962 ★ CHAPTER 24 An Affluent Society
Geneva, Switzerland, with Nikita Khrushchev, the new Soviet leader, at the
first “summit” conference since Potsdam a decade earlier. The following year,
Khrushchev delivered a speech to the Communist Party Congress in Moscow
that detailed Stalin’s crimes, including purges of political opponents number-
ing in the millions. The revelations created a crisis of belief among communists
throughout the world. In the United States, three-quarters of the remaining
Communist Party members abandoned the organization, realizing that they
had been blind to the nature of Stalin’s rule.
Khrushchev’s call in the same 1956 speech for “peaceful coexistence” with
the United States raised the possibility of an easing of the Cold War. The “thaw”
was abruptly shaken that fall, however, when Soviet troops put down an anti-
communist uprising in Hungary. Many conservative Republicans had urged
eastern Europeans to resist communist rule, and Secretary of State Dulles him-
self had declared “liberation,” rather than containment, to be the goal of Amer-
ican policy. But Eisenhower refused to extend aid to the Hungarian rebels, an
indication that he believed it impossible to “roll back” Soviet domination of
eastern Europe.
In 1958, the two superpowers agreed to a voluntary halt to the testing of
nuclear weapons. The pause lasted until 1961. It had been demanded by the
National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which publicized the danger to
public health posed by radioactive fallout from nuclear tests. In 1959, Khrush-
chev toured the United States and had a friendly meeting with Eisenhower at
Camp David. But the spirit of cooperation ended abruptly in 1960, when the
Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane over their territory. Eisenhower
first denied that the plane had been involved in espionage and refused to apol-
ogize even after the Russians produced the captured pilot. The incident torpe-
doed another planned summit meeting.
The Emergence of the Third World
Even as Europe, where the Cold War began, settled into what appeared to be a
permanent division between a communist East and a capitalist West, an intense
rivalry, which sometimes took a military form, persisted in what came to be
called the Third World. The term was invented to describe developing countries
aligned with neither of the two Cold War powers and desirous of finding their
own model of development between Soviet centralized economic planning and
free market capitalism. The Bandung Conference, which brought leaders of
twenty-nine Asian and African nations together in Indonesia in 1955, seemed to
announce the emergence of a new force in global affairs, representing a majority
of the world’s population. But none of these countries could avoid being strongly
affected by the political, military, and economic contest of the Cold War.