5 Things You Didn't Know: The Cold War

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The term “cold war” goes back to a 14th-century medieval writer named Don Juan Manuel, who referred to the uneasy peace between Muslims and Christians in Spain. But it was George Orwell, in a piece titled “You and the Atomic Bomb,” who applied the term as we know it best to the protracted economic, geopolitical and ideological battle between the United States, the Soviet Union and their shifting allies.

The precise dates of the Cold War are the subject of debate, though most agree that it began at some point in the summer of 1945 and continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. Whatever the case, it dominated global politics and culture for the entire second half of the 20th century, and its effects are ongoing.

To bring you up to speed, we present five things you didn’t know about the only war that categorically could have ended all wars through total and complete annihilation — the Cold War.



1- It cost the U.S. about $8 trillion

Eminent foreign relations historian Walter LaFeber has put the U.S. military expenditures bill for the Cold War at around $8 trillion. This is a reasonable figure when you take into consideration wars in Korea and Vietnam; intervention in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Grenada, and elsewhere; psychological warfare through covert CIA operations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe; and, of course, the research, development, testing, and construction of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons (at a high point in the late 1960s, both the U.S. and the USSR were each spending $50 million a day on those weapons).

By way of comparison, the U.S. is currently spending roughly $8 billion per month on the war in Iraq. Money spent on the Cold War could fund that operation for another 80 years.



2- It was predicted by Adolf Hitler

Historian John Lewis Gaddis’begins with Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous 1835 Cold War prediction, and follows it with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler ’s lesser-known 1945 one, quoted from Francois Genoud’s 1961 work,

“… there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other — the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two Powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. These same laws make it inevitable that both Powers should become enemies of Europe. And it is equally certain that both these Powers will sooner or later find it desirable to seek the support of the sole surviving great nation in Europe, the German people.”

With Hitler, it always comes back to Germany, but considering the intense Cold War battleground that Berlin became, he was more right than wrong on this one.



3- Its first casualty was a Christian missionary

In 1942, John Morrison Birch was working in occupied China as a Christian missionary when, by accident, he came to the rescue of Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his Tokyo Raiders, who had to bail out during the Doolittle Raid, the first U.S. aerial raid on Japanese soil. The men had been hiding from Japanese troops and Birch led them to safety. Doolittle hooked Birch up with his CO, who noted that Birch’s experience and contacts in China, along with his command of Mandarin, would make him an outstanding intelligence resource. From then until the end of the war in the Pacific, Birch served with distinction in the U.S. 14th Air Force.

Just 10 days after Japan officially surrendered on August 15, 1945, Birch was sent by the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) on a mission within China. There, he and the men he led ran into a group of Chinese communists who took them prisoner and ultimately executed Birch. As a result, many regard him as the Cold War’s first causality.

Two more cool facts about the Cold War…