New Era in Cold War History

On 6 August 1945 the world was ushered into a new era. However, if the development and use of atomic weapons appeared to open up new horizons of physical destruction towards the end of World War Two, then in the years that followed, and with the attendant constraints on military conflict becoming steadily more evident, US foreign policy-makers, their advisors and non-governmental individuals and institutions began to explore other ways of prosecuting the Cold War and advancing US interests. Students are confident that custom research papers are plagiarized; nevertheless, we deliver only authentic papers. Custom papers are written in accordance to instruction. One of those, the broad and (by its very nature) loosely defined field of ‘political warfare’, is the subject of Scott Lucas' contribution.

Political warfare as practised during the Cold War has been described by Blanche Wiesen Cook as involving ‘new kinds of intelligence operations, new kinds of political activities, and a massive program of psychological warfare unprecedented in scope and intensity’. A shifting amalgam of subversion, subvention, propaganda and cultural diplomacy, its purposes, in Cook's words, were to help ‘combat communism’, ‘extend the influence of capital development’ and protect American interests worldwide against ‘both war and social upheaval’. Manifestations of political warfare ranged, during the earlier phases of the Cold War, from the covert US intelligence agency activities that fostered coups in Guatemala and Iran, via the subsidizing of institutions like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe, to the establishment of the celebrated 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow at which Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon called one another household names. Not surprisingly, the variety of activities and objectives encompassed by political warfare has made it a subject of growing interest to diplomatic, political, cultural, intelligence and other historians. Custom writing paper is a professional assistance sought by students who request assistance of qualified writers online. Plagiarism free guarantee! In the wake of Cook's pioneering study of the Eisenhower administration's political warfare activities, The Declassified Eisenhower (1981), and with the continuing release of relevant primary materials, a stream of articles and monographs has offered new meanings for the phrase Eisenhower himself chose as the title of his second volume of memoirs, Waging Peace (1964).