In the concluding episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we trace how a tentative compromise coincided with the most dangerous moments of the stand-off, in an exchange of letters that threatened disaster. Elinor Evans speaks to expert historians Alex von Tunzelmann, Mark White and William Taubman to find out how the crisis reached a resolution, and the diplomatic fall-out from the 13 days. Plus, we track revelations that have come to light in the 60 years since the world was brought to the edge of a nuclear war.

In the third episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, we chart the first phase of the Cold War standoff. Elinor Evans speaks to expert historians Alex von Tunzelmann, Mark White and William Taubman to uncover how top-secret meetings descended into chaos, the American public was plunged into panic and a US naval ‘quarantine’ threatened to push the Soviets to the brink.

David Reynolds: “Mikhail Gorbachev started an avalanche he could not control… how he will be remembered may well depend on whether Ukraine can hold on to its independence and territory”

Mikhail Gorbachev was a classic example of a reformer who unwittingly precipitated a revolution. When, aged 54, he took over as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985, he seemed a breath of fresh air after the wheezing old leaders of the past. But rather like France’s Ancien Régime in the 1780s, his bid to modernise party and state brought down the whole house of cards and then spawned an imperialist dictator.

Initially, Gorbachev’s buzzword was uskoreniye, or acceleration – getting things moving but still within the framework of the government-run command economy. Yet lack of progress pushed him into a more radical restructuring of industry and the party (perestroika), which required greater openness and transparency (glasnost).

• Read more | What brought a thaw in the Cold War?

A catalyst was the explosion in April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then one of the Soviet republics), which released more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The disaster transformed domestic and foreign policy. It started a protest movement against the USSR’s appalling environmental pollution, which powered wider political agitation.

It undermined Gorbachev’s push for nuclear power to offset the USSR’s reliance on oil and natural gas, eroding economic stability just as he began clumsy attempts to create a “regulated market economy”. And it reinforced his determination to reduce the arms burden on the economy through agreements with the United States, mostly achieved by significant Soviet concessions. Yet he had gained a new sense that “we live in a vulnerable” but “interconnected world”, and this never left him.

In 1988–89, Gorbachev embraced cautious democratisation. A special CPSU conference endorsed competitive elections and set limits on terms of office. This was intended to open up the ruling party and encourage new blood. Among those elected was Boris Yeltsin, a Gorbachev ally turned critic, who won the special citywide seat for Moscow. Then, in 1990, the “leading role” of the CPSU was removed from the constitution and a separate USSR presidency established.

On the podcast | Mary Sarotte reveals how US and Russian leaders squandered the opportunity to forge a lasting partnership at the dawn of the 1990s

Gorbachev wanted to separate party from state to make the latter more efficient, but he continued to be leader of both. He did not open up the presidency to democratic election, nor try to break the conservatives within the CPSU, and his lack of democratic credentials and firm power base would eventually prove fatal. By the end of 1989, the Soviet satellites in eastern Europe turned Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” and his slogan of a “Common European Home” into a new post-communist era. Soviet republics also gained greater autonomy – especially in the Caucasus and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which were freed from the tsarist empire after 1918 but annexed anew by Stalin in 1944.

Yet the real sleeping giant was Russia itself, almost 80 per cent of the land area of the USSR and its principal banker. Yeltsin was now its leader, winning a landslide election victory in June 1991. Although an old-style party boss playing populist politics, he had the strong political base and democratic credentials that Gorbachev conspicuously lacked. That August’s botched conservative coup only hastened the Union’s now inevitable break-up. Its last rites in December 1991 included a referendum in which 92 per cent of Ukrainian voters opted for independence.

Gorbachev started an avalanche that he could not control. But as reform turned to revolution in 1989-91, he did not use force – except briefly in the Baltic in January 1991. So he stands in direct contrast with China’s communist leaders in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, and even more so with Vladimir Putin’s brutal bid in 2022 to reconquer Russia’s lost empire. How Gorbachev will be remembered may well depend on whether Ukraine can hold on to its independence and its territory.

David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. His books include Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Kristina Spohr: “Gorbachev’s actions were particularly feted in Germany. He had been met by ordinary East and West Germans’ total Gorbymania”

Gorbachev’s is a complex legacy, and how his achievements are judged depends on your vantage point. While he is slated by China for being an ideological sell-out and criticised by the Balts for blocking their efforts to restore their statehoods, in the west he has been revered for peacefully managing the end of the Cold War.

Through his actions, rooted in a mix of idealism and pragmatism, he was regarded as a peacemaker and peace-preserver at a time of revolutionary turmoil. He allowed new liberties at home, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, and ultimately even tolerated self-determination inside the USSR – albeit at the cost of his job. In all this, Gorbachev was the key agent of change. This is not to deny the significance of the global shifts that had been happening since the late 1970s – in military balance, the economy, technology, and the rising importance of people power – but it was Gorbachev who would bring about transformative change in European and global affairs.

To succeed at home, Gorbachev believed he needed to foster a stable international environment and address the USSR’s “imperial overstretch”. To this end, he negotiated nuclear and conventional arms reductions treaties with US presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. He granted autonomy to the governments of eastern and central Europe, helping lift the iron curtain that had divided the continent for more than 40 years.

• Read more | Cold War summits: how USA & USSR leaders worked to end the conflict

One nation in which Gorbachev’s actions were particularly feted was Germany. After the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev – who since the summer of 1989 had been met by ordinary East and West Germans’ total Gorbymania – considered the issue of reunification as a natural course of history. Together with the leaders of both East and West Germany he had to confront several complex problems, including what would happen to the 380,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in East Germany and when and how the USSR would give up its Allied reserved rights over the nation.

Eventually, Gorbachev agreed to relinquish the USSR’s rights as a Second World War victor and to grant the Germans their right to self-determination. It was agreed that a unified Germany should gain full sovereignty and would therefore be free to choose its alliance affiliation, which resulted in the new, larger Federal Republic remaining a Nato member. Special provisions and obligations for the former GDR territory were included in the text of the 1990 treaty that formally re-established German unity.

In return for his willingness to compromise on these points, German chancellor Helmut Kohl had granted Gorbachev, as part of their bilateral talks in the Caucasus that July, a financial package of around 80bn German marks in loans and economic aid, which would also finance the withdrawal of the Red Army, scheduled to be completed by 1994. Through mutual trust and a genuine desire to find compromise and jointly acceptable solutions, peace was finally made in the former cockpit of the Cold War. After the east European revolutions of 1989 and reaching a final settlement with Germany, by the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev was praised for ending the “empire by imposition”.

Gorbachev believed in a gradual east-west rapprochement but, in reality, his reforms increasingly seemed more like Soviet catch up with the west. The ultimate shift in 1990-91 from one-party state to political pluralism never worked, and the more the country descended into chaos, the more that Soviet international clout waned. Increasingly challenged by communist hardliners and more extreme liberalisers, the man who embraced radical change and refused to impose his will by authoritarian or coercive means wound up presiding over the destruction of his state.

Gorbachev never got to the stage of truly reinventing the Soviet Union because, in the end, its people turned against its leader and the old communist suprastructure and simply walked out on what had been the USSR. That was his tragedy. Gorbachev was, above all, no normal Russian leader. He opened the USSR to Europe and the world and made Russians freer than they had ever been.

He failed to hold the Union together, but through his pacifist, values-based policies, he transcended old antagonisms and was able to foster real postwar reconciliation. Thanks to him, Russia’s people could let their dreams of previously unimagined opportunities blossom in what was hoped would become a new, more peaceful post-Wall era.

Kristina Spohr is professor of international history at the London School of Economics. Along with David Reynolds, she is the editor of Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Evan Mawdsley: “Putin and other nationalists are correct that the Gorbachev era fatally weakened Russia as a great power, demographically, militarily and economically”

Comments made in the west following Gorbachev’s death have been highly favourable, if not altogether accurate. The former Soviet president has been credited with having brought down the communist regime, but that was not his actual intention, nor did he want the breakup of the multinational USSR. He can with greater accuracy be credited with helping to bring about an end to the Cold War and an arms race that Russia could not win. As a realist, he also accepted that the influence of the USSR in neighbouring states, notably in Germany, could not be sustained. With that he brought about a profound change in European history.

Perceptions of Gorbachev in Russia are more critical. Current president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly condemned the actions of his predecessor and did not grant him a state funeral. It is more difficult to assess the perceptions of ordinary people in the former Soviet Union. Opinion polls there are unreliable, but it would be fair to say that Gorbachev nostalgia is not a mass phenomenon.

His half-decade of reform was 30 to 35 years ago, meaning that even Russians in their fifties have little real memory of what was attempted then, let alone what the “old” USSR of communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko was like. Many inhabitants of the Russian Federation take a nationalist viewpoint, encouraged by a state-controlled news media which emphasises dangers from the US and its European allies. Many blame Gorbachev for the economic hardships of the 1990s, although these had less to do with him than with the inherent problems of the Soviet command economy created more than 55 years earlier.

• Read more | Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion

Inhabitants of the former Soviet “republics”, especially in the Baltic States, Transcaucasia, and Ukraine, might be grateful for the preconditions which led to their becoming sovereign states, but there is a general realisation that this independence was not part of Gorbachev’s agenda.

A second key aspect is the legacy for Russia of Gorbachev and his political approach. His actions, intentionally or otherwise, brought a fundamental break in its history. The failure of Gorbachev’s perestroika demonstrated the difficulties of achieving a transition to what he and other Soviet reformers of the late 1980s thought of as a “normal, modern country”. And Putin and other nationalists are correct that the Gorbachev era fatally weakened Russia as a great power, demographically, militarily and economically – something which is evident today on the battlefields of Ukraine.

On the other hand, it may well be that, given the disastrous failure of Putin’s current military adventure in Ukraine – coinciding as it does with Gorbachev’s death – the era of the later 1980s may still give some sense that a better alternative exists.

Evan Mawdsley is a professorial research fellow at the University of Glasgow. His books include The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917-1991 (Oxford University Press, 2000)

This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

Cuban Missile Crisis: In context

In July 1962 the USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev, in agreement with Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, made the fateful decision to place nuclear warheads in Cuba, just 90 miles from the US mainland. The Americans’ discovery of the weapons in October 1962 sparked a 13-day standoff between the superpowers of east and west that became known as the Cuban missile crisis. It is widely regarded as the most dangerous period of the Cold War.

On 16 October, US president John F Kennedy convened his closest advisors in a secret body later known as ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council), to discuss a response to the Soviet act of aggression. “Go to general war,” was the advice of some of the president’s closest advisors, who pushed for air strikes or a full-scale invasion of the island. After nearly six days of top-secret meetings, Kennedy – who had come to regard a nuclear strike and descent into war as “a final failure” – favoured a naval blockade. He delivered the news to the world in a televised speech on 22 October 1962; Cuba was cut off from any military aid from its communist ally in the east, and America had avoided a declaration of war.

A tense series of letters between the leaders followed, with Khrushchev and Kennedy eventually reaching a diplomatic compromise in which the Soviets agreed to remove missiles from Cuba, and in return Kennedy secretly agreed to remove American nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey. The crisis was diffused, and the world was brought back from the brink of nuclear war.

Can you introduce readers to your narrative of the crisis and how it seeks to handle this episode, 60 years on?

When I started to write this book, it seemed like simply a piece of history or archaeology. One thing that has been extremely spooky is that – as I researched and wrote this account of how the world, in the midst of the Cold War, came closer than at any time in its history to Armageddon, to a nuclear war – President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Suddenly the whole thing achieves an immediacy, because we are looking again at an incredibly reckless, dangerous and ruthless leader in the Kremlin who is prepared to take extraordinary risks to try and frighten the world into acquiescing in these acts of aggression.

Of course, this caused me to significantly change parts of the beginning and the end of my narrative. I’ve said: “Here is this terrifying episode that happened 60 years ago. And what can we learn from it about the experiences we’re going through today?” Alas.

Want to hear more about the Cuban Missile crisis? Browse more episodes in our four-part podcast series

Putin is obviously an inescapable figure on the world stage now. And you write in Abyss that, contrary to ideas that personalities play only a minor part in determining history, the figures involved in the Cuban missile crisis dominated decisions and decided the outcome. What can you tell us about the key players?

There have been many accounts of the so-called “13 days” in October 1962 that followed the Americans’ discovery that the Soviets had secretly placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. I think it’s a mistake just to look at that brief period. To understand what it all means, you’ve got to know quite a bit about what the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba were at that time. And, of course, these three extraordinary personalities.

First is Fidel Castro, the guerrilla leader who took over Cuba from dictator Fulgencio Batista at the beginning of 1959. Then there’s President John F Kennedy who remains, I think, by far the most fascinating and extraordinary US president of the past century – even more so than Franklin Roosevelt. And finally, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, this frightening thug; curiously, an impressive thug in some ways – you didn’t get to the top of the Soviet Union in those days without climbing over a mountain of corpses. A lot of the first half of my book is about these people and these countries.

The first thing to understand is how appallingly the US had treated Cuba for the previous century. The Americans always like to think that they don’t have an empire, but they treated Cuba as a colony. They decided everything, and most of the profits from Cuban sugar and tobacco went straight into American pockets. American gangsters were running all the casinos in Havana. With the ascent of Castro, the Americans suddenly found that they had been kicked out. One of the people interviewed for the book was the so-called head of protocol for the Castro government. He said: “People from the American embassy would turn up at our offices and say, ‘Here’s what you’re going to do, we’re from the embassy and you’ll do it.’” And of course, the Cubans said: “It’s not like that anymore, this is our own country. We’re a sovereign country.”

How did the alliance between the Soviet Union and Cuba lead to such a dangerous crisis?

When it became clear that the US was going to seek to isolate Cuba and topple its leader, Castro turned to the other superpower – to the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev.

Khrushchev was absolutely enchanted by Castro. He was reminded of the 1917 revolutionaries, the young idealists who had taken over Moscow and Petrograd. He decided to give total support to Castro. In the spring of 1962, after a year of supplying weapons to Castro, Khrushchev was staying at his dacha [second home] on the Black Sea, looking through his binoculars. He was infuriated, knowing that 200 miles or so across the water, there were American nuclear missiles [in Turkey] pointed at his dacha. One day in April 1962, he said to his defence minister, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, “How would it be if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?” In other words: “How would it be if we install nuclear missiles in Cuba?”

Khrushchev knew that the Soviet Union was far weaker than the United States. He was obliged to face the fact that, at the same time as he was saying that socialism was going to take over the world, most of the Soviet Union was living in what Americans would think was abject poverty. Bread was rationed in some regions, and people had tiny televisions which they had to watch through water-filled magnifiers to make the picture big enough. Whereas on the other side of the world, you had Americans all eating steaks, with a growing audience for colour television.

This seemed so monstrously wicked and unfair to Khrushchev. It made him rage that – after all the Soviet Union had suffered in the Great Patriotic War, after losing 27 million people – the Americans should end up so rich and with this great nuclear arsenal, and that the Americans were trying to tell the world what to do. He was determined to even the score, to show the Americans that they didn’t rule the world.

Your book includes some staggering testimony from the ExComm meetings following the US discovery of the missiles in Cuba that shows just how close the west came to responding with a nuclear strike. How near did the world come to nuclear war?

The first thing Kennedy said, at the White House when he heard about this, was: “We’re probably going to have to bomb them.” At that stage, the Americans had no idea that there were also tactical nuclear weapons, they had no idea of the strength of the Soviet forces in Cuba. The US chiefs of staff wanted full bombing, an American invasion of Cuba. All through the crisis though, all the civilians around JFK, and the president himself, were always sure that they had to go very carefully, be very cautious. But America’s generals and admirals were saying “we’ve got to go in and zap these people. We’ve got to bomb them. We’ve got to invade them.”

My view, which I’ve expressed in my book very strongly, is that there is no doubt that neither the Kremlin nor the White House wanted a third world war, they didn’t want all-out war. But the Soviets had put hundreds of nuclear weapons in Cuba with no technical safeguards to stop local commanders from firing them. Had the Americans done what many people around the president wanted – bombed and invaded – I think the chances of these weapons not being used, and the idea the Russians would sit there and take devastating casualties to their own forces and not respond, is for the fairies. Once they started that, escalation would have been almost inevitable. You had a terrifying situation.

In those first days, as Kennedy presided over daily and sometimes hourly meetings of the so-called ExComm, they talked through every option: bombing, blockade, etc. The one thing they all agreed upon was that they could not do nothing. By around the Friday [19 October 1962], the chiefs of staff and McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser, were urging towards bombing and probably invasion. But I think that – although JFK made many other mistakes in his time as president in his thousand days – when I listen to the recordings and read the transcripts of those meetings, he stands head-and-shoulders above all the others in his steadiness of purpose and his clear, unflinching understanding that if all this went wrong, we were going to have World War Three.

You write in Abyss of a collective wisdom on both sides that transcended the misjudgements of both the Kremlin and the White House. What was it about Kennedy and Khrushchev and their administrations that made this such an extraordinary episode?

I’m a passionate believer in diplomacy and diplomats. One of the scary things that’s happened in the last 20 years is that suddenly national leaders think the diplomats don’t matter anymore. I don’t think it’s just me as an old man being nostalgic. The quality of some of those top British diplomats and top American diplomats was so impressive.

Today, I’m afraid, there are no successors, because both American governments and British governments treat their diplomats with contempt. They get the diplomats they deserve, who are not people of remotely similar stature. It’s one of the things I’ve come to believe passionately about studying the Cold War. I hope anybody who reads my books will have a sense not only about the missile crisis, but about the wider Cold War. It was so important all the way through to keep talking. And even if the talks didn’t seem to get anywhere, just the fact there was dialogue was terribly important.

I was rather shocked a few years ago when a British general said to me, “You do realise, don’t you, that nowadays we talk less to the Russians than we did in the worst days of the Cold War?”

How do you think the international situation today, particularly regarding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, compares with that of the missile crisis?

President Putin today represents a terrifying threat. I personally believe that he’s a more dangerous and less stable figure than was Khrushchev, who had to consult the Soviet Presidium; although Khrushchev dominated the Presidium, its opinion still mattered. Putin appears to act entirely alone. I’m not suggesting that if we’d had better diplomats then Putin might have acted differently. But I think in general, in international affairs, it is so vital that we understand the importance of dialogue, and the importance of understanding each other in a way that, I’m afraid, I don’t think governments do today. And it is very scary.

Sure, you can say, what about Suez and Harold Macmillan, who only a few years earlier had been complicit in the British government being mad enough to invade Egypt in 1956? And of course later, the best and the brightest around Kennedy during Cuba, they got the United States into Vietnam.

I’m not naive enough to suggest that those people all had the wisdom of Solomon all the time. But one effect of researching this book and reading all the transcripts of who said what during the crisis, is that one can see that people like Robert McNamara [US secretary of defense 1961–68], whom I met later and whose reputation was destroyed during Vietnam, was brilliant on the missile crisis. All the way through, he looked for ways of very graduated escalation, with the blockade as a first step. The chiefs of staff loathed him. After the missile crisis, one of them said – and I quote this in the book – that McNamara as defence secretary was the most dangerous man in America. They meant that he wouldn’t do the horrible things that they wanted to do, including risking nuclear war.

Even if these were not guys who got everything right all their lives, by gosh, they were guys who got a lot right in those days.

What did you make of the legacy of the Cuban missile crisis during your reporting in the US in the late 1960s, and in the years that followed?

I’m not sure I would have had the nerve to write this book about what’s overwhelmingly an American subject, but for the fact that I lived in the United States in 1967–68, and I always remember at the beginning of ’68, sitting in the White House Cabinet Room listening to President Lyndon B Johnson, with a group of other foreign journalists, talking about another American crisis, in Vietnam. I was taking a look around the Cabinet Room in those days and thinking, “This was the room where ExComm met earlier in the decade.”

When I was there as a young reporter, I met a lot of the people who were involved intimately in the missile crisis, including [secretary of state] Dean Rusk, [attorney general] Robert Kennedy, and McNamara, and [presidential speechwriter and historian] Arthur Schlesinger became a close friend.

Of course, at that period, America was racked by the whole Vietnam agony. It did give one an insight into how, on the one hand, it was the most exciting country on Earth. No one doubted its towering stature in the sixties; it was the absolute powerhouse of the world, for its technology, its wealth, its power. But on the other hand, one witnessed the United States doing terrible things, conspicuously including the appalling racial strife. There was always this contrast between the wonderful things about America – which remain true today – and also the terrible things; somehow America has a tragic talent for presiding over some of the worst things that have happened on the planet. I was there in the Vietnam period, and later reported in Vietnam. When I see all that’s going on in Ukraine – and I hasten to add that this does not make me an apologist for Putin – I can’t forget that “our side”, if you like, has its own share of shames, and some of them date from the 1960s.

I do feel it was a big help to me in writing this book to have been around in the sixties and to have known some of those people, and to remember how it all felt. Because in the 21st century, to you who were not even born until ages after that, it seems an eternity away. To me it almost seems like yesterday.

Max Hastings is a leading British journalist, author, broadcaster and former newspaper editor who is currently a columnist for The Times and Bloomberg Opinion. His latest book is Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 (William Collins, 2022)

Hear what life was like for ordinary Cubans during the crisis in BBC World Service’s Witness History

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

The 1961 Bay of Pigs operation was a debacle for the United States that inflamed Cold War tensions to a new height. In the second episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Elinor Evans speaks to expert historians Alex von Tunzelmann, Mark White and William Taubman to find out how the failed invasion set the stage for Khrushchev and Fidel Castro to form a pact that would lead the world to the brink of nuclear destruction.

How did the world end up on the brink of nuclear disaster? In the first episode of our series on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Elinor Evans speaks to expert historians Alex von Tunzelmann, Mark White and William Taubman to explore the roots of the nuclear standoff, tracking the rise in tensions during the Cold War and introducing the key players in the looming confrontation.

On 3 August 1978, the central council of the Islamic Society of Afghanistan (Jamiat-i-Islami) wrote an impassioned plea to Kurt Waldheim, secretary-general of the United Nations. In their letter, they decried Afghanistan’s political leaders, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), as a “power-thirsty gang” intent on destroying Afghanistan’s political and social fabric and lacking any respect for humanitarian norms or human rights. The Council demanded UN intercession, warning that “the continued survival of this group will endanger the peace of this region of the world”.

This warning soon came true. On 24 December 1979, the Soviet Politburo issued a public directive justifying the deployment of Soviet troops into Afghanistan to support their allies, the same PDPA. The Soviets, the Politburo claimed, sought “to give international aid to the friendly Afghan people” and to prevent “anti-Afghan actions from neighbouring countries”.

Within days, 50,000 Soviet troops were on the ground in Afghanistan. They would remain there for almost a decade as part of Soviet efforts to keep their local allies in power.

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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was one of the moments that defined the 1980s. It took place against the backdrop of the global Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and the United States (as well as China) vied for supremacy. Indeed, so international was the Cold War during the 1970s and early 1980s that, while US and Soviet leaders pursued talks on limiting strategic arms and the balance of power in Europe, Soviet forces backed independence movements in southern and eastern Africa as American troops withdrew from Vietnam.

While Vietnam remains the most enduringly remembered of the Cold War’s “hot wars”, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had equally explosive consequences – not just for the Cold War superpowers, but for regional relations in south and central Asia, and Afghanistan itself.

It signalled the end of détente and a resurgence in Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. It also led to an international outcry, including public condemnation in the UN General Assembly. In 1980, US president Jimmy Carter called for economic sanctions and a boycott of that year’s Moscow Olympics, declaring, in his State of the Union address, that “the Soviet Union must pay a concrete price for their aggression”.

Existing tensions

Yet this common narrative of Afghanistan in the 1980s – one of Cold War competition and intervention by the so-called “great powers” – tells only a partial story. In this regard, the Islamic Society of Afghanistan’s UN petition sheds far greater light on how and why a war would break out that would engulf not just Afghanistan and Afghans, but also regional and international powers alike.

Soviet invading forces encountered a nation already embroiled in civil war – one which would go on to outlast the 1980s, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War itself. Violence had broken out more than a year earlier in the aftermath of the coup that brought the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan to power in April 1978.

The PDPA had formed in the mid-1960s during Afghanistan’s era of constitutional reform. While it outwardly pledged to pursue Afghan democratisation, in internal documents the party declared its allegiance to Marxism. Upon splitting into two factions, known as “Khalq” and “Parcham”, in 1973 the latter backed former prime minister Mohammad Daoud Khan in overthrowing his cousin, King Mohammed Zahir Shah, and seizing power.

After being sidelined under Daoud, however, the two factions reunited and launched an unexpected attack on the government in 1978, which culminated in Daoud’s assassination – and gave the PDPA an opportunity to govern.

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The PDPA pledged itself to a socialist Afghanistan, likening its “Saur Revolution” to Russia’s 1917 October Revolution. But the new government’s heavy-handed attempts at political, economic and social reform, alongside its willingness to employ violence to enforce its writ, led to local resentment.

By the autumn of 1978, resistance had erupted across Afghanistan’s provinces, ranging from Nuristan to Kandahar and from Paktia to Kunar. It only spread from there. By the time Soviet troops invaded, three-quarters of the country was in a state of rebellion.

As fighting expanded across the country, a political exodus took place. Individuals and groups labelled enemies of the state by the PDPA sought shelter abroad. A number of political figures settled in and around the city of Peshawar in Pakistan, joining an older coterie of Afghan intellectuals and activists who had fled persecution in earlier times. While living abroad, these groups sought to mobilise Afghans inside and outside the country against the PDPA. They took a leading role in encouraging and supporting an armed resistance, and some groups went even further, seeking to reshape Afghan politics and society.

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One of the older groups already active around Peshawar was the Islamic Society of Afghanistan. Originally formed at Kabul University in the mid-1960s, its leaders had fled to Pakistan in the early 1970s after coming into conflict with Afghanistan’s then-president: Mohammad Daoud Khan. From exile in 1978, the society’s leaders had written to the UN to protest the PDPA’s coup and activities.

But letter-writing was not the organisation’s sole activity. It soon began encouraging armed resistance against the regime, drawing on social and political networks stretching across Afghanistan and Pakistan to deploy men and arms against the PDPA and their Soviet backers.

Its members also travelled abroad, across the Middle East and Europe and to the United States, to lobby foreign states for aid. It published pamphlets to ensure that the world saw the tragedy that was unfolding in Afghanistan, and to promote its own political alternatives. The Islamic Society envisioned a post-conflict Afghanistan in which Islam infused modern politics. It was a vision just as radical as the PDPA’s.

Clash of ideologies

The activities of the Islamic Society of Afghanistan, taken alongside those of the PDPA, point to a war that initially had little to do with the Cold War. The conflict that began in Afghanistan in mid-1978 was fundamentally political. It was between competing visions of Afghan politics and society, and of how Afghanistan should be governed, put forward not just by the PDPA and the Islamic Society but also by a variety of other groups.

Socialism, Maoism, Islamism, parliamentarianism, monarchism and ethno-federalism were just a few of the alternative systems touted as the PDPA’s coup, its failures of governance, and the subsequent outbreak of conflict created an opportunity for different Afghan interest groups to make a play for their visions of Afghanistan to rise to the fore.

Yet regional and Cold War politics fundamentally complicated the conflict, ensuring that none of these Afghan visions ultimately came to pass. Even before the Soviets invaded, they had been involved in Afghanistan. The PDPA’s leaders had immediately sought Soviet support and recognition, despite ignoring Soviet suggestions to moderate their policies and seek local allies.

The scale of Soviet activities changed after December 1979, but shoring up the Afghan state remained a priority – alongside eliminating any armed resistance. This latter effort largely failed, as the Soviet presence neither increased local support for the PDPA nor succeeded in rooting out insurgents.

From the United States, the Carter administration began providing limited amounts of covert aid in 1979, partially fuelled by concerns of further Soviet spread south-west at a time when Iran was in the throes of revolution and Pakistan’s military dictator, Mohammad Zia-ul Haq, had just executed the nation’s former civilian leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The initial amount of aid provided was not enough to create a “Soviet Vietnam”, as Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later claimed it could. But this early US support did help establish an aid pipeline that would balloon in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion, as part of subsequent president Ronald Reagan’s determination to roll back Soviet influence.

Another consequence of this covert aid from the United States was to help further militarise the conflict, although American administrators were indiscriminate about which resistance groups received support. In US Cold War calculations, the ability of Afghan resistance groups to produce a military stalemate against superior Soviet firepower mattered far more than local debates about Afghan politics and society.

• Read more | Cold War summits: how USA & USSR leaders worked to end the conflict

Regional partners took further advantage of Cold War politics. As an ally of the US, and host to many of the Afghan resistance groups in exile, Pakistan was exceptionally placed to manipulate the conflict for its own ends. Not only did its Inter-Services Intelligence take responsibility for distributing foreign aid to Afghan resistance fighters, but the nation’s military dictator, General Zia, used this position of influence to shape local and regional politics.

He chose to provide particularly strong support to Afghan resistance groups that shared his own interests in the Islamisation of politics, including the Islamic Society and the Islamic Party of Afghanistan (Hizb-i-Islami). This, in turn, narrowed the windows of opportunities for other reform-minded Afghan groups, which received less financial and military aid.

The fact that Zia’s government could wield such influence was due in part to a second Afghan exodus. The PDPA coup and subsequent Soviet invasion was accompanied by one of the 20th century’s largest refugee crises, as Afghan people fled the spread of the conflict.

Some migrated within Afghanistan, while others went abroad. Millions settled in Pakistan and Iran, while tens of thousands more travelled to India, western Europe, and North America. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that almost half of Afghanistan’s population was forced on the move due to the war, sparking an international humanitarian crisis. As one Afghan refugee in Iran wrote to the UNHCR, seeking to reunite with family in Germany, “the tyrannical and cruel regime of Afghanistan has limited our peaceful life”.

As host to several million Afghan refugees, Pakistan worked with international partners, including the UNHCR and other UN agencies, to house and support this population. But in seeking to ease the administrative burden of managing the refugees, Pakistani officials turned to the same Afghan resistance groups that had been armed and funded to fight the Soviets.

Groups including the Islamic Society and Islamic Party became intermediaries between Afghan refugees on one hand, and camp and government administrators on the other. They often demanded party membership in return for access to humanitarian aid, giving them outsized influence among many Afghan exiles.

A cycle of violence

At least five different conflicts thus fit under the guise of the “Soviet invasion of Afghanistan”.

They include the war over Afghan politics, the global Cold War, and the regional competition for influence over Afghanistan and within south Asia. But they also include the humanitarian struggle over the rights of Afghan civilians and their ability to return home, and the debates in the international community as United Nations members discussed the legality of the Soviet invasion and gave the organisation the mandate to facilitate a negotiated Soviet withdrawal.

The intersections between these conflicts simultaneously expanded and constricted the nature of the war in the 1980s. They created new opportunities for some groups inside and outside Afghanistan but also limited the conflict’s outcomes, as well as the nation’s political possibilities and place in international politics.

Islamist groups came into the spotlight, and for the first time vied seriously to rule a post-conflict Afghanistan. Their own activities – supporting an armed resistance, interceding for refugees, and lobbying the international community – coalesced with PDPA reforms, which were initially very hostile to Islam. They also benefited from Pakistani favouritism, giving such groups exceptional influence.

• Read more | What brought a thaw in the Cold War?

Increasingly, in the realm of Afghan politics, debates about Afghanistan’s future involved discussions about Islam’s political, rather than just personal or religious, role. But such debates did not necessarily reverberate outside of the country.

Most notably, the UN-led discussions that ultimately resulted in the Soviet withdrawal of troops by February 1989 involved representatives of only four participants: the US, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, and the PDPA. Despite the key role that resistance groups had played in stalling the Soviets and undermining the stability of the PDPA-led state, and the stated sympathies of the international community, members of such groups were excluded.

There was little discussion about what a post-conflict Afghanistan should look like, how this might be achieved, or how civil war combatants might reconcile their differences. Consequently, UN negotiations only resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

The civil war continued long after the Cold War superpowers lost interest. Fighting between local interest groups persisted in Afghanistan, despite several attempts at creating political coalitions. Afghan civilians and infrastructures continued to bear the brunt of that war. Many refugees were unable to return home, even as international aid began to slow down. Several towns and villages had been so damaged by more than a decade of conflict that they could hardly sustain local livelihoods, while black markets and corruption ran rampant.

These developments created the opportunities for the fundamentalist Taliban movement to come to power, taking advantage of the destruction and ongoing infighting. And even then, the violence did not stop. What has emerged is a war that is now entering its fifth decade. Many of the dynamics that have developed in Afghanistan in the 21st century can only be understood by looking at this longer history of conflict in the region.

But even this perspective is narrow. It focuses all too often on Afghanistan as a site of warfare or intervention, and therefore fails to recognise the alternative forms of politics and society imagined and sought by many Afghan people themselves.

The Islamic Society of Afghanistan’s letter to the UN reveals an organisation that sought real political and social change and adopted a universally recognised language of rights and world peace. It was not just an insurgent group fighting to push back invading forces: it aimed to create an Afghanistan that adopted tenets of political Islam while engaging with international society.

Indeed, it continued to fight in the ongoing civil war, and joined a coalition government in 1992. It was part of the Northern Alliance that continued to combat the Taliban after it came to power, and its members took part in further governing coalitions after 2001. But its earlier political visions never came to pass.

The war, then, must be seen not just through the prism of Cold War alliances or of a desire by all Afghan people to return to existing norms. For some Afghans, it was an effort to create something new. Only by recognising such aspirations – as well as the ways in which they failed to materialise – do the real ramifications of the Soviet invasion become clear.

Elisabeth Leake is associate professor of international history at the University of Leeds. Her latest book is Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2022)

This article was first published in the June 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

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In 1983, in the middle of a very ordinary London housing estate, a van driver called Ben Hayden unloaded his shopping from Sainsbury’s and started building his own fallout shelter. As he did so, armageddon seemed closer than ever. Following the relatively peaceful period of detente in the 1970s, during which diplomatic relations between east and west eased, tensions had again been stirred up by revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Western politics had shifted to the right, with Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in the UK being quickly followed by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in the US. The pressure was rising to a point that hadn’t been felt since the Cuban missile crisis two decades earlier; for an anxious British public, nuclear confrontation seemed almost inevitable.

When the government announced, in 1980, that the US would deploy Cruise and Pershing missiles on UK soil, the British public’s nuclear worries were brought to a head. “What pushed it to the front of people’s concerns was the plan to install short-range missiles at Greenham Common and Molesworth, and the big demonstrations that the decision provoked,” says Philip Steadman, emeritus professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at UCL. “That made the issue more immediate and personal. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament became the bogeyman of the right, and there was an acrimonious and nervous political atmosphere.”

Ian Sanders, who now hosts the Cold War Conversations podcast, says the threat of nuclear war loomed large in the public consciousness. “It definitely felt like nuclear war could break out at any time, either by accident or design. As someone in my early twenties, with a life to live, it really did feel as though the end of the world could happen any moment.”

A little consumer test

To help prepare the people of Britain for a potential nuclear attack, in 1981 the UK Home Office published Domestic Nuclear Shelters. Available for just 50 pence, this slim pamphlet aimed to advise the masses on building their own fallout shelters. It gave basic guidance on constructing a hideaway where you could live for up to two weeks after nuclear attack, avoiding – hopefully – the worst of the radiation.

Hayden, a member of Tower Hamlets CND, decided to put this advice to the test in the most practical way possible. Following the instructions to the letter, he would perform what local punk poet Alan Gilbey wryly described as a “little consumer test”, putting up a fallout shelter in his housing estate and living there for two weeks. For Hayden, though, this was a sombre undertaking. “I’m building this seriously,” he told a local reporter. “When this shelter is completed, it’ll prove to everyone what a farce the arrangements for surviving after the bomb are.”

Hayden stocked the shelter with everything the government recommended, plus a few home comforts: plenty of tins of food, a bag of clean clothes, two water tanks, waste buckets, books, a sleeping bag, a pillow, a guitar, and his diary. Crawling into his makeshift home late on a Monday afternoon, he was upbeat as he adjusted to life in this cramped new world. On that first day, he wasn’t alone: journalists did their best to clamber into the shelter to conduct interviews; he heard people from the local estate talking about him (one opined that he must be a “nutter”); and local children gave him a fright by shouting down the ventilation shaft, their voices amplified in the enclosed, tube-like space below.

Soon, Hayden was questioning his own sanity. Four days in, he started to lose track of time, and there wasn’t enough clean air in the shelter to sustain a candle. “This place really begins to get on top of me,” he told his diary. “I get a slight feeling of claustrophobia, and I take a deep breath of smelly, stale air, and think to myself: ‘That’s better.’ As the second week began, the toilet waste he had collected had started to decay, causing the waste bags to leak. His urine bucket was full after 10 days; the food tins began to grow mouldy, and an infestation of insects had joined him in the shelter. “I’m reaching the end of my humour… I have no ability to concentrate on anything now; and spend my time just lying here feeling like a shit bag,” he wrote.

Beautiful mud

Happily, his two-week stint in the fallout shelter came to an end, and Hayden emerged into the sunlight. Walking out proved difficult – it was the first time he’d stood up in two weeks, after all – but he found he was not alone: as well as a delegation from the press and three television crews, around 200 local people had arrived to greet him. In the playground of a nearby primary school, children watched and cheered. “It was pissing down with rain, there was mud everywhere, and it was beautiful,” he wrote.

Spending two weeks in a makeshift nuclear bunker had been gruelling. But, while it had taken a psychological toll, Hayden was under no illusion that the experience had prepared him for the real thing. “The exercise has given me little or no insight into how I might cope,” he wrote. “To make more than a superficial comparison would be naive in the extreme… I was not alone. People came and talked and joked – and I looked forward to seeing them again. I knew I would.”

What the bunker experiment showed was that the advice presented by the government’s Domestic Nuclear Shelters pamphlet only seemed practical on the surface. Hayden had found it tough, and he had had all the advantages of building it in peacetime. With no geopolitical crisis, there was the luxury of time: the shelter took a week to construct and provision. Building materials were readily available; he had the money to buy them, and a plot of land to build on. And there was no nuclear attack to withstand; no blast to damage the outside of the bunker; no radioactive fallout to clog the ventilation pipes and his lungs; no confused and agitated survivors seeking food and shelter. His experience led him to be dismissive of the government’s advice. “This shelter shows it up to be entirely unrealistic,” he told a local reporter. “But I don’t think it’ll change anything.”

And perhaps one reason why the government’s advice was so ‘unrealistic’ was the fact that much of their guidance had not progressed beyond instructions that were created in the midst of the Second World War. During this conflict, the government had issued pamphlets not only on safety during air raids, but on how to best prepare homes for attack. This included guidance on the construction of Anderson shelters – essentially curved corrugated steel tubes, usually buried outside – and Morrison shelters: cheap metal tables with mesh sides, to be used indoors. These could be effective against Luftwaffe raids, but the end of the war brought with it a new threat: the atomic bomb.

Initial public information on the bomb assumed an air of the Blitz spirit: “At Nagasaki, nearly seven out of ten people within a mile from the bomb lived to tell their experiences,” claimed a 1952 pamphlet. “Shelters of the last war standard would give good protection against [an] atomic blast.” But, as both sides in the Cold War tested and refined the hydrogen bomb, with its mind-bogglingly destructive power, the magnitude of the threat really began to worry the British government.

Unlike some countries, however, Britain chose not to make provisions for costly communal fallout shelters as part of its civil defence plans. The onus was instead placed on individuals to find their own means of protecting themselves and their families. This was reflected in detailed public information booklets on the nuclear menace, prepared by the Home Office. The first of these, 1957’s The Hydrogen Bomb, sought to explain this new kind of weapon to the public; however, beyond a few basic diagrams, it gave no useful advice on how to protect yourself from its effects. Its 1963 follow-up, Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack, included a few practical measures on creating a fallout refuge, such as staying in a room in the centre of your home, blocking up windows with sandbags and heavy furniture, or hiding in a trench outside, “deep enough to provide comfortable standing room”.

Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack was roundly criticised. It was lambasted by members of the public, lampooned on the BBC’s satirical programme That Was the Week that Was, and even derided by the majority-Conservative Estimates Committee, who complained it gave the public “entirely the wrong impression”. In parliament, Labour MP Emrys Hughes condemned the booklet for providing impractical advice, and gave his own summary of the Estimates Committee’s position: “This thing is phoney; this thing is rubbish; put it in the waste paper basket!”

Fire and fallout

Following this debacle, new official advice about nuclear attack was slow to materialise. In November 1974, during Harold Wilson’s Labour government, Home Office officials came together to discuss the replacement of the unloved, and by now deeply outdated, 1963 guide. This led to the creation of a new public information campaign that was to become even more infamous than its predecessor: ‘Protect and Survive’.

Having learned from bitter experience, the Home Office was at pains to ensure that Protect and Survive – which comprised a series of TV and radio spots, as well as an accompanying booklet – would not gain adverse public attention. To that end, they opted to keep the programme under wraps until it was needed: only a small batch of booklets was printed in 1976 and distributed privately to those involved in emergency planning, such as chief executives of local authorities and chiefs of police.

Rendered in brown and orange, the cover of the Protect and Survive booklet evoked fire and fallout, with a nuclear family – father, mother, son and daughter – enclosed in a protective circle at its centre. Inside, though, the advice was remarkably similar to that of previous decades: know the warning signals, stay at home, construct an ‘inner refuge’, and ensure adequate water and supplies.

It wasn’t until the spring of 1980, when investigations by The Times and the BBC’s Panorama exposed the deficiencies of the British civil defence programme, that Protect and Survive came to prominence. The Thatcher administration, newly in power, found their hand forced by public and media demand. They gave the go-ahead for the booklet, with a few tactful changes, to be reprinted and put on sale.

Alongside Protect and Survive, a working group had been established to design and test fallout shelter designs. The outcome of their work, published in early 1981, was Domestic Nuclear Shelters. A pamphlet branded with the Protect and Survive logo, containing a potted version of the earlier booklet’s advice, it also gave DIY instructions for five types of fallout shelter. Two of these were unquestionably based directly on the Morrison and Anderson shelters designed in the Second World War. In fact, a larger, more detailed technical manual on shelter construction, which the working group developed for tradesmen and engineers, contained step-by-step instructions lifted directly – illustrations and all – from a 1942 guide to erecting a Morrison shelter. The most notable change was the removal of the pipe that one of the figures in the earlier guide had been shown smoking.

Quite daft proposals

The last-minute amendments to Protect and Survive weren’t enough to save it, and Domestic Nuclear Shelters, from ridicule. The campaign was a gift for leftwing local authorities, who viewed the idea of civil defence as unworkable and actively resisted central government’s attempts to shoulder them with the responsibility of managing the public in the aftermath of nuclear attack. The Greater London Council called the government’s booklets “quite daft”, while an episode of the hugely popular sitcom Only Fools and Horses, screened in 1981, played up the obvious inadequacies of the plans by having the flat-dwelling Trotter family construct a nuclear shelter on the roof of Nelson Mandela House, their central London tower block.

For academic Philip Steadman, the Domestic Nuclear Shelters booklet offered a useful way to interrogate the government’s planning assumptions for nuclear attack. “I got involved in various teach-ins and demonstrations, and thought to myself: ‘What can I do to help?’” he says. “I imagined that, being an architect, I might be able to say something about shelters, so I got hold of the Domestic Nuclear Shelters manual. I think it must have been there that I saw the Home Office estimates of blast damage. It immediately struck me that the calculations of areas of land affected couldn’t be right.”

Digging into the figures, Steadman discovered that the numbers the Home Office had come up with were wildly inaccurate. While Domestic Nuclear Shelters claimed that 5 per cent of the UK’s land area would suffer the serious effects of a nuclear blast, Steadman found at least 60 per cent of the population would be affected. He published his findings in New Scientist, which called the government’s figures “highly suspect”.

Not everyone was critical, though, and some took the governments advice at face value. Magazines such as Protect and Survive Monthly were ready to cater to their needs. Launched in January 1981, with a foreword by Leon Brittan, the minister responsible for civil defence, the magazine was a one-stop shop for the paranoid consumer. Early articles focused largely on shelter construction, but also covered the effects of radiation on agriculture, practical first aid, and even a guide to creating your own DIY fallout suit.

Around them was a plethora of advertisements for pre-built fallout shelters, offering peace of mind – at a price. The government had encouraged the mainstream press not to run advertisements for such products, but readers of PSM had their choice of dozens, with names like ‘The SURVIVA’ and ‘FIBA-MOLE’. One advertisement even subverted memories of the Blitz spirit, showing an archive photo of smiling Londoners sheltering in a tube station, with the chilling caption: “Next time, it won’t be so easy to hide.” For those who couldn’t afford to build or buy protection, there was also the option of hiding in the natural fallout shelter provided by Britain’s disused metal mines.

Today, despite relations between east and west becoming frostier once more, the nuclear threat is far from most people’s minds. Yet nuclear weapons have not gone away, and their presence – combined with new risks driven by climate change – means that the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight now as it has ever been. In an age of instant communication, social media and fake news, it’s unlikely that government advice of the kind seen during the Cold War will ever make a comeback. Hopefully, government communicators can learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.

Taras Young is a writer and researcher. He is the author of Nuclear War in the UK (Four Corners Books, 2019)

This article was first published in the October 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine

We call it the Cold War, but in October 1962 the world seemed about to incinerate. The Soviet decision to install nuclear missiles in Cuba triggered a crisis with the United States that threatened a global holocaust.

How had it come to this? Two decades earlier, the USA and the USSR had been allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany. In March 1943, Life magazine lauded the Russians as “one hell of a people” who “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans”. As for the NKVD (Stalin’s dreaded secret police), Life declared it was “similar to the FBI”.

In reality, though, the wartime alliance had been a marriage of convenience. The “main bond of the victors”, admitted Winston Churchill, had been “their common hate” towards Hitler’s Reich, but this no longer held them together after 1945. Three crunch issues lay at the heart of the ensuing Cold War: ideology, geopolitics and nuclear weapons.

Ideologically, America’s mantra was ‘liberty’ – ‘free enterprise’, limited government and democratic localism. Socialism and communism were minority movements in the USA, easily stigmatised as ‘un-American’.

In the USSR, Marxist-Leninist ideology predicted the imminent crisis of imperialist capitalism, leading to a dictatorship of the proletariat – of which the Soviet communist party constituted the vanguard. Although playing down the rhetoric of world revolution by the 1940s, Josef Stalin remained keen to accelerate the process of historical change. The chaos caused by the Second World War offered plenty of opportunities.

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In fact, the conflict transformed the geo­political position of both countries, sucking them into power vacuums created by the defeat of the Axis powers. These in turn became flashpoints of the new Cold War – above all, in Germany, China and Korea.

The USA and the USSR occupied Germany to defeat Adolf Hitler and then stayed to shape the peace. The Soviets had lost perhaps 27 million people from 1941–45, around one-seventh of their population, and were now determined to prevent the revival of German military power. But America and Britain were equally determined to get the country on its feet again and off their backs. In 1948, the US, Britain and France cut through the diplomatic deadlock and began to create a West German state out of their zones of occupation. They also introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, which almost overnight got goods into the shops. Stalin hit back by blockading West Berlin, which the western allies could only reach through Soviet-occupied eastern Germany.

President Harry Truman had no doubt that remaining in Berlin had become “a symbol of the American intent” in Europe. And so, in tandem with the RAF, the US Air Force mounted a round-the-clock airlift of food and fuel into the beleaguered city in the winter of 1948–49. At its peak, Berlin was handling more air traffic than New York.

Berlin divided

The ‘air-bridge’ not only broke Stalin’s blockade, it also transformed West German attitudes to the Americans and British. Former enemies were now becoming allies, while the wartime allies were turning into adversaries. The blockade also widened the rift between the USSR and the other three victor powers. In April 1949, the US signed the North Atlantic Treaty with Canada and 10 European states, led by Britain and France. Stalin’s gamble in Berlin had boomeranged, drawing the west into an unprecedented transatlantic alliance.

Yet the global ‘correlation of forces’, as the Soviets called it, shifted again the following year. In October 1949, China’s three decades of civil war ended in total victory for Mao Zedong and the communists. The world’s most populous country had gone ‘red’ – arousing alarm and recrimination in America.

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An even greater shock followed in Korea. In 1945, Japanese forces had surrendered to the Soviets in the north and the US in the south. As in Germany, neither superpower was willing to withdraw. But their clients were determined to unify the country, and in June 1950 Stalin gave the green light to the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to attack the south, thinking the west would not react. This was Stalin’s second gross miscalculation in two years: as with Berlin, Truman saw Korea as a vital symbol of US will and power. He judged that “communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted 10, 15, 20 years earlier”. The lessons of appease­ment seemed clear: “If this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war.”

Truman committed US forces to Korea, enlisting the support of key allies, including Britain. The Korean War proved a yo-yo affair, with the North Koreans initially driving deep into the south before US counter-attacks pushed them back almost to the Chinese border. They in turn provoked China to enter the war. Fighting finally stabilised around the 38th parallel, which became the basis of an armistice in 1953. This agreement remains in force today in a country that remains divided. Korea was where the Cold War turned hot: the Americans lost 33,000; the Chinese perhaps half a million, including one of Mao’s sons; and the overall Korean death toll was maybe 2.5 million, a 10th of the population.

During the 1950s, other power vacuums opened up as decolonisation accelerated. Although the Japanese surrender in 1945 allowed the Europeans to recover most of their Asian domains, the days of empire were now numbered. The British conceded independence to India and Burma two years later, the Dutch gave up the East Indies (Indonesia) and France failed in its 1946–54 struggle to retain Indochina. Unwilling to see the whole region go communist, successive US presidents got sucked into a ‘quagmire’ war in Vietnam that eventually proved to be America’s greatest humiliation of the whole Cold War.

Hitherto the champion of liberty against the imperial powers, by the 1950s the US had to decide whether colonialism or communism was more distasteful and dangerous. Fearful of the growing reach of the left, Washington concluded that it was better to prop up colonial regimes and new post-colonial clients, resulting in US interventions in places like Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.

Atomic escalation

It was also during the 1950s that the nuclear arms race – the third hallmark of the early Cold War – became truly existential, with action and reaction its perpetual dynamic. In 1945, the explosion of two American atomic bombs on Japan had helped end the Asian war, but Stalin immediately made an A-bomb his top priority; in August 1949 the USSR successfully tested its first atomic device. Their atomic monopoly at an end, the Americans went all-out for a hydrogen bomb in 1952 – and the Soviets matched them in 1953.

The race then was to upgrade their ‘delivery systems’ from the era of air power into the missile age. This time the Soviets beat the Americans. Their launch of a man-made satellite, Sputnik, in November 1957 was both a technological humiliation for the USA and also a sign that the USSR had a sufficiently powerful rocket to launch a nuclear missile all the way to America. Eisenhower’s administration hastily accelerated its own missile programme and implemented a major scheme of civil defence.

Ideology, geopolitics and the bomb all fused together in the crisis over Cuba. Fidel Castro had seized power on the island in 1959, toppling a corrupt regime that was an American economic colony in all but name. Although Castro was not initially a Marxist, Washington’s reaction to his reforms drove him into the arms of Moscow. John F Kennedy inherited a half-baked CIA plan to topple Castro, using Cuban exiles in the US to avoid implicating the White House. But the ‘Bay of Pigs’ operation in April 1961 proved a fiasco – leaving the president’s macho brother Bobby fuming that JFK would now be “regarded as a paper tiger by the Russians”.

The competition deepened when Nikita Khrushchev, the feisty Soviet leader, got the better of Kennedy at a bruising summit in Vienna in June 1961. Pumped up by success, he introduced medium-range nuclear missiles into Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

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Unlike Stalin over Berlin in 1948, Kennedy was in a position to enforce a blockade of Cuba – controlling the surrounding air space and waters and, above all, enjoying huge superiority in nuclear arsenals if it came to all-out war. So Khrushchev decided to pull his missiles out of Cuba. But it had been a close-run thing. As secretary of state Dean Rusk put it, the two superpowers had been “eyeball to eyeball” and in the end it was the Soviets who “blinked”.

On 26 June 1963, Kennedy, now secure in his presidency, spoke in West Berlin. Two summers before, the Soviets and their East German allies had erected a wall to stop the flood of east Germans, mostly young, fit and educated, going west in search of freedom and prosperity. The wall ended the brain drain, but it proved a propaganda own-goal.

Standing before a cheering crowd outside West Berlin’s city hall, Kennedy admitted that “freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect”. But, he added, “we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in”. To those who claimed not to understand what was at stake “between the free world and the communist world” the president issued this simple challenge: “Let them come to Berlin.”

As we now know, the Cold War still had a quarter-century to run, with many twists and turns. But that summer’s day in Berlin would define the rest of the struggle.

David Reynolds is professor of international history at Cambridge

This article was first published in the July 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine