East Germans moved to West Berlin and from there they then caught a plane to West Germany. By 1961 three million people had done this. The Soviet Union could not allow this to happen. It was embarrassing for them and also many of the people who were leaving were skilled workers and were needed. On the 12 August 1961 a record four thousand East Germans made their way into West Berlin. Early the next morning, soviet and East German “shock workers” closed the border between the Soviet and Western sectors and put barbed wire across the streets. Three days later the barbed wire was replaced with a wall of concrete blocks. Border guards in three hundred watch towers and fifty bunkers made sure that nobody could cross it. The USA did not do anything, as they did not want to risk war with Russia.
Both sides had started to develop nuclear weapons and if war broke out between the two countries, there could be mass destruction. Peaceful co-existence between America and Russia was vital, or the result would be a full out nuclear war. However, this ‘peaceful co-existence’ was not going to happen.
Even though both countries did not want to go to war, they were well prepared and started something known as the “arms race”. Both America and Russia massively built up their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. They seemed to have the belief of the more nuclear weapons you had the more powerful you were, and both countries desperately wanted to be stronger and more powerful than the other.
America and Russian started to race to see who could produce the most bombs, quickly. The USA exploded the H-bomb in 1952, which changed the world. This bomb was smaller than the Hiroshima A-bomb but two 2500 times more powerful. The Russian produced an H-bomb in 1953 which worried many people and made the world a much more dangerous place. America had an advantage over the Russians as they had massive financial backing form the government. Russia had to concentrate on producing big bombs, which was a far more cost effective procedure.
At the end of the 1950’s, American intelligence estimated that in a Russian missile attack, twenty million Americans would die and twenty two million would be injured. During the 1960’s, the Russians put their money into producing more missiles and did not care about the quality while America built fewer missiles but they were of a higher quality. The theory of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was also developed. This is where if Russia attacked the west, the west would make sure that they would destroy Russia. This meant that there would be no winners. By 1961, there were enough bombs to destroy the world. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s there was a real fear of an all out nuclear war between the USA and the USSR, which would devastate those countries and most of the rest of the world with it.
Spying became an increasingly important activity for both the USA and the USSR. Europe was one of the key centres of spying activity. The USA and the USSR both had their own secret service, which stole military and technological secrets. The KGB was the Russian secret service and the CIA was the American secret service. Both sides in the Cold War made extensive use of their secret services and those of their allies. It was easier for Warsaw Pact countries to get there spies into the West as Western countries were free and democratic countries where foreign people were free to enter and travel around as they pleased, without causing any suspicion. Spies could then operate without much getting in their way. It was difficult for the CIA to get spies into Warsaw Pact countries as western visitors were watched wherever they went. The spies would use disguise to try and fit in and so that they did not attract attention to themselves. They would try to persuade locals to work for them as spies, but this was difficult and dangerous for both parties. Both sides tried to make spies from the enemy side to work for their side instead. When a spy does this they are known as a ‘double agent’. Both countries organised many spying missions. For example in 1960, a high-altitude American photographic reconnaissance aircraft, a Lockheed U-2, was shot down over the Soviet Union and the pilot, Gary Powers, was taken prisoner. Gary Powers was returned to the United States in February 1962 in exchange for a high-ranking Soviet spy who had been looking for USA information to take back to Russia, who had been arrested by the Americans.
As the cold war spread to Asia, it started to get more serious. Vietnam’s fight for independence was long and strenuous, and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Firstly, there was a struggle against France, who had ruled Vietnam since before the Second World War. After a long struggle, even with the Americans on their side, the French gave up their claim to Vietnam at Geneva peace talks in 1954. When the Japanese took over Vietnam was divided into two. North Vietnam became communist and South Vietnam remained capitalist. Ngo Dinh Diem led the south. He was anti communist so the Americans supported him. The USA supported Diem with money, equipment and military advisers who trained South Vietnamese troops. Diem’s regime was unpopular with Vietnamese peasants as it was corrupt. Because of this, communists in South Vietnam, who were known as the Viet Cong, began to build up support. The communist leader Ho Chi Minh fought the Japanese and most of the Vietnamese peasants supported him. The North helped the South by forming a Ho Chi Minh trail to carry supplies to South Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh started to attack the South Vietnam army and government buildings and officials. Some Americans were also attacked. The hit-and-run tactics that they used were guerrilla tactics and were very effective. This guerrilla war continued into 1964 and the tension rose between North and South Vietnam.
President Eisenhower had refused to sign the earlier Geneva agreements as he felt that communism was quickly spreading. He felt that Vietnam would be the next country to become communist. This is why the USA had got involved with the Vietnam War. The spread of communism was known as the “Domino Theory” and the USA did not want to see Vietnam “knocked over”. If this happened it could lead to other countries also being “knocked over”
The USA got involved even more with Vietnam with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This allowed President Johnson to use the American forces to defend any SEATO country. The President felt that this allowed him to fight a full-scale war in Vietnam so this is what he did. The USA bombed Vietnamese naval bases and oil refineries. From the middle of the 1960’s American troops started to arrive in Vietnam.
It may be said, due to these reasons, therefore that indeed the cold war became more dangerous from 1960 onwards. Both the USA and USSR could not get on. The USSR was communist and the USA was Capitalist. The USA hated communism and vice versa. They each wanted their own system to be more powerful and more popular than the other. They were prepared to go to extreme measures to get what they wanted, such as using nuclear weapons against each other. The World was very close to nuclear war during the 1960’s, which made it a very dangerous period.
