Why the Cold War did not turn into a Hot War

The Coming of the Cold War

It had happened before, at the end of World War I, and it was happening again at the end of World War II—the next conflict began smoldering in the ashes of a world ruined by the near total devastation of modern war. Among the powers occupying the ruins of Nazi Germany and Nazi-dominated eastern Europe, as suspicions of each others' postwar intentions flared, that conflict sometimes threatened to burst into flame. But at the end of World War I, a grand round of treaty-making, dictated by the victors, which was intended to dampen the enmities created by the war by finding a "just" resolution to its causes and conduct, had only fanned the hatreds to burn brighter. In contrast, after World War II the victors simply moved into the burned over area with their armed forces, set up camp, and began bickering with each other (Betts, pp. 81).

At first their animosity was held in check by the sheer scale of the devastation from what had been the greatest conflict in the history of the planet. Europe looked as people imagined the surface of the moon would look. All the great cities of central and eastern Europe, much of London, and western Russia were pitted remnants standing jagged against the horizon. Transportation networks had been ripped to shreds, farmland turned into scorched earth, and industrial production brought to a complete standstill. Japan was just as blighted, its cities flattened by fire-bombing and two nuclear blasts, its industry and shipping destroyed. China, under occupation for 14 years, was facing a decade of civil war almost as destructive as the war itself. In Europe 45 million people were homeless, half of them in places such as Poland, the Ukraine, and western Russia that had been burned to the ground three times during the fighting. Indeed, the war loosed on the earth a vast army of refugees. A total of 27 million had fled the Nazis or were forced out by them, and nearly 5 million more had been seized and made into slaves. Huge numbers, too, fled the coming of the Russians, many of them ethnic Germans or collaborators who feared, accurately, an especially brutal reprisal. All told, experts estimated 60 million people from 27 countries and 55 ethnic groups were uprooted by the war. And then there were the prisoners of war—7 million taken by the Allies during the war and 8 million more liberated from Axis camps. Finally, there were the 670,000 survivors of the death camps, who left behind some 6 million Jews and 3 million Slavs, gypsies, and other "social undesirables" who the Nazis had exterminated (Betts, pp. 81).

Nobody wished to risk a renewed conflict that could wreak this kind of damage, but everybody feared that this kind of damage could be wreaked on them if they were not careful. There in the battle-spawned ruins of central and eastern Europe, the liberal democracies and ...