Why did the Cold War enter a new stage of crisis from 1960-63?

Hi. I'm Andrew Preston.

I teach history at Cambridge University,

And this is a lecture on the middle decades of the Cold War,

a period between roughly nineteen sixty and nineteen seventy nine.

The cold war was marked over its four decades by periods of

intense hostility and crisis,

and then periods of detente or relaxation of tensions,

and it would ebb and flow between detente and

confrontation, detente and confrontation. But in this

period, in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,

the fluctuations between detente and confrontation

whipsawd much more violently than in earlier or later periods.

And it's in this middle period of the cold war when it really

truly became a global cold war. There was not just in Europe,

not just in East Asia, but in Southeast Asia, in Africa,

in Latin America. Basically,

in around around the entire world.

So much so that by the time we get to nineteen seventy nine,

there wasn't a part of the planet that was untouched.

By the Cold War.

The turbulence,

the instability of this twenty year period between nineteen

sixty and nineteen seventy nine really began because all sides

of the Cold War thought that they were losing the initiative

and they had to regain the initiative by maybe not going

on the offensive and being aggressive,

but certainly by getting on the front foot.

After a period in the nineteen fifties when the US and the

USSR, especially

had come to some sort of arrangement

so that we weren't yet in a period where we would even

think that the Cold War was was moderating or even perhaps the

beginning of the end, but at least where the superpowers

could agree to disagree on many issues, not all issues, but many issues.

And that there was a period of stability from nineteen fifty

four to nineteen fifty nine.

Policymakers and political leaders in Washington, Moscow,

and Beijing thought we're starting to lose ground and we

need to regain the initiative.

In November nineteen sixty,

American voters elected John f Kennedy,

one of the youngest men ever to assume the Oval Office.

As president, and he vowed to pay any price, bear any burden

in waging the cold war.

He definitely wanted to regain the initiative in the cold war

for the United States against what he saw and what a lot of Americans saw.

As the increasing momentum of the communist world.

In Moscow, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev also took a

similar line. In the late fifties,

he began to regaining the initiative.

We're trying to regain the initiative in the cold war. And

he said on behalf of the communist world, to the west,

we will bury you.

In Beijing, Mao was also doing the same sort of thing. He was

trying to regain the initiative,

not necessarily for leadership of the global cold world,

though he was definitely thinking more along those

lines, and we'll come to that later in this lecture.

But he was also trying to get China on the front foot.

Initially with the great leap forward,

later with foreign policy,

and then as we'll see and the Cultural Revolution.

The point is that all three leaders wanted to regain the initiative.

And all three leaders wanted to do so,

not necessarily for aggressive purposes,

but because they all thought that they were losing ground in the Cold War.

However, by in in attempting to regain the initiative,

all three introduced new instabilities

into the international system.

Which quickly brought the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

And even though it would also lead them eventually to detente,

It did so in a way that wasn't on stable foundations

and managed to perpetuate and entrench the cold war well into

the nineteen eighties.