(1946-1948)

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR the responsibility for supervising the defeated Germany was divided among the Allied victors. West Germany was occupied by British and American troops, while East Germany was occupied by Russia. Berlin, the capital of Germany, was also divided into East and West, but embedded within East German territory.

On 24 July 1948, Soviet troops set up a blockade, severing the road and rail links between West Germany and Berlin. It was a calculated act of aggression against the West, and was felt as such. The West came close to declaring war on Russia and was only put off by the thought of Stalingrad. In fact, it later turned out that Stalin did not have sufficient troops or equipment in the Russian sector (later East Germany) to launch a war on the British and American sectors (later West Germany). If the British and American troops had fought their way through the Soviet blockade, there would probably have been no further military action from Moscow, but at the time the level of risk was unknown.

The day after the Berlin blockade started an airlift began, with British and US aircraft flying in food and supplies for the people living in West Berlin – some 2million of them. The blockade continued and by September the aircraft were ferrying in 4,500 tons of supplies a day. The blockade was maintained for almost 18 months.

Relations between the West and the Soviet Union naturally cooled over the Berlin blockade. The US Presidential adviser Bernard Baruch described the situation as a “Cold War”, coining the phrase that would characterise the state of the world for the next half-century. The Soviets were not firing guns at anyone, but their behaviour was certainly hostile and intimidating.

This state of frozen hostility went on for over 40 years. It led directly to a dangerous arms race in which the latest atomic weapons were stockpiled. As the science of rocketry developed, America and the Soviet Union equipped their arsenals with rockets and missiles that could carry nuclear warheads right across the Arctic Ocean or from one side of Europe to the other. The cost of these intercontinental ballistic missiles (IBMs) was enormous, a huge drain on the economic resources of the countries involved.

A climate of fear was generated. Both sides wanted to test their latest nuclear bombs, and the bomb test explosions were in themselves intended to deter the enemy. By the late 1950s it was evident that dangerous levels of radiation were being pumped into the atmosphere by these test explosions, and anxious people were concerned their life expectancy was being shortened by the increase risk of serious illness. In the West, there was also a heightened fear that real, full-scale war would break out, a Third World War that might be shorter but far more violent than the two previous world wars, a war that could and probably would destroy both sides.

Perhaps in the knowledge that an old-style military war would probably annihilate everything and everyone, America and the Soviet Union played out their fierce rivalry in a Space Race. The competition to launch satellites, space probes and land men on the Moon was a kind of displacement activity, an acting-out of the Cold War in a contest of supremacy over space technology.

. Appendage