Total Soviet Expenditure During The Cold War example essay topic

The Cold War was a confrontation between military giants, and it was the balance of terror, which preserved the world's peace. But the balance was maintained at a ridiculously high and costly level. Both the United States and the Soviet Union equipped themselves with thousands more nuclear missiles than were needed for self-defense. Those weapons, added to conventional armaments, cost the superpowers trillions of dollars. In 1955 President Eisenhower warned, "The problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without".

One of many different estimates show that more than eight trillion dollars were spent, worldwide, on mainly nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1996. At one point, the world's nuclear stockpiles held 18 billion metric tons of explosive energy: 18,000 megatons. Today, they still hold about 8,000 megatons. Compared to these totals with the entire explosive energy released by all bombs dropped in the Second World War (6 megatons); in the Korean War (0.8 megatons); in Vietnam (4.1 megatons)., and one could possible realize the significance and foolish decisions of this "war". Total Soviet expenditure during the Cold War is hard to estimate, but Eduard Shevardnadze thought that perhaps nearly 50 percent of Soviet national product was spent on defense, depriving the Soviet people of a better life. The United States ended the Cold War, still a major superpower, with a booming economy.

But the poor of the United States, could certainly have used some of the resources spent to the cause of Cold War armaments. A continuing cost will be that for cleaning up weapons-related nuclear pollution. Estimates of what this will cost in the United States range from $100 billion to $400 billion. In Russia and the old U.S.S.R., the problem is intractable; they simply will not be able to deal with it. Above and beyond the dollar cost is the cost in human lives.

Though a nuclear catastrophe was avoided by the balance of terror, the Cold War's firefights did take their toll in death: millions in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan; hundreds of thousands in Angola; tens of thousands in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Ethiopia; thousands in Hungary and Romania. Civilians accounted for more deaths than soldiers in uniform. Men and women died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall; strikers were shot in Poland; protesters were crushed by Soviet tanks in Prague; rebels were killed in Budapest; worshippers were gunned down on cathedral steps in San Salvador. Some of the wars people perished in, post-colonial struggles, would have happened anyway. But the Cold War made each local conflict it touched even more deadly. Covert actions by intelligence services killed tens of thousands more.

The Cold War stifled thought; for decades the people of Eastern Europe, living under a tyranny, were, someone said, "buried alive" -- cut off from and, as they felt, abandoned by the West. When the chance came, Germans, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians all rejected communism. So too did the peoples of the Americas; in Nicaragua the Sandinista's held free elections and lost them. Given the choice, people chose democracy. Only Fidel Castro in Cuba, the great Cold War survivor, kept the Red flag flying and the cause of socialist revolution alive. China is the great question mark of the 21st century: What will China do?

The world's most populist nation is still ruled by a Communist autocracy, though no longer along Marxist-Leninist lines. Will China succeed in reconciling Communist ideology with a free market? Will the Communist Party monopoly of power be broken there also? Although no new world order is in place, the world is far safer for the Cold War's ending. "The Cold War really began during the Second World War, when talk of post-war treaties between the United States, Great Britain, and Russia were put on hold until the war ended. "From early in 1942 the American Government had repeatedly proclaimed the principle that no final decisions on matters of postwar frontiers or systems of government should be made until the end of the war" (Graebner 5).

"The growth of distrust and opposition between the United States (US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) begins with Joseph Stalin's pre World War II behavior. The US and Great Britain provided war tactics and military hardware to Moscow but in return were rewarded with a veil of secrecy. As early as the Tehran conference (September 1943), Churchill confided to one of his staff that he considered Germany already finished; 'the real problem now is Russia'.