The Cold War: A Military History

276 Pages·2015·2.26 MB·English

by  Black, Jeremy

The Cold War

The Cold War
A Military History
JEREMY BLACK
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2015
© Jeremy Black, 2015
Jeremy Black has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-1799-6
PB: 978-1-4742-1798-9
ePDF: 978-1-4742-1801-6
ePub: 978-1-4742-1800-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Black, Jeremy, 1955-
The Cold War : a military history / Jeremy Black.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4742-1799-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4742-1798-9 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-
1-4742-1801-6 (ePDF) -- ISBN 978-1-4742-1800-9 (ePub) 1. Military history, Modern--20th
century. 2. Cold War. 3. History, Modern--1945-1989. I. Title.
D842.2.B55 2015
355.009’045--dc23
2014034951
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
For
Pete Brown

CONTENTS
Abbreviations viii
Preface ix
1 1917–39 1
2 1939–45 27
3 1945–53 37
4 1953–68 81
5 1968–79 137
6 1979–85 171
7 1985–92 197
Postscript 219
Selected Further Reading 225
Notes 229
Index 253
ABBREVIATIONS
CAB Cabinet Office Papers
FO Foreign Office Papers
NA Kew, National Archives
NSC National Security Council Report
WO War Office
PREFACE
This book adopts a particular focus on the Cold War, a focus that is
thematic and chronological. The stress is on diplomatic and military
confrontation and conflict, and the book begins in 1917. In practice,
the Cold War has had many meanings and interpretations since the term
was used by the British writer George Orwell, in an article, ‘You and the
Atomic Bomb’, published in the magazine Tribune on 19 October 1945,
to describe an unwelcome division of the world between the USA and the
Soviet Union at the close of World War Two. The Cold War is commonly
employed to describe the confrontation between the two powers and
their respective alliance systems, from then until the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991 at the hands of its own politicians and citizens. The Cold
War has also been employed to describe and, indeed, explain much else
in the world in this period. The degree to which the Cold War led to the
mobilisation of whole societies ensured that the term has been used to
analyse everything and across the world; for example, from comics to
pro-natalist policies,1 and science fiction to gender politics. This range
has great value, not least in capturing a potent sense of cultural challenge
and the varied dimensions of ideological conflict. Yet, this range also
poses problems, notably by diluting the focus on war of a certain type,
and by exacerbating a lack of precision in the definition and analysis of
Cold War.2
Such a lack of precision is helpful in one respect in that it captures
the very different international, national and personal experiences and
perceptions of the Cold War. This range owes much to the extent to which
the term is frequently understood to relate to a period as a whole and,
therefore, to much that happened in that period. At once, the Cold War
was the global and militarised conflict that was the price to be paid for
the ‘long peace’ from 1945 – the avoidance of the recurrence of a war
at the scale of World War Two; and also the peace itself in so far as the
avoidance of war was concerned. Moreover, even defined simply in terms
of the confrontation mentioned in the first paragraph, there is much that
can then be brought into this confrontation or considered in terms of it: the
Cold War therefore becomes an economic, social, cultural and intellectual
history, as well as a political one, in short a form of total history. Such an
approach has great value. Indeed, the Cold War was ideological as well
as strategic; and moreover, as the former, but also the latter, cultural in its