella"

framework for U.S.-U.S.S.R. arms talks.

November 6: Reagan reelected.

November 22: U.S. and U.S.S.R. agree to new negotiations on nuclear and space issues.

1985

March 10: Konstantin Chemenko dies.

March 13: Mikhail Gorbachev succeeds Chemenko as General Secretary.

March 12: Nuclear and Space Talks (NST) open in Geneva, based on START proposals

of 1983.

September 9: Reagan announces economic sanctions against South Africa.

September 30: Soviet Union presents START proposal, which accepts for the first time

the principle of deep reductions in strategic offensive forces.

November 1: U.S. counters with new START proposal.

November 21: At the Geneva Summit, Reagan and Gorbachev issue joint statement on

cooperation in arms reductions with goal of 50 percent reductions of nuclear arms.

1986

January 15: Gorbachev proposes eliminating all nuclear weapons over next 15 years,

contingent on United States backing off SDI. Reagan applauds proposal, but won't

change position on SDI and supports principle of 50 percent reduction as agreed to in

1985.

January 28: Space shuttle Challenger accident kills all aboard.

April 11: U.S. launches air strike against Libya in retaliation for Libyan terrorist acts.

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April 26: Explosion and fire at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union

spreads radiation over large area.

October 11-12: Gorbachev-Reagan arms talks stall at the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland

over Reagan's refusal to limit SDI research and testing to the laboratory although

agreement is reached on other details.

November 4: First press revelations of the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan

Administration sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance Nicaraguan Contra

rebels.

December 22: Peacekeeper ICBM becomes operational.

1987

January 1: Gorbachev addresses Soviet citizens on arms race and threat of war. Reagan

addresses the Soviet people via Voice of America saying that the United States and

Soviet Union are "closer now than ever before ... to agreement to reduce nuclear

arsenals and have taken major steps toward permanent peace."

May 5: Last Titan ICBM Wing removed from alert status as the MX Peacekeeper enters

operation.

August 26: West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl states Germany will destroy its

Pershing missiles if United States and U.S.S.R. agree to destroy intermediate-range

nuclear missiles.

September 15: Nuclear Risk Reduction Center Agreement signed by the United States

and the Soviet Union to promote communication and confidence-building measures.

December 7-10: At the Washington Summit Meeting, Reagan and Gorbachev sign a

treaty eliminating INF and agree to work toward completing START agreement, if

possible for Moscow meeting in first half of 1988.

1988

January 14: NST resumes in Geneva with the United States and U.S.S.R. working on a

joint draft START treaty.

March 15: Oliver North, former National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter, and

Iranian- American arms dealer Albert Hakim are indicted on charges of diverting Iranian

arms sales proceeds to Nicaraguan Contras.

April 15: Soviet Union agrees to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by February 15,

1989, after seven years of peace talks.

May 29-June 1 : At the Moscow summit, Reagan and Gorbachev reiterate their

commitment to concluding the START treaty.

June 28: Gorbachev tells Communist Party leaders that key elements of Communist

doctrine are outdated; defends his proposals for change. Party attempts to relax its grip on

Soviet society in order to advance Gorbachev's Glasnost policies.

July 3: USS Vincennes shoots down Iran Air commercial flight, killing 290, after

mistaking plane for Iranian F- 1 4 fighter.

August 16: Pro-Solidarity strikes take place in Poland. Demonstrators demand that

government grant legal status to the union.

August: War in Angola ends, Cubans withdraw from Angola, South Africa from

Namibia.

September 29: Shuttle Discovery launched successfully, the first shuttle flight since the

Challenger disaster.

November 8: George H. W. Bush elected President.

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1989

April 5: Poland agrees to legalize Solidarity union.

April 17: "Pro-democracy" demonstrations begin in Beijing.

May: Gorbachev visits Beijing to normalize relations with China.

June 3-4: Chinese army assaults prodemocracy students in Tienanmen Square. Many

hundreds of students are killed.

September 22-23: Reciprocal Advance Notice of Major Strategic Exercises Agreement

signed as part of the Wyoming Ministerial by the United States and U.S.S.R. to prevent

inadvertent conflict arising from provocative military exercises.

September-December: Eastern European nations leave Soviet Bloc, renounce ties to

Moscow.

November 9: Berlin Wall is opened as hundreds of thousands of East Germans stream

into West Berlin to visit without restrictions.

November 10: Bulgarian president Todor Zhikov resigns after 35 years of hard-line

communist power.

December 2-3: Bush proposes the acceleration of START negotiations.

December 20: United States invades Panama.

December 22: The Romanian army overthrows President Nicolae Ceausescu; three days

later he and his wife are executed.

1990

February 26: Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega concedes defeat for his Sandinista

Front in popular elections, ending one-party Marxist rule of Nicaragua.

March 18: East German voters opt for German reunification and market-based economy.

May 2: South African government and African National Congress hold first talks in Cape

Town on ending white minority rule.

May 30-June 3: Washington, D.C., summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev.

July 24: SAC takes National Emergency Airborne Command Post ("Looking Glass")

aircraft off continuous alert duty.

August 2: Iraq invades Kuwait.

September 3: U.S. sends combat aircraft to the Middle East to help defend Saudi

Arabian allies from Iraq.

October 3: Two Germany s reunify into one nation.

October 15: South Africa bans racial discrimination in public accommodations only.

November: Treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe cuts East- West land armies.

November 28: Margaret Thatcher resigns as British prime minister.

December 12: Lech Walesa elected President of Poland.

1991

January 16: U.S. and international coalition attack Iraq in Gulf War.

March 3: Iraq accepts cease-fire terms.

July 31: Bush and Gorbachev sign START treaty, pledging to destroy thousands of

strategic nuclear weapons.

August 18-21: Coup attempt against Gorbachev fails, but power shifts to Russian

president Boris Yeltsin, who mounts a tank to denounce the coup.

September 1: Clark Air Force Base closes in the Philippines after a volcanic eruption.

September 18: All SAC bombers, tankers, and Minuteman II ICBMs removed from

alert. Minuteman Ills, Peacekeepers, and Navy SSBNs remain on alert.

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October: Gorbachev and Bush agree to major unilateral cuts in nuclear arms. December: Commonwealth of Independent States created in the former Soviet Union. December 25: Gorbachev resigns as Soviet president and transfers control of nuclear arsenal to Yeltsin. U.S. recognizes six independent republics: Armenia, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Russia, Ukraine. The Soviet Union no longer exists.

SOURCES:

Department of Defense Legacy Cold War Project. Coming in from the Cold: Military Heritage in the Cold War. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1994.

Gaddis, John Lewis. 77?^ Cold War: A New History. New York, NY: The Penguin Press, 2005.

Waddell, Karen. Cold War Historical Context, 1951-1991, Fort Richardson, Alaska, United States Army Alaska. Fort Collins, CO: Colorado State University, 2003.

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ASSOCIATED PROPERTY TYPES

This section is intended to assist agencies and individuals in identifying, documenting, and evaluating properties under the Cold War Sites context for possible designation as National Historic Landmarks (NHLs). This section is divided into two subsections. The first describes four broad property types that emerged from the historic contexts and properties identified during the course of the study, and the second provides registration requirements based on the NHL criteria as applied to the Cold War context and property types.

TYPES OF COLD WAR PROPERTIES

The Cold War began at the end of World War II as the great powers jockeyed for position and advantage in order to influence and dominate the postwar world. For approximately four and a half decades after the end of the war, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their respective allies confronted each other with strategies and tactics that created an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, in contrast with the certainty of a "hot" war. Both sides developed, tested, and deployed offensive and defensive missile networks. Each side evolved weapons and delivery systems. Each side challenged and provoked the other and gauged responses to blockades and the proximity of threatening missile sites. The Soviets and the United States each backed opposing sides in proxy wars or became directly involved themselves, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

During the course of the Cold War, the United States developed increasingly powerful nuclear weapons and more efficient and accurate delivery systems including aircraft, missiles, and submarines. Testing and production facilities likewise grew in complexity and size. To defend the nation, sophisticated early warning radar stations, surface and embedded missile sites, protected command and control centers, and large flight training centers were created and expanded. In addition, each President of the United States adopted and refined strategies for dealing with the Soviet threat: containment, tactical nuclear weapons, mutual assured destruction, detente, and the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars," among others. The threats, the defenses, and the strategies all interacted to create an environment of property types constructed to meet the nation's needs.

In this theme study, particular attention has been paid to the property types identified in the enabling legislation for consideration:

(i) Intercontinental ballistic missiles;

(ii) Flight training centers;

(iii) Manufacturing facilities;

(iv) Communications and command centers (such as

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado); (v) Defensive radar netv/orks (such as the Distant

Early Warning Line); (vi) Nuclear weapons test sites (such as the Nevada

test site); and (vii) Strategic and tactical aircraft

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Places associated with research and development will include laboratories. Examples already listed in the National Register of Historic Places or determined eligible for listing include Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos County, New Mexico; McKinley Climatic Laboratory, Okaloosa County, Florida; and Oak Ridge Historic District, Anderson County, Tennessee. Examples already designated as National Historic Landmarks include Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 , Idaho National Engineering Lab, Butte County, Idaho; and X-10 Reactor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Roane County, Tennessee.

Places associated with production and testing will include test sites, arsenals, and manufacturing facilities. Examples already listed in the National Register of Historic Places or determined eligible for listing include the Fort Hancock and Sandy Hook Proving Ground Historic District, Monmouth County, New Jersey; One-Million-Liter Test Sphere (Horton Test Sphere), Ft. Detrick, Frederick County, Maryland; and Rocky Flats Plant, Jefferson County, Colorado. Examples already designated as National Historic Landmarks include the B Reactor, Richland, Benton County, Washington; Eight- Foot High-Speed Tunnel, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia; and Full- Scale Wind Tunnel, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia.

Places associated with controlling and executing the national defense will include command and control centers, missile launch sites, flight training centers, military posts, depots and storage facilities, and defensive radar networks. Examples already listed in the National Register of Historic Places or determined eligible for listing include D-01 Launch Control Facility/D-09 Launch Facility, Ellsworth AFB (Minuteman Missile National Historic Site), Jackson/Pennington County, South Dakota; Nike Missile Site C47, Porter County, Indiana; Grand Forks Safeguard ABM Installation, Grand Forks County, North Dakota; Site Summit, Anchorage County, Alaska; Tierra Amarilla AFS P- 8 Historic District, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico; Titan II ICBM Launch Complex 374-7 Site, Van Buren County, Arkansas; Titan II ICBM Launch Complex 374-5 Site, Faulkner County, Arkansas; and Titan II ICBM Launch Complex 373-5 Site, White County, Arkansas. Examples already designated as National Historic Landmarks include Air Force Facility Missile Site 8 Military Reservation, Pima County, Arizona Fort David A. Russell (Francis E. Warren AFB), Laramie County, Wyoming; Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia; Space Launch Complex 10, Vandenberg AFB, Santa Barbara County, California; and USS Nautilus (submarine). New London County, Connecticut.

Places associated with politics and government will include office buildings, sites of significant public addresses, and residences. Examples already listed in the National Register of Historic Places or determined eligible for listing include the Greenbrier Hotel, Greenbrier County, West Virginia; and Little White House, Monroe County, Florida. Examples already designated as National Historic Landmarks include Eisenhower National Historic Site, Adams County, Pennsylvania; General George C. Marshall House, Loudoun County, Virginia; Greenbrier Hotel, Greenbrier County, West Virginia; Harry S Truman National Historic Site (Harry S Truman Historic District), Jackson County,

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Missouri; Kennedy Compound, Barnstable County, Massachusetts; Westminster College Gymnasium, Callaway County, Missouri; White House, Washington, D.C.; and Whitakker Chambers Farm, Carroll County, Maryland.

Preliminary List of Cold War-Related Property Types

Cold War-related property and resource types include buildings, sites, structures, objects, and districts.

Examples of buildings include houses, duplexes, barracks, bachelor officer quarters, apartment buildings, garages, motor pools, sheds, bath houses, latrines, hangars, railroad facilities, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, weapons and ammunition storage facilities, infirmaries, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, fire stations, laundries, recreational facilities, mess halls, bakeries, restaurants, theaters, armories, offices, guardhouses, radar stations, maintenance shops, carpenter shops, churches, chapels, schools, classroom buildings, laboratories, command and control bunkers, post exchanges, commissaries, communications facilities, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, gas stations, incinerators, artillery batteries, Quonset huts, air raid shelters, fallout shelters, post offices, and service clubs.

Examples of sites include archaeological sites, rifle ranges, artillery ranges, missile ranges, and atomic bomb test sites.

Examples of structures include mines, nuclear reactors, runways, launch pads, storage tanks, electric substations, power plants, pump houses, missile silos, railroads, ships and boats, submarines, aircraft, reservoirs, magazines, fences, running tracks, and baseball fields.

Examples of objects include monuments, missiles, and nose cones.

Examples of districts include residential areas, office complexes, missile launch facilities, manufacturing complexes, storage and warehousing complexes, and communication complexes.

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Registration Requirements for National Historic Landmark Designation

This section is intended to assist agencies and individuals in evaluating properties related to the Cold War for designation as National Historic Landmarks.

NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS

National Historic Landmarks relevant to the Cold War must be acknowledged to be among the nation's most significant properties associated with research and development, production and testing, controlling and executing the national defense, or politics and government. The association must have been established between the beginning of the Cold War (approximately at the end of World War II) and December 25, 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev signed the document officially disbanding the Soviet Union.

The thresholds for designation as a National Historic Landmark include national significance and a high degree of integrity. In addition, each property must be evaluated in comparison with other properties associated with the Cold War to determine their relative significance and integrity.

Any National Historic Landmark designated under this context must have a nationally

significant association with one or more of the important topics discussed in the historic

context. According to National Historic Landmark regulations (36 CFR 65.4 [a & b]),

the quality of national significance can be ascribed to districts, sites, buildings, structures,

and objects that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the

heritage of the United States in history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and

culture; that possess a high degree of integrity of location, design, setting, materials,

workmanship, feeling, and association; and that:

(Criterion 1 ) are associated with events that have made a significant contribution to, and

are identified with, or that outstandingly represent, the broad national patterns of United

States history and from which an understanding and appreciation of those patterns may

be gained;

(Criterion 2) are associated importantly with the lives of persons nationally significant in

the history of the United States;

(Criterion 3) represent some great idea or ideal of the American people;

(Criterion 4) embody the distinguishing characteristics of an architectural type specimen

exceptionally valuable for the study of a period, style, or method of construction, or

represent a significant, distinctive, and exceptional entity whose components may lack

individual distinction;

(Criterion 5) are composed of integral parts of the environment that are not sufficiently

significant by reason of historical association or artistic merit to warrant individual

recognition but that collectively compose an entity of exceptional historical or artistic

significance, or outstandingly commemorate or illustrate a way of life or culture; or

(Criterion 6) have yielded or may be likely to yield information of major scientific

importance by revealing new cultures, or by shedding light upon periods of occupation of

large areas of the United States. Such sites are those which have yielded, or which may

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reasonably be expected to yield, data affecting theories, concepts, and ideas to a major degree.

The following section provides suggestions for criteria and topics with which potential National Historic Landmarks might be associated. Examples of National Historic Landmarks already designated, and their association with the Cold War, also are given.

Criterion 1

In order to be eligible for designation under this criterion, properties must have played a

central role in nationally significant events.

Places associated with research and development might include laboratories and facilities designed for the testing of components. Places already designated as National Historic Landmarks that meet this criterion include the Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 , located at the Idaho National Engineering Lab, Butte County, Idaho, and the X-10 Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Roane County, Tennessee. The Experimental Breeder Reactor generated the world's first electricity from atomic energy and the X-10 was the first reactor built for continuous operation and experimentation.

Places associated with production and testing may include reactors, factories, arsenals, test sites, and similar facilities. Places already designated as National Historic Landmarks that meet this criterion include the Eight-Foot High-Speed Tunnel and the Full-Scale Wind Tunnel located at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. They were used before and during the Cold War to test scale models and full- scale high-performance aircraft. Space Launch Complex 1 0, Vandenburg Air Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, California, is also included; it was a Thor missile test site. The B Reactor at the Hanford site in Washington was the world's first production-scale nuclear reactor, constructed in 1943-1944, and produced the plutonium for the world's first nuclear test at the Trinity site and for the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan.

Places and resources associated with controlling and executing the national defense may include command and control centers, missile sites, flight training facilities, ships and aircraft, and military posts. Places and resources already designated as National Historic Landmarks that meet this criterion include the Air Force Facility Missile Site 8 Military Reservation in Pima County, Arizona; Fort David A. Russell (Francis E. Warren Air Force Base) in Laramie County, Wyoming; the Pentagon, in Arlington County, Virginia; Space Launch Complex 1 0, Vandenburg Air Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, California; and USS Nautilus, located in New London County, Connecticut. Site 8, Complex 1 0, and Warren Air Force Base were missile launch sites. The Pentagon is the nation's central military command facility. Nautilus was the world's first nuclear- powered submarine.

Places associated with politics and government may include dwellings, office buildings, and other facilities. Places already designated as National Historic Landmarks that meet this criteria include the Eisenhower National Historic Site near Gettysburg in Adams

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County, Pennsylvania; General George C. Marshall House in Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia; Westminster College Gymnasium in Callaway County, Missouri; the White House, in Washington, D.C.; and Whittaker Chambers Farm in Carroll County, Maryland. The Eisenhower Site, intended for his retirement home, was also where he met with world leaders including Nikita Khrushchev while president. The Marshall House is where the general lived while secretary of state, when he engineered the Marshall Plan. Whittaker Chambers concealed the infamous "Pumpkin Papers" at his Maryland farm. Former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech inside the Westminster College Gymnasium in 1946.

Criterion 2

Properties designated as National Historic Landmarks under this criterion must be

associated importantly with individuals who played central roles in the Cold War.

People whose associated places are likely to be eligible under this criterion in the area of research and development might include scientists. No such place meeting Criterion 2 has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

People whose associated places are likely to be eligible under this criterion in the area of production and testing are scientists, military figures, and industrialists. No such place meeting Criterion 2 has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

People whose associated places are likely to be eligible under this criterion in the area of controlling and executing the national defense might include political and military leaders. Places already designated as National Historic Landmarks that meet this criteria include the Eisenhower National Historic Site near Gettysburg in Adams County, Pennsylvania; General George C. Marshall House in Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia; and the White House, in Washington, D.C. They are associated, respectively, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with General and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and with all of the presidents who held office during the Cold War.

People whose associated places are likely to be eligible under this criterion in the area of politics and government might include political leaders. Places already designated as National Historic Landmarks that meet this criteria include the Eisenhower National Historic Site near Gettysburg in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and the White House, in Washington, D.C. They are associated, respectively, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and with all of the presidents who held office during the Cold War.

Criterion 3

Properties designated as National Historic Landmarks under this criterion must be associated importantly with national ideas and ideals of the highest order as they relate to the history of the Cold War.

Places that are likely to be eligible under this criterion might include sites that outstandingly represent presidential leadership, in terms both of crisis management and of inspiring the American people, during the Cold War. The place already designated as a

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National Historic Landmark that meets this criteria is the White House, in Washington, D.C. It was there that the presidents who held office during the Cold War planned strategies, addressed and inspired the American people, and managed such events as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Criterion 4

Properties designated as National Historic Landmarks under this criterion must be exceptionally important examples of architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, planning, or construction techniques. Such properties might include government buildings or complexes that were designed by nationally recognized architects or that played vital roles in the Cold War.

Places of surpassing architectural importance associated with research and development might include laboratories and similar facilities. No such place meeting Criterion 4 has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Places associated with the production of nuclear weapons materials (such as enriched uranium and plutonium) as well as the production and testing of weapons and other resources used during the Cold War might include arsenals, factories, and test sites. No such place meeting Criterion 4 has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Places and resources associated with controlling and executing the national defense may include command and control centers, missile sites, flight training facilities, and military posts. Places and resources already designated as National Historic Landmarks that may meet this criterion include the Air Force Facility Missile Site 8 Military Reservation in Pima County, Arizona; Fort David A. Russell (Francis E. Warren Air Force Base) in Laramie County, Wyoming; the Pentagon, in Arlington County, Virginia; Space Launch Complex 10, Vandenburg Air Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, California; and USS Nautilus, located in New London County, Connecticut. Site 8, Complex 10, and Warren Air Force Base were important (and almost the sole surviving) missile launch sites. The Pentagon is the nation's central military command facility, architecturally significant. Nautilus was the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, an exceptionally important example of advanced design.

Criterion 5

Districts that possess extraordinary historic importance under other criteria may be eligible for designation under this criterion as well, while districts whose primary significance is architectural are more likely to be designated under Criterion 4.

No district meeting Criterion 5 has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Criterion 6

This criterion applies primarily to archeological sites. To be eligible, a site must be shown to have data that will make or have already made major contributions to our understanding of the Cold War by resolving a substantial historical debate or by substantially modifying a major historical concept.

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No site meeting Criterion 6 has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Criteria Exceptions

Ordinarily, cemeteries, birthplaces, graves of historical figures, properties owned by religious institutions or used for religious purposes, structures that have been moved from their original locations, reconstructed historic buildings, and properties that have achieved significance within the past fifty years are not eligible for designation as National Historic Landmarks. If such properties fall within the following categories they may, nevertheless, be found to qualify:

(1) A religious property deriving its primary national significance from architectural or artistic distinction or historical importance;

(2) A building removed from its original location but which is nationally significant primarily for its architectural merit, or for association with persons or events of transcendent importance in the nation's history and the association consequential;

(3) A site of a building or structure no longer standing but the person or event associated with it is of transcendent importance in the nation's history and the association consequential;

(4) A birthplace, grave, or burial site if it is of a historical figure of transcendent national significance and no other appropriate site, building, or structure directly associated with the productive life of that person exists;

(5) A cemetery that derives its primary national significance from graves of persons of transcendent importance, or from an exceptionally distinctive design or an exceptionally significant event;

(6) A reconstructed building or ensemble of buildings of extraordinary national significance when accurately executed in a suitable environment and presented in a dignified manner as part of a restoration master plan, and when no other buildings or structures with the same association have survived;

(7) A property primarily commemorative in intent if design, age, tradition, or symbolic value has invested it with its own national historical significance;

(8) A property achieving national significance within the past 50 years if it is of extraordinary national importance.

Several of the Cold War-related sites that have been designated National Historic Landmarks have been designated under criteria exception 8, either specifically or in that they were less than fifty years old when designated. They include Air Force Facility Missile Site 8 Military Reservation in Pima County, Arizona; Fort David A. Russell (Francis E. Warren Air Force Base) in Laramie County, Wyoming; Space Launch Complex 10, Vandenburg Air Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, California; USS Nautilus, located in New London County, Connecticut; and Whittaker Chambers Farm in Carroll County, Maryland.

Themes

Several historical themes can be associated with the Cold War, based on the Revised Thematic Framework that the National Park Service adopted in 1 994. Derived from the historic context above, the themes include: IV. Shaping the Political Landscape; VI.

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Expanding Science and Technology; and VII. Changing Role of the United States in the World Community. These themes and others are outlined in History in the National Park Service: Themes and Concepts (1994).

Integrity

A high degree of integrity is essential for a property to be designated a National Historic Landmark related to the Cold War. The property must retain to a high degree the historic fabric that conveys its exceptional historical significance. Seven standards can be used to assess the integrity of a property: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.

Location is the exact place where a historic event occurred or where a historic property was constructed. A property associated with the Cold War will meet the standard of location if it is the actual site where something significant happened or if it is the place where a historic structure was built. Properties that have been moved may only be considered for designation if they meet the requirements of Exception 2 above.

Design includes the architectural features that establish the historic form, plan, space, structure, and style of a property. In districts, design reflects the way in which buildings, sites, and structures relate to each other. If essential design elements are lost in the process of rehabilitation or adaptive reuse, the integrity of the property will be reduced.

Setting relates to the environment in which a property is located. A building constructed in a rural location will have greater integrity of setting if the surroundings are still rural than if they have been enveloped by new structures.

Materials are the elements from which a structure is built. National Historic Landmarks need to retain a high degree of original materials, both on the exterior and on the interior.

Workmanship reflects the skill and labor required to construct a historic building or structure. Generally, good workmanship is appropriate to the type of structure, whether a modest dwelling, a missile site, or an architecturally sophisticated public building.

Feeling is a historic property's expression of the time in which it was constructed or used. Modem intrusions, surfaces, and treatments may adversely affect the historic feeling of a property.

Association is the direct link between an important historic event or person and a specific site. A site where a significant event actually occurred or where a creative person did his work will have a strong element of association if the property still conveys its historic character through the existence of other physical features.

Evaluation

Historic properties considered for designation as National Historic Landmarks must be evaluated against other comparable properties also associated with the Cold War. Through such evaluation, those that have the strongest association with the era, the

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highest level of significance, and a superior degree of integrity will be the best properties to be considered for designation.

For National Historic Landmark designation, an archeological property should possess the aspects of integrity described above to a high degree. The intactness of archeological deposits must be professionally demonstrated, to determine whether the site has the potential to yield data that may address nationally significant research questions. For further information for evaluating properties for National Historic Landmark designation, see National Register Bulletin: How to Prepare National Historic Landmark Nominations (1999).

If properties associated with the Cold War that are eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places are rare, those potentially eligible for designation as National Historic Landmarks are even rarer. Few sites would meet the significance criteria, and fewer still would retain the high level of integrity needed for designation. Careful research and evaluation will be needed to determine if, in fact, there are any such sites in existence.

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Methodology

The process for identifying properties associated with the Cold War Sites historic context began in June 2010 with letters from the historical consultant to State Historic Preservation Officers, Federal Preservation Officers, and Tribal Preservation Officers throughout the United States and its territories. The letters requested assistance in identifying properties associated with the Cold War. At the same time, research in secondary sources was conducted concerning the history of the Cold War, the development of the atomic bomb and the creation of the national nuclear weapons complex, and the research, development, testing, production, and deployment of the offensive and defensive missile systems, defensive radar networks, and military installations that defended the United States during the Cold War.

The Cold War, a global contest, went on for almost half a century. To wage it, the United States not only created an infrastructure of missile and radar sites that were later altered to support advances in technology, it also "retrofitted" older sites and military installations, adapting them for new uses such as training, bomb storage, and missile testing. As a result, while some Cold War sites were newly constructed during the period 1945-1991, others include elements of older facilities. In addition, since the end of the Cold War, many sites have been deactivated, destroyed, or turned over to cities, states, and developers for other uses.

In 1991, Congress directed the Department of Defense to conduct a nationwide survey of Cold War-related resources under its jurisdiction. That effort is ongoing and has resulted in a number of topical surveys, some of which have been released to the public and are listed in the Bibliography. Other surveys have been started but not completed; some have been completed but not released to the public. There are others whose status is uncertain. In addition, some state historic preservation offices have conducted similar surveys of Cold War properties within their states, or have received cultural resource management reports and surveys of Cold War resources at particular installations. In summary, then, there is no single, comprehensive survey of property types associated with the Cold War. Instead, there is a multiplicity of surveys and reports that vary widely in the comprehensiveness of their historic contexts and the degree of detail in their property inventories. Some of the reports and surveys are available on Web sites, while others can be seen only in state or federal agency libraries. Persons who wish to nominate properties to the National Register of Historic Places, or for designation as National Historic Landmarks, may therefore face numerous challenges in conducting research. In addition, properties may have been listed in the National Register or designated as National Historic Landmarks that have clear associations with the Cold War that were not part of the documentation for the nomination or the designation.

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National Historic Landmarks

The Secretary of the Interior has designated the following Cold War-related resources as National Historic Landmarks.

Air Force Facility Missile Site 8 Military Reservation, Pima County, Arizona (designated on April 1 9, 1 994)

This is the only remaining Titan II ICBM site, out of fifty-four that were operational between 1963 and 1987 during the Cold War. The site includes the liquid-fueled missile launch facilities and has retained or reacquired all of the above- and below-ground command and control components as well as the missile silo. Under provisions of the SALT I treaty, all of the Titan II missile sites except this one were destroyed over a five- year period beginning in 1982. The site is today the Titan Missile Museum and is open to the public.

B Reactor, Richland, Benton County, Washington (designated on August 19, 2008) The B Reactor at the Hanford site in Washington was the world's first production-scale nuclear reactor. It was constructed in 1943-1944 for the Manhattan Project and it produced the plutonium for the world's first nuclear test at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, and for the atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. The reactor served as the model for other nuclear reactors designed and constructed during the early years of the Cold War. The reactor is open for guided tours on specified dates between April and September.

Eight-Foot High-Speed Tunnel, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia (designated on October 3, 1985)

This wind tunnel was completed in 1936 under authority of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, to test scale models of aircraft as well as full-size aircraft parts. It was the most vibration- free wind tunnel in the world at the time of its construction. A 1 6,000-horsepower electric fan produced an airstream flowing at Mach .9, almost the speed of sound. The tunnel was used to test and perfect high- performance aircraft during World War II and the Cold War. It is now used for storage and is not open to the public.

Eisenhower National Historic Site, Adams County, Pennsylvania (designated on May 23, 1966)

Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, bought this farm near Gettysburg in 1950 as a retirement home. Service as NATO commander and president delayed their retirement plans, however. After Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, the farm served as the temporary White House as he recuperated. Throughout his presidency, he escaped to the farm whenever he could and met with staff and world leaders there, including Nikita Khrushchev during the Cold War. The Eisenhowers donated the site to the National Park Service in 1967. It has been open to the public since 1980.

Experimental Breeder Reactor No. I, Idaho National Engineering Lab, Butte County, Idaho (designated December 21, 1965)

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This facility generated the world's first electricity from atomic energy. Construction began in 1949 and the reactor was installed early in 1951. On December 20, 1951, experimenters harvested atomic energy for the first time and the next day the reactor produced enough electricity to light the facility. This was also the world's first breeder reactor and the first to use plutonium as a fuel. The reactor is open to the public between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Fort David A. Russell (Francis E. Warren Air Force Base), Laramie County, Wyoming (designated on May 15, 1975)

Francis E. Warren Air Force Base evolved from a frontier infantry and cavalry outpost in the 19th century to a strategic missile site during the Cold War. In 1960, Warren became the first fully operational Atlas ICBM squadron, and two years later, Minuteman I replaced the Atlas missiles there. Minuteman III missiles replaced the earlier models in 1975, and Peacekeepers arrived in 1986. Although the ending of the Cold War reduced the numbers of strategic missiles in the nation's arsenal, Warren remains the largest strategic missile site in the United States. The Warren ICBM/Heritage Museum is open to the public.

Fort Hancock and the Sandy Hook Proving Ground Historic District, Monmouth County, New Jersey (designated on December 17, 1982)

This historic district contains a variety of resources, not all of which are related to the Cold War. The district played a significant role in the development of advanced weaponry and radar, helped guard New York City and the harbor from 1895 to 1974, and is also the site of the Spermacetti Cove No. 2 Life-Saving Station, one of the earliest such stations established by the federal government.

Full-Scale Wind Tunnel, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia (designated on October 3, 1985)

The Full-Scale Wind Tunnel was designed to test actual aircraft, in contrast with the nearby Eight-Foot High-Speed Tunnel, which tested scale models and components. Completed in 1931, the tunnel was 440 feet long, 230 feet wide, and 95 feet tall. Aircraft were tested to calculate the air-drag penalties of exposed struts, rivet heads, wheels, and other components before, during, and after World War II. Today Old Dominion University uses the tunnel to improve the design of aircraft, automobiles, and trucks.

General George C. Marshall House, Loudoun County, Virginia (designated on June 1 9, 1996)

Known as Dodona Manor, this is the only house that George C. Marshall ever owned. His wife purchased it in 1941 to serve first as a weekend retreat and then as a retirement home after Marshall served as army chief of staff during World War II. Immediately after retiring from the Army, however, Marshall received a call at the house from President Harry S Truman asking him to serve as Secretary of State. Marshall is best known, in terms of his postwar career, as the architect of the European Recovery Program, called the Marshall Plan. Dodona Manor has been restored — many of the contributions toward its preservation came from gratefijl Europeans — and is open to the public.

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Harry S Truman National Historic Site (Harry S Truman Historic District),

Independence, Jackson County, Missouri (designated on November 11, 1971) The Truman house at 219 North Delaware Street, Truman's home from 1919 until his death in 1972), is the core of the site and district. Truman served as President of the United States from the death of President Franklin D. Rooseveh in 1945 until 1953 — the earliest years of the Cold War — and gave final authorization for the first and only uses of atomic weapons in warfare. The house is open to the public.

Kennedy Compound, Barnstable County, Massachusetts (designated on November 28, 1972)

The Kennedy Compound contains the three summer homes of President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and their father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. During John F. Kennedy's tenure as president, and while Robert F. Kennedy served as attorney general and his brother's principal advisor, several of the Cold War's most dangerous moments occurred, especially the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The houses are not open to the public.

Pentagon, Arlington County, Virginia (designated on October 5, 1992) Constructed in 1941-1942 to house the rapidly expanding War Department at the beginning of World War II, the Pentagon became the best-known symbol of American military might during the Cold War years. Constructed with 6,240,000 square feet of office space, it was then the largest such building in the world. Here the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have their offices.

Space Launch Complex 10, Vandenburg Air Force Base, Santa Barbara County, California (designated on June 23, 1986)

The launch complex was constructed in 1958 to test Thor ballistic missiles and train their military operators. From 1965 to 1980, the site supported early launches of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, using launch vehicles based on the Thor missile design.

USS Nautilus, New London County, Connecticut (designated on May 20, 1982) President Harry S Truman laid the keel of Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, on June 14, 1952, at Groton, Connecticut. Nautilus was launched on January 21, 1954, and got under way on nuclear power on January 17, 1955. On August 3, 1958, the submarine became the first vessel to sail under the North Pole. Nautilus was decommissioned on March 3, 1980. The submarine has been open to the public since April 11, 1986.

Westminster College Gymnasium, Callaway County, Missouri (designated on May 23, 1968)

In October 1945, President Harry S Truman invited former British prime minister Winston Churchill to give several lectures at Westminster College in Truman's home state of Missouri. Churchill traveled to the United States in February 1946, having planned a Florida vacation, then went by train from Washington to Missouri with Truman. On March 5, 1946, in the college gymnasium, Churchill delivered his speech, which was broadcast by radio throughout the United States. He had entitled the address "The

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Sinews of Peace," but a passage in which he proclaimed in reference to Soviet influence in Europe that "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent," it became known as the "Iron Curtain" speech.

White House, Washington, D.C. (designated on December 19, 1960) Presidents Harry S Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush directed American political and military strategy while in residence at the White House. There, also, they met with Soviet leaders, negotiated treaties and agreements, and worked their way through such events as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Oval Office was the scene of many important Cold War-related addresses by several presidents.

Whittaker Chambers Farm, Carroll County, Maryland (designated on May 17, 1988) Also known as Pipe Creek Farm, this was the home of the former Communist who played a key role in the conviction for perjury of Alger Hiss, a State Department official who attempted to pass secrets to the Soviet Union. Most famously. Hiss gave Chambers documents on a roll of microfilm that Chambers concealed in a hollowed-out pumpkin in the pumpkin patch on the farm; the documents became known as "The Pumpkin Papers" when Chambers turned them over to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. The farm is private property, not open to the public.

X-10 Reactor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Roane County, Tennessee (designated on December 21,1 965)

Constructed in 1942-1943, the X-10 was the first nuclear reactor built for continuous operation and experimentation. It went into operation on November 4, 1943, and used neutrons emitted in the fission of uranium-235 to convert uranium-238 into a new element, plutonium-239. The reactor supplied the first significant amounts of plutonium to the Los Alamos laboratory. After the war ended, X-10 became the world's first facility to produce radioactive isotopes for peacetime use, including radioisotopes to treat cancer and for other medical uses.

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National Historic Landmarks Study List

Based on research conducted for this theme study, these properties appear to have strong associations with nationally significant topics within the Cold War context, although their current documentation does not discuss the Cold War in detail. Further study of the Cold War-related sites inventory as it becomes available will likely uncover additional resources potentially eligible for designation.

Greenbrier Hotel, Greenbrier County, West Virginia (nuclear-war shelter for Congress, 1950s and later); designated a National Historic Landmark on June 21, 1990.

Harry S Truman National Historic Site, Jackson County, Missouri (Truman Home before, during, and after presidency, early 1950s); listed in the National Register of Historic Places on May 31, 1 985.

Kennedy Compound, Barnstable County, Massachusetts (John F. Kennedy Summer White House, 1960s); listed in the National Register of Historic Places on November 28, 1972.

Little White House, Monroe County, Florida (Truman Summer White House, 1 946- 1949); listed in the National Register of Historic Places on February 12, 1974.

Savannah, Newport News City, Virginia (nuclear-powered merchant marine vessel associated with the federal "Atoms for Peace" program, late 1950s); designated as a National Historic Landmark on July 1, 1991.

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Bibliography

This is a bibliography of secondary Hterature sources specifically related to inventories of Cold War-related sites, chosen in order to provide context for evaluating the relative significance of such sites and resources.

The first section lists general works that give overviews of the history of the Cold War; the evolution of the nuclear weapons complex, including the creation, manufacture, and testing of those weapons; and the evolution of the aircraft and ballistic missile systems designed to deliver nuclear weapons to their targets, as well as the missile and radar systems designed to defend the United States.

Inventories of Cold War-related sites in the United States are presented in the second section. The inventories were compiled as part of a nationwide survey of sites primarily related to national defense, training, radar, missile systems. Air Force bases, research and development, and Navy guided-missile and communications systems.

The third section lists selected cultural resource management site reports and publications on related subjects. These reports typically contain overviews of the Cold War era in which the facility was constructed; historic contexts specific to each facility; and inventories of the buildings, sites, structures, objects, and districts related to the facility.

The bibliography and inventory are necessarily works in progress and can never be "finaf because new studies and inventories are always forthcoming. Almost daily, new ones are completed, published, and posted to or removed from Web sites. The following listings include works available in one form or another as of early in 201 1 . Researchers are encouraged to search the Internet and to contact the relevant service branches, federal and state preservation offices, and military installations.

GENERAL

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list but rather a guide to selected works that provide a broad context for the Cold War era with regard to its history, weapons, and defense and delivery systems.

Berhow, Mark. U.S. Strategic and Defensive Missile Systems, 1950-2004. Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2005. The fixed-launch-site strategic and defensive missile systems of the United States are discussed and illustrated in this book.

Borstelman, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. The author describes how the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War affected each other not only in the United States but on the global stage as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence in the nonwhite nations of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Juxtaposing related events at home and abroad, Borstelman illustrates the clash between American ideals of freedom with the lack of their application in the United States.

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Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb 's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. The author discusses the diverse reactions to the emerging nuclear era between 1945 and 1950. Specifically, he describes how the Bomb affected moral, religious, literary, scientific, and philosophical beliefs in a short period of time.

Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Surxnval: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Random House, 1988. Bundy, who served under presidents Kennedy and Johnson as a national security advisor, describes the choices that United States and Soviet leaders made regarding the development and use of atomic weapons. Writing during the last stages of the Cold War, Bundy was critical of President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" defensive system proposals.

Craig, Campbell, and Fredrik Logevall. America 's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. This study explores the connection between the Cold War and American domestic politics and economics. The authors argue that the Cold War lasted as long as it did in part because of American insecurities that resulted in the exaggeration of external threats, which in turn lead to misadventures that were extremely costly in terms of treasure and lives.

Gaddis, John Lewis. Tlie Cold War: A New History. New York, NY: The Penguin Press, 2005. Gaddis, an eminent scholar of the Cold War, untangles the complex global history of the era in this concise study. The book provides a broad overview of the Cold War and the roles of American and Soviet leaders in its crucial events from the beginnings to the end.

Herkin, Greg. The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. The author discusses American policies toward the development and use of nuclear weapons from the last months of World War II to the decision to build the hydrogen bomb. He contends that nuclear weapons failed as bargaining chips in diplomacy and led to the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Herring, George. America 's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. The history of America's involvement in Vietnam, including its military, diplomatic, and political aspects, is the topic of this book.

Kwon, Heonik. 77?^ Other Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. According to the author, the global struggle known as the Cold War was not only a conflict between the two superpowers but also a simultaneous and slow dissolution of a complex political and social order that resulted in vicious civil wars that frequently had less to do with the global conflict than with local and regional changes.

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LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-96. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996. The author focuses on diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union and its role in the causes and consequences of the Cold War.

Leffler, Melvyn. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. In this study, the author traces the development of national security policy during the Truman administration as the president and his advisors sought to use American power to create a global environment compatible with American interests. They also endeavored to counter the serious threats posed by Soviet forces in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in part through such initiatives as the Marshall Plan, the promotion of economic recovery in Japan, and the commitment of troops to defend South Korea.

, and Odd Ame Westad, eds. Tire Cambridge Histojy of the Cold War. 3

vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. This expansive history is international in scope and presents the global dynamics of the Cold War in the evolving geopolitical, ideological, economic, and socio-political environment of the twentieth century. It discusses demography, consumption, women, youth, science, technology, ethnicity, and race as they relate to the Cold War.

Leonard, Barry, ed. History of Strategic Air and Ballistic Missile Defense, 1945-1972. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2005. This work analyzes the strategies that the United States and the Soviet Union each employed to defend against nuclear missile and aircraft attacks, and the missile and air defense systems that each side developed during the Cold War through 1972.

Loeber, Charles R. Building the Bombs: A History of the Nuclear Weapons Complex. 2nd ed. Albuquerque, NM: Sandia National Laboratories, 2005. This work gives a site- by-site history of the development of the nuclear weapons complex, including the research, testing, and manufacturing processes.

Logevall, Fredrik, and Andrew Preston, eds. Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969-1977. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. The authors describe the effects of hysterical anticommunism and American military actions overseas, including the deaths, financial costs, and destabilized nations that were the consequences of the Cold War. The policies of the era resuhed in the limiting of political debate, the authors argue, while placing the United States in the position of supporting repressive regimes.

Matlock, Jack. Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended. New York: Random House, 2005. The author, formerly an advisor to Reagan on Soviet and European affairs, offers an insider's view of the end of the Cold War and the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev. He concludes that Reagan's surprising flexibility and Gorbachev's essential humanity contributed largely to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the conclusion of the Cold War.

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May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 2008. The 1950s is typically viewed as a period of idealized domestic tranquility, but the fears and tensions of the Cold War cast a shadow over this supposedly happy scene. The author argues that the withdrawal into the security of the home was a response to the era's political insecurities and that the conservative social norms of the time were related to Cold War policies.

May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds. Tlie Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. In the summer of 1 962, President Kennedy had a taping system installed in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room. During the Cuban Missile Crisis that October, Kennedy secretly recorded the many meetings and conversations that occurred as the crisis evolved. The editors present a fascinating inside view of what may have been the most dangerous event of the Cold War, augmenting transcripts of the tapes with Soviet documents and the memoirs and notes of those involved.

Naftali, Timothy, and Aleksandr Fursenko. "One Hell of a Gamble ": Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964. New York: Norton, 1977. The authors, one of whom is an American scholar and the other a Russian, utilize recently opened Soviet archives to illustrate the iimer workings of the Politburo during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The result is the story of the crisis from the Soviet viewpoint.

Neufeld, Jacob. The Development of Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945-1960. Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1990. This book is in print, and is also available on line at the Air Force Historical Studies Office Web site, http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af mil/Publications/fulltext/ballistic_missiles_in_the_usaf pdf Neufeld focuses on the first generation of ballistic missiles (Atlas, Titan, and Thor), and describes the difficult technological competition with the Soviets. The Air Force also had to overcome interservice rivalries, budgetary constraints, administrative complications, and engineering problems. This first series of long-range strategic missiles was the forerunner of the modem U.S. nuclear arsenal, especially Minuteman and cruise missiles.

Sarotte, Mary. 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. The author argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany basically reestablished a new version of the Cold War status quo — ^N ATO versus post-Soviet Russia instead of the West versus the Soviet Union. She credits West German chancellor Helmut Kohl as the man who outmaneuvered other leaders to annex East Germany through adroit diplomacy and offers of aid to the collapsing Soviet economy.

Schaffel, Kenneth. 77?^ Emerging Shield: The Air Force and the Evolution of Continental Air Defense, 1945-1960. Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force Office of Air Force History, 1991 . This book is in print, and is also available on line at the Air Force Historical Studies Office Web site, http://www.airforcehistorv.hq.afmil/Publications/Annotations/schaffelemerging.htm. It

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traces the development of defenses to counter bomber attacks, the primary nuclear weapons delivery system before the advent of ICBMs in the 1960s. By the end of the 1950s, the defenses included an early warning radar network stretching across Alaska and Canada, as well as radar picket ships, ocean platforms, and ground observers. Defensive weapons included antiaircraft artillery and air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles. A computer-driven command and control system coordinated the defensive array. Over the decade, the defensive network, weapons, and control system evolved to meet new Soviet challenges until ICBMs became the principal threat.

Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarihyism in America. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1998. This study expands the concept of McCarthyism beyond merely the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy to include various professional anticommunists who maneuvered federal officials into adopting their crusade to confound dissent with disloyalty.

Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Detente has been considered a strategic Western approach to Soviet power—agreeing to maintain the status quo to avoid instability. The author contends that social unrest in capitalist nations such as the United States and France as well as in communist countries such as China and Russia resulted in leaders everywhere withdrawing or withholding political power from the public, or applying the principles of detente internally as well as internationally.

Titus, A. Costandina. Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics. Rev. ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. This volume, which first appeared in 1 986 and has been updated, focuses primarily on the Nevada Test Site and vicinity. It examines the effects of nuclear testing (especially radiation) affected the health of not only military personnel but also civilians and livestock downwind of the test site. The book also examines how the government, specifically the Pentagon, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the courts failed to inform, protect, and compensate the victims of atomic testing.

Wamock, A. Timothy, Daniel L. Haulman, Forrest L. Marion, and Jeffrey P. Sahaida (Frederick J. Shaw, ed.) Locating Air Force Base Sites: History 's Legacy. Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museum Program, 2004. Available as a PDF file at the WorldCat Web site, http://www.worldcat.org/title/locating-air-force-base-sites-historvs- legacv/oclc/3 1 8682361 ?title=&detail=&page=frame&urHhttp%3 A%2F%2Fhandle.dtic. mil%2F100.2%2FADA476351%26checksum%3Decd08bea0186ca2fdb745dfdbb5738c7 &linktvpe=digitalObiect. This work consists of a historic context tracing the history of Air Force bases from 1907 to 2003 and documents their changes in function over time. The historic context is divided into four chronological chapters (1907-1947; 1947-1960; 1961-1987; 1988-2003), with the middle two devoted to the Cold War era.

Westad, Odd Ame. Tlie Global Cold War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. The author shows how the global Cold War of the twentieth century laid the foundations for most of the next century's international conflicts, including the "war on

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terror." Because the United States and the Soviet Union alike practiced interventionism in the Third World, they produced resentments that constitute the true legacy of the Cold War.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE COLD WAR RESOURCES INVENTORY Most of the service-wide inventories and contexts listed below were compiled under the auspices of the Department of Defense Legacy Resource Management Program, which the Defense Appropriations Act of 1991 established. One of the program's nine task areas is the Cold War Project, which seeks to "inventory, protect, and conserve [DoD's] physical and literary property and relics" associated with the Cold War. Some of the inventories and contexts were compiled as special projects by other federal agencies, or under the mandates of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Documents devoted to guidance concerning resource management and recordation are also included. Some of these reports can be found on the Internet, while others are in the files of federal or state historic preservation offices, or at the respective bases. Some may be found in libraries listed on the WorldCat Web site, http://www.worldcat.org,, or for sale by the publishers, Amazon, or other book dealers.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 1 1, 2001, however, the Department of Defense and the armed services have reconsidered whether all of the information in these inventories should be publicly available. In some cases, it is likely that the researcher will find that inventories formerly available on the Internet are no longer available, or that certain sections or chapters have been redacted.

Best, Brooke V., Katherine Grandine, and Stacie Y. Webb. Navy Cold War Communication Context: Resources Associated with the Navy 's Communication Program, 1946-1989. Frederick, MD: R. Christopher Goodwin and Associates, 1997. Available as a PDF file at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Web site,

www.poital.navfac.naw.mil. The study contains chapters on methodology, the history of the Navy's role in the Cold War communication program between 1946 and 1989, and property types associated with the Navy's shore-based communication program. It also includes a bibliography and an inventory of 37 sites associated with the communication program during the Cold War. Each entry includes the site name and location as well as a brief narrative history.

Best, Brooke V., Eliza H. Edwards, and Leo Hirrel. Navy Cold War Guided Missile Context: Resources Associated with the Navy 's Guided Missile Program, 1946-1989. Frederick, MD: R. Christopher Goodwin & Associates, Inc., 1995. Available as a PDF file at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Web site, www.portal.navfac.navv. mil. The context contains sections on methodology, a chronological overview, theme studies, property types, evaluation criteria, and treatment options. The study also contains a bibliography and several appendices, including an inventory of 39 installations associated with the Navy's Cold War guided-missile program, arranged alphabetically by state. Each entry gives the installation name and locafion, the period of significance, relevant themes, and a narrative overview of the installation and its functions.

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Department of Defense Legacy Cold War Project. Coming in from the Cold: Military Heritage in the Cold War. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1994. Available for download on the U.S. Military Liaison Mission Association Web site, www.usmlm.org/home/coldwar/coldwar.html. This report discusses the formation of the Cold War Task Area and its progress in fulfilling the mandates of the Defense Appropriations Act of 1991 for inventorying DoD Cold War sites and resources. At the end of the document is a useful time line of the Cold War through 1991 .

. Interim Guidance: Treatment of Cold War Historic Properties for U.S. Air

Force Installations. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1993. Available as a Word document on the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment Web site, http://www.afcee.af mil/shared/media/document/ AFD-070828- 060.doc. This publication gives guidance for the treatment and preservation of Cold War properties, and includes a preliminary list of property types.

Gaither, Steve. Looking Between Trinity and the Wall: Army Materiel Command Cold War Material Culture within the Continental United States, 1945-1989. Piano, TX: Geo- Marine, Inc., 1997. Available as a PDF file at the Air Combat Command (ACC) library, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia; also available as a PDF file at the Scribd Web site, http://www.scribd.com/doc/40 171141 /Trinity-and-the-Wall. The study contains a Cold War historic context, a history of the Army Materiel Command and its predecessors, and the themes associated with the AMC during the Cold War. An appendix lists 3 1 3 Army Materiel Command-related sites, including housing areas, command centers, depots, arsenals, and manufacturing facilities.

Gregory, Carrie J., and Martyn D. Tagg. Recording the Cold War: Identifying and Collecting Cold War Resources Data on Military Installations. Tucson, AZ: Statistical Research, Inc., 2008. Available as a PDF file at the DoD Environment, Safety and Occupational Health Network and Information Exchange Web site, http://www.denix.osd.mil/cr/upload/07-285_Final.pdf This is a Department of Defense Cold War Legacy project (07-285) to assist in identifying facilities and documentation, creating a systematic approach to compiling and analyzing data, and assessing costs for each project. For the purposes of the study, four Air Force bases were identified and analyzed: Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ; Hill AFB, UT; Kirtland AFB, NM; and Vandenberg AFB, CA. The introduction offers a useful history of the Legacy program and includes a list of contexts and inventories that had been completed by 2008.

Hoffecker, John F., Mandy Whorton, and Casey R. Buechler. Cold War Historic Properties of the 21st Space Wing, Air Force Space Command. Pensacola, FL: Cold War Workshop, Eglin Air Force Base, 1996. Available as a PDF file on the Department of Energy Scientific and Technical Information Web site at

http://www.osti.gov/bridge/purl.cover.isp;isessionid=lB6E0E3B09E22469AD7C1339D D237CFE?purl=/2 1 1 543-ifJ7vE/webviewable/. This brief ( 1 5-page) report describes generally the historic contexts and facilities at several air stations and bases: Cape Cod

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AS (MA), Cavalier AS (ND), Clear AS (AK), Eldorado AS (TX), Peterson AFB (CO), and Thule AB (Greenland).

Isemann, James L. "To Detect, To Deter, To Defend: The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line and Early Cold War Defense Policy, 1953-1957." Ph.D. Diss. Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University, 2009. Available as a PDF file at the Kansas State University Web site, www.krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/2097/2 161/1 /J ameslsemann2009.pdf This dissertation discusses the planning and construction of the system, which was designed ostensibly to protect the civilian population but more importantly to safeguard the Strategic Air Command's retaliatory-strike bombers. The chapter on construction contains descriptions, plans, and photographs of some of the main, auxiliary, and intermediate DEW Line stations.

Kuranda, Kathryn M., Katherine E. Grandine, Brian Cleven, Thomas W. Davis, and Nathaniel Patch. Historic Context for Army Fixed-Wing Airfields, 1903- J 989. Frederick, MD: R. Christopher Goodwin & Associates, 2002. Available as a PDF file at the Air Combat Command (ACC) library, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia; also available as a PDF file at the DoD Environment, Safety and Occupational Health Network and Information Exchange Web site, http://www.denix.osd.mil/cr/upload/Armv-Airfield- Historic-Context.pdf The study contains a historic context for Army aviation from the earliest days through the end of the Cold War, focusing on changes in aircraft technology and airfield development. Selected property types at various bases are described and their integrity is discussed. Property types include landing fields, landing aids, radio buildings, operations buildings, flight control towers, fire stations, hangars and maintenance buildings, paint shops and storage buildings, general storage buildings, parachute buildings, aerial photography buildings, aircraft fiiel storage facilities, and wash racks. Five case studies are offered in an appendix (Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD; Fort Hood, TX; Fort Rucker, AL; Fort Sill, OK; and Fort Stewart, GA), and another appendix lists sixty-five currently (200 1 ) active Army airfields nationwide.

Kuranda, Kathryn M., Katherine E. Grandine, and Deborah K. Carman. Support and Utility Structures and Facilities (1917-1946): Oveniew, Inventory, and Treatment Plan. Frederick, MD: R. Christopher Goodwin & Associates, 1995. Prepared for the Department of the Navy. Available as a PDF file at the Air Combat Command (ACC) library, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia; not available on line. This study describes and inventories structures and facilities at both Navy and Army installations. Although most of the resources predate the Cold War, their use continued into the Cold War era.

Lavin, Mary K. Thematic Study and Guidelines: Identification and Evaluation of U.S. Army Cold War Era Military-Industrial Historic Properties. Fairfax, VA: Home Engineering, 1998. Available as a PDF file at the Defense Technical Information Center Web site, http://www.dtic.mil/cai-

bin/GetTRDoc?AD-ADA353034«S:Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf The study contains a historic context of the Army's military-industrial history during the Cold War to provide the overview necessary to identify, evaluate, and manage the Army's Cold War-related resources. Property types and facility types are identified, a list of Army

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posts is provided, and two time lines note the changes in the Army's organization and major events and Army activities during the Cold War.

Lewis, Karen, Katherine J. Roxlau, Lori E. Rhodes, Paul Boyer, and Joseph S. Murphey. United States Air Force Air Combat Command and the Legacy of the Cold War: A Systemic Study of Air Combat Command Cold War Material Culture. Laramie, WY: TRC Mariah Associates, Inc., 1995. Prepared for Headquarters, Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, and available at the ACC library as a PDF file containing three volumes; not available on line. The first volume contains a historic context of the Cold War and its effects on the United States, especially on the nation's air defense system. The second volume contains baseline inventories of Cold War material culture at twenty-seven Air Force bases {see also Karen J. Weitze, Cold War Infrastructure for Air Defense: Tire Fighter and Command Missions below). The bases are: Barksdale AFB, LA; Beale AFB, CA; Cannon AFB, NM; Castle AFB, CA; Davis- Monthan AFB, AZ; Dyess AFB, TX; Ellsworth AFB and Badlands AFR, SD; Fairchild AFB, WA; Griffiss AFB, NY; Holloman AFB and Melrose AFR, NM; Homestead AFB, FL; Howard AFB and Balboa AFR, Panama; K. L Sawyer AFB, MI; Langley AFB, VA; Little Rock AFB, AK; Loring AFB, ME; MacDill AFB and Avon Park AFR, FL; McConnell AFB, KS; Minot AFB, ND; Moody AFB and Grand Bay AFR, GA; Mountain Home AFB and Saylor Creek AFR, ID; Nellis AFB, NV, and Cuddeback AFR, CA; Offutt AFB, NB; Pope AFB, NC; Seymour Johnson AFB and Dare County AFR, NC; Shaw AFB and Poinsett AFR, SC; Whiteman AFB, MO. The third volume contains a summary report and final programmatic recommendations relating to the resources on each base that are potentially eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.

Lonnquest, John C, and David F. Winkler. To Defend and Deter: The Legacy of the United States Cold War Missile System. Washington, DC: Department of Defense, Legacy Resource Management Program Cold War Project, 1 996. Available as a PDF file at the WorldCat Web site, http://www.worldcat.org/title/to-defend-and-deter-the-legacv- of-the-united-states-cold-war-missile-

program/oclc/227865728?title-&detail=&page-frame&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhandle.dti c.mil%2F100.2%2FADA337549%26checksum%3D541e88d6c79780fda5a3ea237e2099 78&linktvpe=digitalObiect. The study contains a history of the Cold War missile system, descriptions of the various defensive and ballistic missile systems, a history of missile development and deployment sites, a chronology, a bibliography, and a state-by-state inventory of intercontinental ballistic missile and air defense missile sites. Each inventory entry includes the site name, missile type, installation, site location, military service branch, dates of active service, and current status (as of 1996).

Louis Berger Group, Inc. Historic Context Statement: The United States Na\y in the Cold War. Draft. Morristown, NJ: Louis Berger Group, Inc., 2009. Available as a PDF file at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Web site, www.portal.navfac.navv.mil. This report was compiled in compliance with provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1 966 and contains a two-part historic context. The first section is an overview of the Cold War and the role of the Chief of Naval Operations in the Navy's

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approach to countering the Soviet threats. The second section focuses on the Navy's strategic responses to developments in terms of the "platforms" employed for deterrence, control of the seas, communications, and intelligence. The appendix presents a list of property types (excluding objects such as aircraft, missiles, and vessels) and recommendations for evaluating integrity and National Register of Historic Places significance.

Morgan, Mark L., and Mark A. Berhow. Rings of Supersonic Steel: Air Defenses of the United States Army J 950-1 979, An Introduction And Site Guide. 2nd ed. Bodega Bay, CA: Hole in the Head Press, 2002. This study is available from the publisher; a 3rd edition is forthcoming. An excerpt from the book may be seen on the Google Books Web site at

http://books.google.conVbooks?id=vagliMKPYrkC&pa=PP3&dq=Mark+Morgan+Nike+ Quick+Look&hl=en&ei=LFtUTeTlGsqr8AaAk8D6CA&sa=X&oi=book result&ct=resu lt«S:resnum=l&sqi=2«S:ved=0CDYO6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Mark%20Morgan%20Nik e%20Ouick%20Look&f=false. The extract contains historic contexts for various installations as well as photographs, maps, diagrams, and other graphic materials.

Morrison, Dawn A., and Susan I. Enscore. The Built Environment of Cold War Era Senicewomen. Washington, DC: Department of Defense, Legacy Resource Management Program Cold War Project, 1996. Available as a PDF file at the WoridCat Web site, http://www.worldcat.org/title/built-environment-of-cold-war-era-

servicewomen/oclc/227900613?title=«fedetail=&page=frame&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fhand le.dtic.mil%2F100.2%2FADA455179%26checksum%3D3fc814ffD6766e54833556f4e4a 23de9&linktvpe=digitalObiect. The study presents a service-wide historic context showing how the accommodation of women into the armed services affected the military's built environment. It presents several property types, largely related to housing, and includes plans and drawings.

Murdock, Scott D., Mikel Travisano, Marsh Prior, and Julian Adams. Ch'er-the-Horizon Backscatter Radar NetM'ork: Maine, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Seattle, WA: Historic American Engineering Record, 2008. HAER No. ME-98. Available as a PDF file at the Air Combat Command (ACC) library, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia; not available on line. This study contains photographs, historic contexts, descriptions, and significance statements for buildings and other radar facilities.

Pedrotty, Michael A., Julie L. Webster, and Aaron R. Chmiel. Historical and Architectural Overview of Military Aircraft Hangars; A General History, Thematic Typology, and Inventory of Aircraft Hangars Constructed on Department of Defense Installations. Champaign, IL: U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, 1999. Prepared for Headquarters, Air Combat Command (ACC), Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. The study's objectives were to identify and describe principal hangar types constructed before 1 996; to document the origins, locations, and numbers of hangars; and to provide a context for understanding the aviation and construction history of the major hangar types. The report includes a historic context through the Cold War era, a database of military hangars, and standard hangar drawings. As of January 2010,

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the Introduction, Chapter 1 (The Early Years), Chapters 5-7 (The Cold War; Military Hangar Typology, and Conclusions and Recommendations), Appendix A (Military Hangar Database) and Appendix C (Abbreviations and Acronyms) are available as a PDF file at the Federation of American Scientists Web site, http://www.fas.org/man/dod- 101/usaf/docs/webster/index.html. Chapters 2^ (The First World War, The Interwar Years, and The Second World War) and Appendix B (Standard Hangar Drawings) are not yet on line. The hangar database (Appendix A) includes Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy installations nationwide. The database is presented twice: sorted alphabetically by service and location; sorted by date of construction through 1996.

Shiman, Philip, and Julie L. Webster. Forging the Sword: Defense Production during the Cold War. Champaign, IL: U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories, 1997. Available as a PDF file at the WorldCat Web site,

http://www.worldcat.org/title/forginR-the-sword-developing-leaders-for-the-air- operations-

center/oclc/7426 1 2 1 2?title=&detail=&page-frame&urHhttp%3 A%2F%2Fhandle.dtic.mi l%2F100.2%2FADA420573%26checksum%3Dbe6a3cc4c87cec913262d7d90d70c273&l inktvpe=digitalObiect. Written under the auspices of the Cold War Task Area, this work provides a historic context for the defense industry from its expansion for World War II through the end of the Cold War. It includes a bibliography and a state-by-state inventory of 64 DoD-owned industrial facilities. Each inventory entry gives the facility's name and location, a brief history including changes in fiinction or product, and a list of sources.

Temme, Virge J. For Want of a Home: A Study of Wherry and Capehart Military Family Housing. Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD: Army Environmental Center, 1998. This historic context study is available from the U.S. Army Environmental Center, ATTN: SFIM-AEC- CDC, 5179 Hoadley Road, Aberdeen PG, MD 21010-5401, and is not posted online. It was written as part of the 1990s Department of Defense review of the history of the Cold War era. The U.S. Army contracted with the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to prepare this study of Wherry and Capehart housing at military installations nationwide. The buildings were constructed during the period 1949-1964 in a military-private partnership with development firms, to provide desperately needed housing for military families. During the programs' lifespan, about 250,000 units were constructed; about 175,000 remained in existence in 1994.

Thompson, Scott, and Martyn D. Tagg. Identification and Categorization of Cold War- Era Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation Property Types. Tucson, AZ: Statistical Research, Inc., 2007. Prepared for Headquarters, Air Force Materiel Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH, and available at the Headquarters, Air Combat Command (ACC), Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, library as a PDF file. It is also available on line at the DoD Environment, Safety and Occupational Heahh Network and Information Exchange Web site, www.denix.osd.mil/cr/upload/04-2 1 1 -Cold-War- RDT-E.ppt. This is a Department of Defense Cold War Legacy project (04-21 1) to advise in identifying and classifying research, development, testing, and evaluation

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(RTD&E) property types to supplement the types listed in the 1993 DoD publication, Interim Guidance: Treatment of Cold War Historic Properties for U.S. Air Force Installations (noted above). For this study, the authors conducted research to identify property types (buildings, structures, and sites) at nine Air Force, Army, and Navy installations: Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD; Arnold AFB, TN; Dugway Proving Ground, UT; Edwards AFB, CA; Hill AFB, UT; Holloman AFB, NM; Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake, CA; Wright-Patterson AFB, OH; and Yuma Proving Ground, AZ. The resulting list of property types is to be used at all DoD RTD&E installations for consistent categorization as future inventories of Cold War-era resources are undertaken.

Weitze, Karen J. Cold War Infrastructure for Strategic Air Command: The Bomber Mission. Sacramento, CA: KEA Environmental, Inc., 1999. Prepared for Headquarters, Air Combat Command (ACC), Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, and available at the ACC library as a PDF file; not available on line. This