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- Yes, the cold war should be considered a war
- Argument‹5 of 5
The Cold War was a war because of its deadly Arms Race
As both nations raced to build the most destructive atomic weapons, and schools practiced attack drills with the looming threat of atomic warfare, the Cold War tensions increasingly grew. The threat of an actual, devastating war was ever-present in both nations as the arms race ensued.
The argument
The Arms Race between the United States of America and the Soviet Union represents why the Cold War was a war. What distinguishes a war from a rivalry is not only whether shots are fired but whether both sides are organising themselves for the destruction of the other, and on that test the Arms Race settles the question. The contest had a stake. After the Second World War there was a race between the USA and the USSR — the two global superpowers at the time — to spread their form of government, either democracy or communism. This was not a difference of interest that could be split. Each side understood the other's system as something to be displaced rather than accommodated, which is the condition under which rearmament becomes the obvious response. The method both countries chose in order to flex their muscles was the development of nuclear weapons, and the sequence shows how tightly each was responding to the other. The United States created the Atom Bomb during the Second World War; by 1949 the Soviets had developed their own. By 1952 the Americans had built an even more powerful weapon, the Hydrogen Bomb, and the following year the Soviets had one too. Neither advance was allowed to stand unmatched, and the interval between an American capability and its Soviet counterpart kept shrinking. The result was a state of affairs in which both countries could effectively wipe out humanity if they deployed their nuclear weapons. A rivalry conducted under that condition is not a peace. It added to the tension between the two countries and pushed forward the conflicts and proxy wars that made up the Cold War — fighting that happened elsewhere precisely because direct fighting had been made unthinkable by the weapons themselves.
Context
Shortly after the end of World War Two, American politicians developed a strategy called "containment." The goal of this strategy was to contain Soviet influence in the world, particularly in places that recently gained their independence after the war.
Premises
Counter-arguments
While the Arms Race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated tensions between both countries, the decision to not use nuclear weapons conveys that the Cold War was not a war. The Soviets put nuclear weapons in Cuba – just over one hundred miles from the Florida coast – and fighting never occurred. The development of arms alone is not enough reason to call the Cold War a war.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise describes preparation for war rather than war. Competing to spread a system of government and building weapons to display strength are things states do in peacetime as well, and no criterion is offered here that distinguishes an armed peace from a war. [Rejecting P2] Matched escalation is evidence of deterrence, not of combat. The capacity to destroy one another is precisely what each side used to avoid fighting the other directly, so the fact that these weapons were never used against their intended target tells against the conclusion rather than for it — the counter's point about the Cuban missile crisis, where the confrontation ended without an exchange. [Rejecting P3] "Drove the conflicts and proxy wars" weakens the argument's own case. If the proxy wars are what make the period warlike, the arms race is at most an indirect contributing factor, and the position would stand on firmer ground argued from Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan — where fighting and casualties are not in dispute — than from weapons that stayed in their silos.