Less than a year later, on 12 August 1953, the Soviets did indeed test their own H-bomb. The race continued. In March 1954 the Americans detonated a lithium-based hydrogen bomb, the fallout spattering a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, eighty-two miles away. The unlucky crew members fell ill, one eventually dying. In October 1961 the Soviet Union successfully tested the world’s largest bomb – a single explosion that exceeded all explosives used throughout the whole of the Second World War.
The US, concerned over a perceived ‘missile gap’, increasingly used spy planes over Russia to gather information on the strength of the Soviet nuclear capacity. Khrushchev was furious about these intrusions over Soviet airspace but the US U-2s were able to fly at too high an altitude to be brought down. However, in May 1960, days before a four-power summit in Paris, a Soviet fighter plane did finally bring down a U-2. At first Eisenhower insisted it was not a spy plane but a weather plane. But when Khrushchev provided firm evidence, Eisenhower had to confess. Khrushchev then boycotted the Paris talks and relations between the superpowers deteriorated. The U-2 pilot, Gary Powers, was sentenced to ten years imprisonment but released after two in exchange for a Soviet spy in US captivity.
The superpowers knew that these bombs could not be used against each other – to do so would destroy each other and would make the world uninhabitable. To the end of the Cold War the very existence of humanity lay in this fragile balance of deterrence, known as Mutually Assured Destruction or, rather aptly, MAD. The time had come to discuss how to slow down the arms race, and the first of many, rather meaningless, agreements came in 1963 with the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
The Korean War: Korean children in front of a US tank
The first major conflict – the first ‘hot war’ of the Cold War – took place in Korea between 1950 and 1953. Ruled by Japan since 1910, Korea rejoiced in Japan’s defeat, and following the end of the Second World War, was split between Soviet and US spheres of influence at the 38th parallel into North and South Korea respectively. In 1948 the newly formed United Nations called for free elections in both the North and the South. The Soviets refused to comply and proclaimed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with Kim Il Sung as its chairman. Elections did take place in the South, although they were boycotted by the communists, and Syngman Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea.
Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China, 1 October 1949
Kim Il Sung sought Stalin’s permission to invade South Korea and reunify the peninsula. Stalin, fearful of provoking the US, refused. But then two events changed his mind. First, the Soviet Union attained the atomic bomb. Second, the triumph of communism in China following a protracted civil war and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. ‘The Chinese people have now stood up!’ declared Mao Zedong (pictured above). Both these events, Stalin felt sure, would make America think twice before going to war over a relatively minor issue such as Korea. With Stalin’s authority, on 25 June 1950, Kim Il Sung ordered his army across the 38th parallel into South Korea, taking Seoul three days later. Stalin was wrong in his assessment of the US’s reaction. The US moved its army of occupation stationed in Japan into the conflict, executing a counterattack on the port of Inchon in the North and recapturing Seoul on 25 September. The US forces then pushed north, taking the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on 19 October.
Mao, keen to show his loyalty to Stalin, offered to help. Accordingly, China entered the fray, pushing back the US advance, recapturing the capitals of both North and South Korea, although, in reply, the Americans retook Seoul in March 1951. The conflict now disintegrated into a stalemate of trench warfare. It suited Stalin to keep the war going, if merely to tie the US down in East Asia. Soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953 a ceasefire was announced and the war finally ended on 27 July with the boundary between North and South Korea at much the same place as three years and 3 million casualties earlier.
US Anti-Communism: ‘Reds Under the Bed.’
Following the realization that US spies working for the Soviet Union had accelerated Russia’s development of the atomic bomb, anti-communist hysteria swept through 1950s America. In 1953, a married couple, the Rosenbergs, were sent to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. A series of witch-hunts, orchestrated by Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy (pictured below), targeted Hollywood, universities and even the originator of the Marshall Plan, George C. Marshall. Richard Nixon, then a congressman, unmasked communist agent Alger Hiss, a former insider in Roosevelt’s government, who served forty-four months in prison as a result. In an atmosphere reminiscent of Soviet Russia, people were encouraged to inform on each other and to maintain vigilance against the internal enemy.
Joseph McCarthy
Stalin’s Final Years: ‘I’m finished, I don’t even trust myself’
In Russia itself, Stalin, paranoid of everyone, including his own bodyguards, unleashed a new reign of terror, as lethal as the ‘Great Terror’ of the 1930s, and, based on his fears of a Zionist conspiracy. Every Soviet citizen lived under the cloud of possible arrest and subsequent deportation or execution. Stalin’s control over his satellites remained absolute; no socialist state could make any decision or exert any form of independence from Moscow, with the exception of Tito, popular leader of communist Yugoslavia, who placed national autonomy above ideological brotherhood and who, unlike other eastern European leaders, did not need Stalin to keep him in power. Having expelled Tito from Cominform, an alliance of communist leaders set up by Moscow in 1947, Stalin considered invading Yugoslavia to teach Tito a lesson. Ultimately he decided against it.
By the end Stalin trusted no one and suspected everyone, including his personal doctors most of whom he had arrested. ‘I’m finished,’ he said in his final days. ‘I don’t even trust myself.’ With the new terror reaching fever pitch, Stalin suffered a stroke and was left to fester for several days, his personal staff too frightened to check on him. He died eventually on 5 March 1953, aged seventy-three.
Despite his tyranny, Stalin’s death was received with a public outpouring of grief. His body lay in state and such was the mass of mourners scrabbling to pay their last respects that several people died in the crush. Immediately, the Kremlin started adopting a softer approach, issuing amnesties to many languishing in Stalin’s gulags and aborting the campaign of terror. But who, after thirty years, could take the Great Leader’s place? Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police since 1938, looked an obvious choice but his detractors within the Soviet hierarchy, fearful of a continuation of Stalin’s harsh rule, had Beria arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage, tried him and had him shot. A fate that Beria himself had inflicted on countless thousands of his fellow citizens. As Stalin had said, ‘No man, no problem.’ It was to be the only issue decided in blood. Nikita Khrushchev then emerged as the new leader. A Ukrainian peasant by origin, impulsive, rotund, by turn vindictive and charming, his ‘socialism with a human face’ was a different type of leadership to that of his predecessor.
Khrushchev: ‘Different roads to socialism’
However,
