Armageddon averted

From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Hungarian and Prague uprisings, the fall of the Berlin wall — but the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the great divide between the broadly capitalist West and the broadly socialist East and the numerous proxy conflicts it spawned, were the background to daily life. In retrospect, it seems stable, almost cosy: you knew where you were.

Its ramifications were so many and so all-encompassing that virtually everything you say about it will be true of some part, somewhere. Odd Arne Westad, a Norwegian who is a Harvard professor and co-editor of the magisterial Cambridge History of the Cold War, was brought up on one of the front lines of the confrontation, a region that could have become very hot very quickly. It is in his blood, as it were, and his attempt to summarise the period in 600-plus pages is both comprehensive and concise. If you want your Cold War in a single thick sandwich, this is it.

He defines it as a conflict between capitalism and socialism, originating in ‘global transformations of the late 19th century and buried, as a result of tremendously rapid changes, 100 years later’. One may quibble with his writing of capitalism as if it were a worked-out ideology like socialism, rather than what people do when left to themselves, but he is probably right in treating it as an ideological confrontation comparable to that between Catholic Spain and Protestant England in the 16th and 17th centuries. He argues that, although the Cold War peaked between 1945 and 1992, it was the first world war that engendered it by ‘jump-starting’ the two superpowers, Russia and the US.

From soon after the Russian revolution it was apparent that state socialism, like the national socialism of the Nazis and the Italian fascists, would brook no opposition.