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Start of the Cold War: The Marshall Plan or Soviets' exploding first atomic bomb

George Wallace said:
Whoa!  You really missed out on a very interesting time in Canadian history.  Quite a scandal for the day. 

Guess not being a "Super Power" has its pitfalls in the history books.

Lets not forget Fred Rose.  His claim to fame, being a Member of Parliament and member of the Communist Party of Canada, and alleged to be part of the spy ring Gouzenko disclosed
Rose lost his seat, did time in prison, and then after release from prison, he went to Eastern Europe (Poland I think) While there Canada revoked his citizenship
Wish I hadn't sold some of my university textbooks now LOL
Canada indeed has had a very interesting history...just as, if not more interesting :cdn: than American
history

Tom
 
George Wallace said:
Have fun with the Diefenbaker years......The Avro Arrow.  Bomarc Missiles.  The Cuban Missile Crisis.  Then the Peason years and the start of the Canadian myth of "Peacekeeping", followed by the Trudeau years with the War Measures Act and "Just watch me".....Then we have the business of "the nations bedrooms", Judy LaMarsh........Wow!.....In between the lines, our history is not quite as boring as some would like to think.

I have a documentary queued up on my Youtube channel about the Avro Arrow along with several documentaries about Canada's involvement in Somalia. 
 
There is a great deal to say in favour of the Anglosphere's struggle against totalitarianism in the last century as being at the centre of the Cold War.. To describe all of it as the Cold War is, in my opinion, incorrect. It was not until the end of the Second World War that two competing ideologies emerged and the resulting struggle lasted for almost a half century before communism as a system of government (but not a theory popular with the chattering classes) collapsed. Before then, it was a struggle against fascism that motivated the liberal west and the totalitarian USSR. In fact there was a great deal of support for the Soviets in the west, not least of all because Stalin's murderous excesses passed unreported by the progressive press. Even during the Second World War, President Roosevelt remarked that the American people had more in common with the egalitarian Russians than with the class-ridden British system.

Communism and its little cousin, Socialism, enjoyed considerable support in Western society for decades, especially among those with a social conscience. In fact, the "soak the rich" philosophy was and is popular and it was not all that long ago that a Canadian prime minister stated in so many words that capitalism was s failure. Toss in support for various revolutionary movements and it did seem in the sixties, seventies and even into the early eighties that communism would prevail.

So what? To my mind, the Cold War began as the Germans collapsed in 1945 and the USSR imposed its will on the states of Eastern Europe. Whether we are facing a new cold war is moot, but it is not an extension of the old one.
 
I think you could go well back into WW2 to find a start point of the Cold War. Reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, there was a lot of distrust of Stalin and his intentions regarding the post war. So much so that there was a debate about whether to reveal the bomb development at some point in the various 3 party conference discussions; and finally the subsequent success of the Trinity test to both Churchill and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference.

One thought was that if they revealed the development prior to a successful test would potentially force their hand and reveal too much information to the Soviets to allow them to advance their own program. But to not inform them prior to the bombing of Japanese targets would ultimately cause a breakdown and rift within the uneasy allied alliance, with the Soviets closing off the east, which it ultimately did.

In a sense you could argue that the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the historical points for the start of the Cold War.   
 
FortYorkRifleman said:
To be honest all I can name more US Presidents than I can Canadian Prime Ministers.

So can I, but that's normal: They've had 44 presidents to our 22 Prime Ministers. :)

But personally, I would put the beginning of the cold war in the months that followed the Yalta conference, when Roosevelt learned of the "naughty document" and his Moscow ambassador informed him that Stalin had no intentions of allowing free elections in the post-war zone under his control.
 
The think "our," the liberal, capitalist West's, problem with communism dates back to circa 1865 and the 1st International. We (the liberal, capitalist West, again) got really upset in 1871 when the French Civil War (one of them, anyway) dissolved into the Paris Commune.

Our fear of communism was quite rampant at the turn of the 19th/20th century and, in 1918/19, we, that same "we" including Canada, sent an expeditionary force to Russia to help the Whites in their ongoing war against the communist Reds. US President Woodrow Wilson was one of the main proponents of defeating communism (no containment for Wilson) and it is important to note that the Dulles brother, Allen and Foster, who would later become head the CIA and Secretary of State, respectively, and who were important allied leaders in the Cold War, were staunch Wilsonians.

The anti-communist movement in the West is very firmly grounded in the 19th century.

 
Except that the issue is the commencement of the Cold War and not our opposition to communism and the two are not the same at all.  Fighting godless communism was a good rallying cry for the post WW1 invasion but of perhaps greater significance was the need to re-establish the status quo i.e the monarchy lest the push towards other forms of government result in a revolution that encompassed all of Europe.  As long as Stalin was willing to stay within the pre=WW2 boundaries Europe learned to live with, if not accept the communist regime but his treatment of the enslaved eastern European nations resulted in the growth of fear in the west, particularly when he kept his armies massed on the borders.  Fear was the motivator for the cold war.
 
Other factors playing into the West's distrust of the Soviet Union (and Stalin) is the USSR signed with Nazi Germany (the West's enemy) the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, the infamous non aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union
Besides the obvious non aggression aspect of the pact, the pact divvied up Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and also prohibited each other from attack from third party alliances.
And there was also an economic agreement in which the German's would trade manufactured goods for Soviet raw materials
Only after Hitler broke the pact did the USSR then want Allied support. But hardly Allies in the conventional sense of the word
As a sidebar, the stupidest thing Hitler did was invade the USSR...he might very well have won and consolidated gains in Europe had he left the Soviet Union alone

Tom
 
 
expwor said:
As a sidebar, the stupidest thing Hitler did was invade the USSR...

You can get quite a good argument started over what was Hitler's stupidest move during the War.  (In my opinion it was declaring war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbor.)

But as to the start of the Cold War, I think I'll go with Winston Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech in 1946.  All of the Soviet Union's moves prior to that can be viewed as setting up puppet states on their western borders to protect them from another German invasion.  In 1945 enslaving Poland and repatriating the Cossacks were accepted by the western politicians as the price to be paid for having had the Soviet's as allies.

By 1946 you had the Gouzenko revelations, the fact that the Soviet Army was remaining in the occupied nations at full strength, and the beginning of the closing of Eastern Europe to the rest of the world.

Just my 2 kopecks.

Cheers,
Dan.
 
It's interesting most people overlook the importance of the Soviet's first atomic bomb and its role in ensuring things wouldn't become hot (outright war between East and West). I'd imagine most people involved, from politicians to military figures, realized the improbability of a conflict and settled for propping up governments and supporting them during their own wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba).I think the Cold War has been defined by the conflicts that sprung out of them and when the Soviet's debuted their own atomic weapon that was them planting their flag as a superpower and a check against aggression by the West
 
I wonder! The Soviets and their proxies were rather aggressive in the early 1950s, see Korean War. While they were paranoid, Europe really was in no shape to sustain a ground war. Thus the old wartime Western powers stepped into the breach. The rationale for ground based tactical nuclear weapons may look odd today, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. For the better part of two decades the Canadian Army trained (and was equipped) to fight a nuclear war on the North German plain.

And the only military qualification I have that I am glad I never got to use is nuclear target analysis. For whatever it is worth, the Canadian Army had the best land-based nuclear delivery unit in NATO for close to a decade.
 
Old Sweat said:
I wonder! The Soviets and their proxies were rather aggressive in the early 1950s, see Korean War. While they were paranoid, Europe really was in no shape to sustain a ground war. Thus the old wartime Western powers stepped into the breach. The rationale for ground based tactical nuclear weapons may look odd today, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. For the better part of two decades the Canadian Army trained (and was equipped) to fight a nuclear war on the North German plain.

And the only military qualification I have that I am glad I never got to use is nuclear target analysis. For whatever it is worth, the Canadian Army had the best land-based nuclear delivery unit in NATO for close to a decade.

I would have thought the only training any nation needed was CBRN because once those bombs go off who would be left to fight? I would think just having nuclear arms would be a deterrent and never knew about our role apart from Korea. 
 
FortYorkRifleman said:
I would have thought the only training any nation needed was CBRN because once those bombs go off who would be left to fight? I would think just having nuclear arms would be a deterrent and never knew about our role apart from Korea.

In the 1960s, for example, our tactics were built around the use of tactical nuclear weapons, say .5 to 10 KT with a few perhaps up to nominal yield, which was the phrase for the Hiroshima device which was set at 20 KT. (KT is kilo ton of TNT, by the way.) The ICBM exchange with very destructive devices was assumed to be still in the future and perhaps avoidable by negotiation.

Now, the nuclear battlefield was not a healthy place, so we sought wide dispersion between subunits to minimize casualties. This made us vulnerable to defeat in detail by land forces, so tactics were built on concentrating to force the Warsaw Pact forces to in turn concentrate. We also made use of natural and manmade obstacles to force this concentration. When they had done so, we dropped a nuke on them and then counterattacked to restore the battlefield. At least that was the theory.

 
Old Sweat said:
In the 1960s, for example, our tactics were built around the use of tactical nuclear weapons, say .5 to 10 KT with a few perhaps up to nominal yield, which was the phrase for the Hiroshima device which was set at 20 KT. (KT is kilo ton of TNT, by the way.) The ICBM exchange with very destructive devices was assumed to be still in the future and perhaps avoidable by negotiation.

Now, the nuclear battlefield was not a healthy place, so we sought wide dispersion between subunits to minimize casualties. This made us vulnerable to defeat in detail by land forces, so tactics were built on concentrating to force the Warsaw Pact forces to in turn concentrate. We also made use of natural and manmade obstacles to force this concentration. When they had done so, we dropped a nuke on them and then counterattacked to restore the battlefield. At least that was the theory.

That sounds like a nightmare. I had always assumed nuclear war went hand in hand with the Air Force and never knew ground units were involved. I have very little knowledge of nuclear weapons and always assumed they just came out of silos. I actually learned a lot about the START treaty in the 90's when I was still in Middle School because my teacher wanted to get rid of her husband's books whom she was divorcing and gave me a ton of books that I still have now. I still have a long ways to go in regards to all of this on top of learning about CAF history, specifically Infantry regiments as I am currently applying as an NCM for the Regular Force (hopefully PPCLI)
 
None of us really believed we would ever see Canada again if we went to war. There was comfort, though, in the knowledge that there was a plan in place to evacuate dependents back to Canada on the aircraft there were bringing the two brigades and the "divisional troops" earmarked to reinforce 4 CIBG to Germany.
 
FortYorkRifleman said:
That sounds like a nightmare. I had always assumed nuclear war went hand in hand with the Air Force and never knew ground units were involved. I have very little knowledge of nuclear weapons and always assumed they just came out of silos. I actually learned a lot about the START treaty in the 90's when I was still in Middle School because my teacher wanted to get rid of her husband's books whom she was divorcing and gave me a ton of books that I still have now. I still have a long ways to go in regards to all of this on top of learning about CAF history, specifically Infantry regiments as I am currently applying as an NCM for the Regular Force (hopefully PPCLI)

The 'nuclear battlefield' was (and is) quite complicated.  In the days of Old Sweat we had the Honest John which was capable of delivering nuclear warheads.  The Americans also had artillery of delivering nuclear rounds.  In my day, the Americans also had Special Forces who were capable of delivering "Backpack Nucs" behind enemy lines.  Delivery is limited only by the imagination, and sometimes "Hollywood" portrays reality.
 
Old Sweat said:
In the 1960s, for example, our tactics were built around the use of tactical nuclear weapons, say .5 to 10 KT with a few perhaps up to nominal yield, which was the phrase for the Hiroshima device which was set at 20 KT. (KT is kilo ton of TNT, by the way.) The ICBM exchange with very destructive devices was assumed to be still in the future and perhaps avoidable by negotiation.

Now, the nuclear battlefield was not a healthy place, so we sought wide dispersion between subunits to minimize casualties. This made us vulnerable to defeat in detail by land forces, so tactics were built on concentrating to force the Warsaw Pact forces to in turn concentrate. We also made use of natural and manmade obstacles to force this concentration. When they had done so, we dropped a nuke on them and then counterattacked to restore the battlefield. At least that was the theory.

Very interesting.  So hat the Cold War turned hot and your skills put to use would fighting have been conducted in the impact area ?  Or were these highly radioactive zones intended to be "battlefield obstacles"  that had to be traversed ?
 
Halifax Tar said:
Very interesting.  So hat the Cold War turned hot and your skills put to use would fighting have been conducted in the impact area ?  Or were these highly radioactive zones intended to be "battlefield obstacles"  that had to be traversed ?

A comprehensive answer would be quite lengthy. Normally one aimed to minimize radiation, especially on ground one's own troops would have to cross. Mind you, the best way was to avoid these areas as much as possible and/or to avoid exposure by staying in them for the least amount of time. Easier said than done. One often created a more effective obstacle over a larger area by maximizing tree blowdown and building destruction, which was dependent both on the yield and the height of burst. Fires could also be started by the thermal pulse, and this could deny areas to movement. Radii of effects for this sort of thing could be found in the appropriate manuals.

It sounds cold-blooded and it was, but all we worried about (at least in military terms) was something called militarily significant radiation, which more or less was a dose that would incapacitate troops within the duration of the operation. Nobody really liked to think about what happened to troops who received a non-militarily significant dose at sometime in the future.
 
I cant imagine that these were fun things to work on.

Thank god cooler heads prevailed, no pun intended.
 
I'm still amazed that even today nuclear weapons are still an issue. I don't just mean having them in nations' armaments but countries still wanting them. Bringing the issue into modern times with Iran gunning for them along with terrorists' groups I would still think some of the tactics Old Sweat brought up should still be taught
 
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