When did the Cold War become global?

Abstract or Introduction

The 20th century was shaped by three wars, each global and utterly destructive in its own way. The first took the world by surprise and crushed the romantic ideal of heroism with industrialised brutality. The second stained the very core of mankind with unimaginable evil and cruelty, with death and suffering on an unprecedented scale. The third brought disruption to the world and the planet to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. This is the story of the role that the atomic bomb played in this third global conflict within a few decades, which we have come to call the Cold War.

The impact of nuclear weapons on international relations in general and on the Cold War in particular is too little understood. Especially for us millennials, who were socialised after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the pervasiveness of nuclear danger is hard to conceptualise. Yet, it defined an era of global volatility and a Zeitgeist of glooming apocalypse that manifested itself in the political, cultural and social spheres of its time.

In this paper, the author will reconstruct how nuclearisation was both cause and consequence of the Cold War, cemented its dichotomy and eventually made it global. The argument is this: while it may have been the Korean War, or the emergence of proxy wars in general, that manifested the clash of expansionist ideologies on an international level, the Cold War became – and had to remain - global as a result of nuclearisation.