cold war crisis

• The four summit meetings of 1959-61 had failed to resolve the problem in Berlin, and President Kennedy started to prepare the USA for nuclear war
• Khrushchev could not risk a nuclear war with the United States, but he still needed to solve the refugee problem that existed in Berlin
• On 12 August 1961, East German troops erected a barbed wire fence around West Berlin. The fence eventually became a heavily guarded wall. Soviet tanks were deployed to stop Western access to the East. By the end of October 1961, West Berlin was completely out off from East Germany
• Khrushchev backed down as he knew he couldn't win a nuclear war
• Despite the Berlin ultimatum, the Western powers stayed in Berlin
• The Soviet Union saw Cuba as a fix to a key strategic problem: the USA had missiles close to the Soviet Union (eg in the UK), but the Soviet Union had no missiles close to the USA
• Cuba saw Soviet missiles as a great way to prevent the USA from invading Cuba again
• In September 1962, Soviet ships carried nuclear warheads and missiles to Cuba
• In October 1962, US spy planes photographed the Cuban missile sites and the secret was out
• The US public learned that they were now in range of Soviet nuclear missiles. There was panic
• How should the USA respond?

  1. Attack straight away (the 'hawks')

  2. Avoid nuclear war at all costs (the 'doves')

  3. Do a deal and get the Soviet Union to withdraw from Cuba in return for the USA withdrawing from one of its missile bases close to the Soviet Union

  4. Blockade Cuba to stop any more missiles or equipment coming from the Soviet Union

  5. Destroy Cuban missile sites with airstrikes
• Brezhnev could not allow the reforms, as any weakness in control could mean the break-up of the Warsaw Pact - even though this wasn't Dubček's intention
• Brezhnev failed to convince Dubček to stop the reforms
• From now on, the Soviet Union declared the right to invade any Eastern bloc country that was threatening the security of the Eastern bloc as a whole
• The USA condemned the invasion but did nothing to stop it: it feared war
• Western European communist parties were horrified and declared themselves independent from the Soviet Communist Party
• Yugoslavia and Romania also backed off from the Soviet Union, weakening the Soviet Union's control over Eastern Europe
• The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was important because the Brezhnev Doctrine meant that other East European states, such as Poland or Hungary, were required to rigidly stick to Soviet-style communism or risk invasion themselves