My son came home from school today and said, "Today we learned the US was responsible for starting the Cold War." I asked him to tell me how the US started the Cold War, he said that the USSR was so frightened by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that it prompted them to intensely pursue nuclear weapons. I'm really getting tired of this kind of junk history being taught to my child. It is evident that the only way ideas like this can be passed off as credible is to intentionally omit critical historical context and otherwise twist world events.
The assertion that we started the Cold War by using the Atom Bomb makes many assumptions that discount significant facts. Perhaps my son's teacher naively assumes Stalin had not come in contact with atomic science before he saw it on display or that he would not have been enticed to use it's extraordinary potential for military dominance once he did. Both are ignorant assumptions that place blame on the US simply because we "fired the first shot." This is a tragic simplistic view of the effect World War II, and it's convergence with the known scientific discovery of atomic fission, would ultimately have on world powers.
I am not in favor of the juvenile reasoning used in his class lesson but to illustrate it's deficiencies let's apply this logic to the facts his curriculum omits:
In the first decades of the 20th century, physics was revolutionized with developments in the understanding of the nature of atoms. Hopes were raised among scientists and laymen that the elements around us could contain tremendous amounts of unseen energy, waiting to be harnessed. In a 1924 article, Winston Churchill speculated about the possible military implications: "Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?" Perhaps if we apply the logic of my son's school lesson, we could blame the Cold War on the imaginations of Winston Churchill. Or perhaps we can blame H.G. Wells and his 1914 novel that incited the imaginations of nuclear war 50 years before kids would duck under their desks in terror.
The fact that Nuclear fission was a known scientific theory as early as 1898 would alone suggest that Stalin wasn't caught unaware of the potential. The first experiment confirming the atomic bomb theory was conducted in Germany, not the US, by Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch on January 13, 1939. Years before the Manhattan project, nuclear fission was sparking the violent imaginations of Hitler, who had world supremacy on his mind. The collaboration of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada during World War II, known as the Manhattan Project, was put in place to counter the suspected Nazi German atomic bomb project. Even if such a project did not exist, the cost of assuming Hitler wasn't developing the capacity was too great a gamble to simply wait and see. Applying the logic of my son's school lesson here you might easily conclude Hitler was to blame for sparking the chain of events leading to an arms race and the Cold War, after all, Hitler had the whole world on the defensive.
By the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, many of Europe's top scientists had fled the imminent conflict. Physicists on both sides were well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but no one was quite sure how it could be done. In August 1939, concerned that Germany might have its own project to develop fission-based weapons, Albert Einstein signed a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the threat. Applying the logic of my son's school lesson we might conclude Albert Einstein trigger an arms race, or perhaps it was FDR for believing him.
But wait, it was only after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that FDR devoted significant resources to a serious atomic project. Applying the logic of my son's school lesson, we could conclude that Japan is responsible for the Cold War by dragging America into the war. But then again, progressive logic might lead us to conclude that there was no other nation besides the US capable of making a bomb and had it not been for the exceptional intelligence of scientists in America no one would have ever figured it out. Once again applying the logic of my son's school lesson here we might conclude that talented scientists are to blame for the Cold War.
The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb was launched as a top secret research and development program during World War II, after evidence of German and western nuclear programs was collected by the Soviet atomic spy ring and presented to Stalin. Also adding to Stalin's awareness was Soviet physicist Georgy Flyorov who noticed that in spite of the progress German, British and American physicists had made in research into uranium fission, scientific journals had ceased publishing papers on the topic. Flyorov deduced that this meant such research had been classified, and wrote to Stalin in April 1942. Applying the logic of my son's school lesson here we might conclude that the arms race was caused by America's unwillingness to share atomic advancement with Russia.
Despite the fact that Stalin launched a full blown atomic bomb project in September 1942, after gathering intelligence on the German nuclear project, progressive historians point to the fact that Stalin made a decision to accelerate his program in the wake of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as evidence supporting the idea that America launched the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. Besides other logical explanations for why Stalin's expanding nuclear program might coincide with the bombing of Japan, I suppose you might conclude Stalin was merely protecting himself from Germany and the allied powers, but only if you willfully ignore who Stalin was.p
How about we apply some grown up logic to this curriculum:
My son's class will study the "Cold War" in the next chapter, but today's commentary is not a stray thought from a careless teacher, it is straight out of the text book. I've been reading my son's US history text book, a Pearson published text titled, "The American Journey." This is not the first historical distortion I have encountered in this book, however, it is astonishing that any history text taught widely to US students can so distort the record of the Soviet Union as to shed doubt on the fact that Russia had aims to spread world communism. The text book claims that "Truman and the 'wise men' who made up his Foreign policy circle ignored examples of 1945 Soviet conciliation," which they evidence by the fact that the Soviets "demobilized much of their army," and credited Russia with "allowing a democratic Finland and free elections in Hungry and Czechoslovakia." Further the book charges the boldness of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plans with putting Russia on "the defensive" and undoing any hope there might have been for peace with Russia. Both assertions are misleading at best but if these inferences are suggesting that the world would have been a more peaceful place without US "boldness," then it is only fair that the curriculum explore the question, "Would world peace have been achieved had the Americans simply left war torn Europe in shambles and retreated to our own shores?"
The astonishing deficiencies in this analysis has at its root an attempt to draw moral equivalency between oppressive regimes, like Russia, and America's influence on the world stage. This faulty foundation saturates this text book from cover to cover. It is outrageous to suggest that Russia's aggression in Eastern block countries was justified self-defense as a reaction to US designs to liberate and establish free societies in Europe. This is a sickening mis-characterization of the nature of communism and Stalin's totalitarian regime and what was in reality the lowering of an Iron Curtain of totalitarian control and deadly oppression over Eastern Europe. Russia's atrocities during World War II, their brutal administration of East Berlin, and their provocations beyond their own boarders were enough to cause series concern to the free world. The Soviets blockaded Berlin, annexed several occupied countries, and converted Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Czechoslovakia into Soviet Satallite states with oppressive communists governments.
Despite the 1949 tests of Soviet nuclear bombs, the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung taking power in China, and a fierce war with communist North Korea, the text book claims it was the US that "accelerated a forty-year race with the Soviet Union." The explanation of the causes of the Cold War put the heavier burden for the escalation on the US. The book details Truman’s dislike of Stalin as exaggerated suspicion, blames Truman's pursuit of the hydrogen bomb for locking the US into the Cold War, portrays American fear of communist attack as sensationalized, and faults the US for the mistrust between nations because of their refusal to share nuclear secrets.
The text book makes no attempt to imagine how the world might have looked had it been left to the bold plans of Stalin's worldview? Where are the mentions of the deplorable dictator who personally made death lists and ordered whole groups of his own people to die. After all, Stalin was the dictator who systematically exterminated 30,000 Red Army officers so he could work plans for military conquest unimpeded by Russia's national heroes. He used murder as state policy executing 90% of the Russian Parliament, he sent 14 million to die in slave labor in the Gulags, and his campaign of murder was so endemic that historians struggle to estimate the millions who died at his hands, estimates ranging widely between 30 and 60 million people.
It is a fact that in the rubble of World War II he sought to expand his brutal regime of absolute control and murder, and it is irresponsible for any text book to infer that he did so purely motivated by "self-defense." The Western powers foolishly placed their trust in Russia's goodwill at the 1945 Yalta Conference only to watch in horror as their Polish Allies were executed and the relocation of tens of thousands of Poles, already victimized by Hitler, were forced into slave labor in Stalin's gulags. The British parliament was so ashamed of betraying their Polish allies that they allowed liberal immigration to Polish refugees. Both FDR and Churchill expressed deep regret over their naive trust in this brutal dictator. Stalin was never a man who acted on the honorable virtues of self-defense and his view of world dominance left no room for America's commitment to world liberty.
Weighing all the evidence: The fact that it is not only impossible to hold back scientific progress, but foolish. The fact that there have always been men in this world bent on the evil domination of others. The fact that the world was gripped in the jaws of evil by the rise of the most despicable dictators the world had ever known; dictators who were seeking these weapons, who would eventually acquiring them, and who were entirely capable of using them to oppress the world. Based on the evidence, it is far more accurate to conclude that the Cold War was caused by Communist designs to dominate and control the world, then to place the blame on the shoulders of the US who was working against extraordinary odds to secure liberty in the world. Now that's applying grown up logic based on the facts which seems to have no place in my son's US History curriculum.
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