THE WAR OF THE WORLD

PROGRAMME 5: THE ICEBOX

PROGRAMME AIMS

The programme should enable students to:

• Understand the Cold War between the USA and Soviet Union
• Realise the role of these superpowers in third world conflicts
• Appreciate the role of ethnicity in the violence in the third world
• Assess the significance of the Cuban Missile Crisis
• Use film evidence to learn about the past.

BACKGROUND

The Cold War between the Soviet Union and America from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s is the focus for this programme. Niall Ferguson describes how, despite the fact that nuclear war never happened in this period, horrendous wars took place all over the third world, sponsored by the superpowers as a kind of proxy Cold War.

Niall begins his examination in the 1950s and '60s, with the world gripped by the fear of a third world war on an unprecedented scale. The Soviet Union and USA were engaged in a nuclear arms race, and he uses the term 'Brinkmanship' to describe the 'game of chicken' between the two countries as each built up their nuclear missile capacity and kept up a continuous threat. With American missiles based in Turkey, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, wanted a matching missile capacity within range of the USA, so he used Cuba, a communist country led by Fidel Castro, as its base. In the USA and Soviet Union, nuclear capacities were put on red alert and this Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. In the end, both sides agreed to withdraw their missile sites in Cuba and Turkey.

Although the Cold War itself involved no actual conflict, Niall argues that the Cold War was carried out by proxy within the third world, as both superpowers backed governments and political groups with similar ideologies to their own. In Korea and Vietnam the superpower troops fought directly, whereas in other third world countries, the fighting was between local groups, each of whom had backing from either the Soviet Union or America.

For example, seeing Guatemala as a tool of Moscow, the American CIA backed anti-government rebels who overthrew the Communist government, and the USA openly warned the Soviet Union to stay out of 'their region'. By the mid-1960s, paramilitary death squads were torturing and killing thousands of left-wing opponents in what came to be called 'Operation Clean Up'. As with previous 20th-century violence, ethnicity was just as important as political ideology, with those murdered tending to be from the lower classes – mainly the landless indigenous population.

Much the same violence was happening in other parts of Latin America – such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay – with the same superpower involvement.

Niall also shows us the change of US tactics that took place from the late 1960s as President Nixon, with the support of Henry Kissinger, began to replace proxy wars with diplomacy. We see footage of Nixon and Kissinger's state visit to China in 1972, which was hailed by the Americans as a triumph. As relationships between the two countries forced the Soviets to the negotiating table, Nixon and Breshnev signed two arms-control pacts and Nixon used the famous phrase, 'This was the week that changed the world.'

Finally we learn of the horrific brutality of the Khmer Rouge and its leader Pol Pot in Cambodia, another Cold War by proxy, in which 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died.