Cold War and Hot Spots, An Essay
From a previous exhibition at March Field Air Museum ( June 14 through October 1st, 2002)
Curated by Steve Clugston.
The Cold War between the Soviet Union, its satellites, and the United States and NATO allies, was a direct result of East / West polarization: an ironic consequence of the Allied victory over the Axis powers in World War II, which ended in 1945. The founding of the United Nations, the new nation state of Israel, the formation of the Soviet Bloc, the existence of Red China in Asia and the beginning of the Nuclear Age coincided with and contributed to this powder keg stalemate. The founding of the Strategic Air Command in 1946 and the U.S. Air Force as a separate branch of service in 1947 participated in no small way to this global political struggle. Air power was now the dominant military advantage in the modern post WWII world. Aerial espionage, and deployment of nuclear ordnance in new Jet Age bombers and eventual deployment of ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) systems brought the world to a new brinkmanship in the form of a nuclear Pandora's box. Political ideologies were even more critical as they had been in the former global war between Axis and Allied powers. Ironically, the threat of global nuclear annihilation and fallout, which was suppose to eliminate war, forced the Communist and Free world powers to fall back to conventional warfare in brushfire hot spots around the globe. New military conflicts in Korea (1950-1953), Latin America (1950s-1970s) and Vietnam (1955-1975) proved to be the tragic fruit of these strained and failed policies designed to curtail fear of this new ideological "imperialism". The fall of European Communism in 1989 by economic and political collapse from within the former Soviet Union finally brought an easement to this fifty year long east-west checkmate, ending the self defeating nightmare and potential end of the world as we knew it.
A promotional display urging the public to build family fallout shelters in 1955.
The final outcome has seen the emergence and irony of a new renaissance of freedom and chaos in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and a common European currency and market. The result is a beginning of a new world stage set with China, the United States, and Europe as the players locked in struggles with renegade Near Eastern sub governments and a war on global terrorism. The clay giant was shattered and we are now left to pick up the pieces of a challenged world and a new millennium.
The legacy of the Cold War from 1945-1991 has brought us lessons, which we can still learn from. Super national states as we knew them have been reinvented and a sinister new enemy sponsored by hidden fanatical religious factions are now gnawing away at civilizations. The question becomes: can we use this former practice of national military and industrialism to work with all nations to respond to this new challenge, or will we divide into large blocks of nations again as we did in the Cold War? Will we be able to use what we have learned from CIA covert activities in the Cold War counteracting underground Soviet subversion to head off new terrorist threats? This examination of Cold War and Hot Spots may help us conceive of what not to repeat again as well as how we have tried to solve our modern world problems of the former recent past. That is the goal of this exhibition.
The end of a season and the foreshadowing of a new era have begun. Foreign armies and intruders tread upon American soil in the past. The first foreign attack and outrage after the initial Revolution came in 1814, when the British burned the White House and Washington City. It resulted in one of England's greatest defeats less than five months later when she was humiliated at the Battle of New Orleans. The new state of Texas was assaulted in 1846 by Mexico: who paid the price and was beaten back by having an American army capture her capital. The U.S.S. battleship Maine was mysteriously blown up in Havana harbor in 1898, killing hundreds of American sailors. This led the U.S. to believe that Spanish radicals had provoked this terrorist act, which led to war. In 1916, the Villistas attacked Colombia, New Mexico, which resulted in the unsuccessful Punitive Expedition. The most infamous action occurred in December 1941, by a devastating surprise attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, which roused a nation and devastated another. Now we are facing the winding down and conclusion of the U.S.-Afghan War, as it might be called.
The United States has been attacked or invaded only six times by this account: a relatively small number of assaults by foreign powers when compared to European or Asian countries. Perhaps this is our legacy more than just our resolve: our ability to respond, or our resiliency. "Its safer in the air than it is on the ground" is an old expression by fliers who often compare automobile fatality stats with the smaller number of aviation deaths.
America may never be a perfectly safe place to be, but it is in comparison, relatively the safest as well as the freest. We may also remind ourselves of an old sage who cautioned about over reaction at another time of great American peril, during the Revolution: "Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin.
-Steve Clugston,
Curator of Cold War and Hot Spots, 1945-1991
March Field Air Museum. c. 2002.
[Opinions in this essay are the observations of the curator and not necessarily those of the museum foundation or staff.]-SC
steve@marchfield.org