Global Communism and Containment

Europe's division into Soviet and U.S. camps meant that the entire Continent became the main theater of the Cold War, militarily and economically dominated by Moscow or Washington. Berlin, an international city located in the Soviet sphere but also occupied by U.S., British, and French forces, tested Soviet and U.S. wills, but survived with the U.S. airlift in 1948-49.The Soviet Union detonated an A bomb in 1949, the U.S. and Soviets both exploded H bombs in the 1950s, with the British and the French soon becoming nuclear powers. The United States formed NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in 1949 and the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955.

The North Atlantic Alliance was founded on the basis of a Treaty between Member States entered into freely by each of them after public debate and due parliamentary process. The Treaty upholds their individual rights as well as their international obligations in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. It commits each member country to sharing the risks and responsibilities as well as the benefits of collective security and requires each of them to undertake not to enter into any other international commitment that might conflict with the Treaty.

In 1961 the East German authorities claimed the wall was necessary as an ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’ to protect against ‘subversive activity’ from the West. In a Letter sent by Soviet authorities to the governments of the USA, UK and France dated 18 August 1961, they claim that: ‘West Berlin has been transformed into a center of subversive activity diversion, and espionage, into a center of political and economic provocations against the G.D.R., the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries’. It has long been accepted that the primary motivation behind the wall’s construction was to stem the growing exodus of people leaving East Germany however, something which was both politically embarrassing and economically damaging for the communist authorities, with those leaving primarily comprised of younger, skilled citizens, amounting to a ‘brain drain’.