Europe in the Age of The Cold War,1945–75623capable of carrying bombs long distances, in 1953, and
both sides developed Intercontinental Ballistics Missiles
(ICBMs) that could reach each other’s cities.
The nuclear arms race shared much of its technol-
ogy with a simultaneous space race between the USSR
and the United States. The space age—and an era of
Soviet superiority in space—began in 1957 when a
Russian rocket carried the first artificial satellite, Sputnik,
into orbit (see illustration 31.2). A month later, the So-
viets launched a second satellite sending a dog into
space and safely retrieving it. When President Eisen-
hower rushed an American rocket to show the world
that the United States did not lag far behind, it ex-
ploded a few feet off the ground and became known as
the American “Dudnik.” The Soviet lead in the space
race continued into the 1960s when the USSR sent the
first person into outer space, the cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin. The U.S. space program of the 1960s showed
that this “missile gap” was narrowing; launches of
American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts into space
soon became commonplace. President John F. Kennedy
committed the United States to win the space race by
putting the first people on the moon, and by 1969 the
United States succeeded in sending Apollo astronauts
to the moon.
While the space race glamorized one aspect of the
cold war arms race, the United States quietly took the
lead in another technology capable of raining atomic
bombs on the Soviet Union by building a fleet of nu-
clear submarines with atomic missiles aboard. By the
early 1970s technology had produced the MIRV, a
hydra-headed missile that could deliver separate bombs
(multiple independent reentry vehicles in the cold war
lexicon) to several cities from one missile. Both sides
stockpiled nuclear weapons and their delivery systems
long after they attained the capacity to obliterate civi-
lization. Simultaneously, both sides developed the phi-
losophy of using nuclear weapons. The United States,
for example, threatened the use of nuclear weapons to
force negotiations to end the Korean War and again in
1962 to force the USSR to withdraw its missiles from
Cuba. And both sides seriously discussed such strate-
gies as “massive retaliation” with nuclear bombs instead
of fighting traditional ground wars. One of the keenest
metaphors of the cold war appeared on the cover of a
scientific journal: a clock showing that the human race
had reached one minute before midnight.
The nuclear arms race and the space race were
enormously expensive, which would ultimately have
much to do with the end of the cold war. An early sign
that this was an extremely expensive burden for the
USSR came in 1959, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita
Khrushchev, proposed the concept of “peaceful coexis-
tence” (see document 31.2). Many in the West doubted
Khrushchev’s sincerity (he had recently made another
speech, taunting the West with the message, “We will
bury you!”), and few were yet willing to gamble on a re-
laxation of cold war preparedness. Many Europeans
would favor peaceful coexistence by the late 1960s,
when it came to be called a policy of relaxed tensions
(detentein the French vocabulary of diplomacy).
As the nuclear balance-of-power became a balance-
of-terror, the cold war became a delicate stalemate. The
NATO allies restrained themselves from direct inter-
ventions in Communist countries, although discontent
with Communist rule provided opportunities. A work-
ers’ revolt in East Berlin was put down by force in 1953,
beginning an era of uprisings behind the Iron Curtain.
A Hungarian rebellion in 1956 led to fighting in the
streets of Budapest and the creation of reformist gov-
ernment under Imre Nagy. Nagy pledged to withdrawIllustration 31.2
The Space Age.The space age began in October 1957
when the USSR successfully launched the first artificial satellite
(Sputnik) into orbit around the Earth. In this photo, visitors to the
Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 flock to see Sputnikon exhibit.