Causes Of The Cold War

Submitted By emcrad4
Words: 448
Pages: 2

I believe that the start of the ‘Cold War’ was due to the Soviet Union. This is because of the mutual distrust of Josef Stalin and his alleged allies, especially with the USA’s newly elected Prime Minister, Harry Truman. Furthermore, Stalin appeared to have exterior motives, which he concealed from the other leaders, which included accommodating and expanding his sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
This resulted in suspicion and tension between all countries. Also, many of the disagreements, at The Potsdam Conference, were between Stalin and the USA, for example – for compensation over Russia’s mass death during the war, Stalin wanted reparations; yet Truman didn’t want to repeat the Treaty of Versailles. Problems like this eventually caused a great division between both superpowers.
However, USA refused to share A-Bomb technology with the Russians after World War Two, but confided in Britain, this scared Stalin, who had lost 20 million Russians, and thought that America might start a war against Russia because of the advantage of having nuclear weapons. This indirectly caused a large problem as Stalin then had to retaliate and defend Russia against the threat of being bombed.
The Iron curtain speech, made by Churchill, officially declared the ending of war-time allies, with Truman by his side. The ‘iron curtain’ which spread across Eastern Germany implied that you can’t see what’s going on, on the other side. Churchill made it sound as if Stalin is hiding something to his audience, which cause mass suspicion among the recipients. This was the first publicized and verbal announcement that we were in a cold war.
The West wanted to renovate the German economy and incorporate the three western zones into one area. Soviet Union feared this collaboration because it gave the one combined zone more power than