In the fifties and sixties, North America was certain that Russia was going to bomb us. My question is why?

What did they have to gain by bombing north america?

They would win the worldwide game of King of the Hill?

Spread to keep everyone in constant fear…war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

After WW2, the world was pretty much divided into the soviet sphere of influence and the American sphere of influence. Communism versus capitalism.

There were certain elements in the soviet union that thought they could take over the world. And one way to do so was to fly over the North Pole and bomb cities in the US. So we built the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line, and built NIKE anti-missile sites.

dew line link

How serious were they? No one knows. But the tension kept the Cold Ward going into the 1980s, and now it is happening again.

So the fundamental answer to your question: World Domination.

And arms manufacturing makes a select few very wealthy,while providing jobs to the working poor??

@SQUEEKY2 probably, but I think that the soviet threat was real – not invented like some of the other games that the Pentagon has played. I believe that there was reason to take seriously the soviet threats.

Did people get rich? Probably. But that always happens.

Remember, too, that Pearl Harbor was a recent, vivid memory and a major blot on the national psyche.
In order to never be caught unaware again, we had to be hyper-aware.

Russia could, so we had to assume they would.

But we fought along side Russia during ww2 to defeat Hitler from just that, now just a few short years after that we feared Russia would take up where Hitler failed?

We’re fighting along with Iran today, @SQUEEKY2.
Strange bedfellows.

The way I think about it, it was communism vs democracy, and America didn’t want the “domino effect” to allow communism to take over the world. At one point, supposedly, the missiles in Cuba were pointed at the US. My girlfriend, who lived in Miami at the time, remembers being terrified the bombs would drop on their heads.

Also, America had used the atom bomb, so of course we believed other countries would. Other countries knew we had pushed the button before, so it’s not far fetched we would do it again.

The communists were atheists. Just think about how so many people in the US don’t trust atheists. Godless communists over there in Russia. We even added under God to our pledge of allegiance to show we are a country that believes in God. Why would atheists care about life? They don’t have morals or ethics.

The Russians perceived us as not wanting to care for all if our citizens. Everyone was suspicious of everyone and both Russia and America were manufacturing and stockpiling bombs, missiles, tanks, arms, and on and on.

Is it such a surprise to you that former allies would soon be enemies, @SQUEEKY2? Surely your knowledge of history isn’t so shallow! After all, the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a more-or-less secret-at-the-time treaty even before Germany invaded Poland to nominally start World War Two, and they were nominal allies while they divided Poland between them, right up until June of 1941 when Hitler launched Barbarossa to invade his erstwhile “ally” and attempted to conquer the Soviet Union. (Hitler hated Communism, and Stalin in particular, and thought that he only had to “kick in the front door” to watch the whole house collapse. No one ever expected an “alliance” between them to last, and it obviously didn’t.)

If you need more evidence of how allegiance and friendships change, consider that two of our strongest and most faithful allies since the 1940s have been … Germany and Japan. Who would have predicted that in 1940?

As for the view of the Cold War, part of the reason why “the US and USSR feared each other so much” (if they really did at the highest levels of government, which is debatable), part of the answer to that depends on who you want to listen to. On the one hand, there’s H.L. Mencken, who may not have been talking specifically about Soviet / American relations when he said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,” but those words may apply. (They applied just as much to the Soviet leadership, who needed to have the USA as a bogeyman to keep their own people in line supporting the Party aims to become stronger and “sacrifice for the Motherland”.)

Or perhaps you prefer conspiracy theories that suggest that the Rothschilds family – who were certainly rich, powerful, and spread out around the world – had family members who were calling the shots in the Politburo and others who were the powers-behind-the-throne in naming US Presidents, too. All so that a rich, powerful and connected family could increase their wealth and power by pitting the masses of Soviet citizens against the masses of US citizens … and still keep both countries from actually going to a shooting war, which would cut into profits. (And there is no denying that the Rothschilds were, have been and still are rich, powerful and well connected, and because of their worldwide banking interests they do make money off armaments and funding of defense industries all around the world.)

In any case, the prevailing strategic thinking was that the USSR would invade Europe, the ground war would resume there as the US, allied with most of Western Europe, would attempt to prevent that invasion and conquest, and the bombing and missile strikes over the North Pole would be strong attempts to “dissuade” (or prevent) us from fighting them in Europe. I don’t think a serious military person in leadership in the USA or USSR ever thought that an invasion of the other country had a hope in hell of succeeding, but missile strikes on population centers and military targets could take the other fellow out of war production capability.

Therefore, since either side had the capability and apparent willingness to target the other’s population, manufacturing and military bases, both felt the need to develop those to ensure the Mutual Assured Destruction in order to prevent, forestall or at least massively retaliate from the other’s first strike capability.

That is simple, had the US found a way toi sneak missile up the Kremlin’s tail pipe, or stop every missile the Soviets launched, Uncle Sam would have gave them a WWE smack down just has he did Saddam, because He knew Saddam could be bitchslapped and do nothing about it.

Big picture perspective: Because the insanity of our culture is especially nasty in the form of politics.

Slightly lower-level than that: The string-pullers in the USSR were not the same as the string-pullers in the USA & Europe. String-pullers like to be in control, and so there was a power conflict. Add to that the danger of cities or nations being destroyed in a matter of hours by long-range thermonuclear attack, and both sides felt very threatened by the other. Add more xenophobia and paranoia on both sides, and you also get the communist vs capitalist propaganda conversation going, which is still derailing objective political thinking today.

More specifically, the effective dictator of the USSR at the end of World War Two was Joseph Stalin, who was a terrifying paranoid mass-murdering nasty who was only to be preferred to Hitler in that he was not actively invading the rest of the world. The culture of string-pullers who developed around his regime were somewhat to be preferred, but still quite frightening.

Americans believed the Soviet government didn’t care about their own families, and would gladly sacrifice them in the big chess game of politics and world domination. If the Soviets destroyed America, there would be no one to stand in their way to take over every other country.
Anyway, that’s what we believed.

We were convinced that the Soviets wished us toal annihilation. The premise was a con job, and we were chumps for not seeing it for what it was. I mean there were some pretty big clues. Take for example the interesting fact that the people screaming loudest about our certain doom were exactly those who stood to reap billions as long as we believed it.

Paranoid xenophobia on both sides.

The USA fought against Hitler together with the Communist nation of USSR because Hitler was a common enemy… eventually. The US declared war on Japan first and didn’t join the war against Hitler for a very long time. Norway was battling against USSR before World War 2. Then, USSR was trying to take over Finland, so men from Norway went over to stop them. Fast forward 4 years and Norway is invaded by the Nazis and so was Russia, so there was Norway and Russia on the same side of a different fight.
.Once Hitler was defeated, (but Fascism and Nazism still was a live and well) agendas changed. Check out this about how the USSR controlled communists expanded their territory in Europe after WW2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/ir2/sovietexpansionineasterneuroperev2.shtml

The US was fearing the spread of communism. Well, many nations were. And it wasn’t strictly, ‘communism’... it was a particular brand. Ruthless with death squads and secret police. It was a tactic the fascists were using, too, in Spain and then eventually in South America. If you had mentioned ‘human rights’ back then, they would have laughed in your face… right before they disappeared you. Of course, in their defence against communism, the US trampled the rights of their own citizens and couldn’t see the irony of it. Much like what is happened now, but the enemy isn’t communism any more, but terrorism, of course.

The race was on during WW2 to invent the atomic bomb. America got there first, thanks to the efforts of scientists working in a secret location in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The project was code named, The Manhattan Project. Eventually the Russians got their hands on the technology, too. The US were afraid the Russians were going to use them to further their expansion of communism. They didn’t. The USA were the only ones who used atomic bombs against their foe in war. They dropped two on Japan.

In the end, it became a huge stand-off and the technology grew and grew and the stockpiles of weapons grew and grew. More nations got their hands on them, too. Here is a brilliant infographic video showing the spread of testing of atomic bombs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAnqRQg-W0k

Of course, it got to the point that if someone hit the button, it was ‘mutually assured destruction’ because the other nation would have time to launch all their missiles before they were hit. It was an insane, expensive stand-off.

There was the We will bury you speech by Nikita Khrushchev. The banging of his shoe on the podium. And let’s not forget the Cuban missile crisis. Many nuke test above ground and below. It seemed like every week each side would detonate a bigger one.

“We will bury you!” (Russian: ”Мы вас похороним!”, transliterated as My vas pokhoronim!) is a phrase that was used by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.[1][2][3] The phrase was originally translated into English by Khrushchev’s personal interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev.[4]

You have to remember the way the world was back then. Stalin was not exactly a benevolent dictator. He killed 10s of millions of his own people. When he negotiated the non-aggression pact with Hitler it was primarily a way to divid Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia. When Germany attacked Russia, Stalin negotiated with both Churchill and FDR again to divide Eastern Europe territories. Soviet expansion was not mere speculation. When Stalin died in ‘53 and Khrushchev took over, there was no reason to believe things would get better. Khrushchev was one of Stalin’s henchmen and his desire for expansion was no less than Stalin’s. WWII had made it obvious that if there was to be any more Soviet expansion they would have to deal with the US. The falsified elections in Poland made it obvious that the Soviets couldn’t be trusted and so the tensions rose. The soviet blockade of West Berlin also made the case that nothing was safe. With two super powers both with nuclear weapons, there was a very real possibility that someone would push too hard. Berlin, Cuba, Poland all brought the possibility of a collision to everyone’s attention.

It made no sense for the Russians to bomb the west but there was a fear that a nuclear exchange could be started accidentally through a misunderstanding of some sort. That is a still a possibility today but we have become more used to having nuclear weapons around and we don’t conduct atmospheric tests with enormous yields the way we once did.

@stanleybmanly Change “Soviet” to “Muslim” and ask yourself if things are really all that different today.

You must understand the tenor of the times to understand the madness, and the complacency within that madness, of the Cold War years.

The Bolshevik Revolution, in all its brutality, was still within living memory. Stalin’s seemingly arbitrary purges of the 1930s, the forced marches and starvation of whole provinces of the uncooperative people of the Ukraine (Stalin said he got the idea from our own brutal relocation of the eastern Indian tribes into the Oklahoma Territory), the creation of the gulags as described in the newspapers and again in the 1970’s in greater detail by Solzhenitsyn, the suicidal determination of Stalin’s armies at the defense of Stalingrad and their mercilessness as they took Poland and eastern Germany at the end of WWII. Then his treatment of prisoners of war, his death camps, and finally, his treatment of the Soviet East Bloc countries after the war as a result of the Potsdam Agreement.

The betrayal of the Potsdam Agreement was exemplified by the situation in Berlin after the Wall went up in 1961. East Berlin became stark physical evidence to all us of the difference of our two systems, the difference in the standard of living the communist system would provide compared to our capitalist system and it was obvious to everyone that communism was inferior and held up only under dictatorship and eventually doomed to fail. Nobody wanted to live in East Berlin. Nobody wanted to live under the Soviet system.

In short, Stalin, then Khrushchev, along with their generals, scared the living shit out of us. We expected no mercy if the Soviets ever got the upper hand. The Leaders of the Soviet Union from Lenin through Khrushchev had each proclaimed American capitalist imperialism the world’s number one enemy and the communist Soviet Union the world’s savior. They said that we needed to go, that their own lower standard of living was due to our greed in taking more than our share of the world’s resources, that in solidarity and in assistance to their third-world brothers, they must sometimes go without meat and coffee.

But we were safe because we alone had the Atom Bomb and had shown the world in 1945 that we would use it against the civilian populations of an enemy state if sufficiently provoked. Then, when the Soviets got the bomb, an incredible paranoia filled our national consciousness. There was no question in the minds of the press and the people that Stalin, and later Khrushchev, wished our annihilation. A Soviet pre-emptive strike was a foregone conclusion. Did it make sense? The answer to that question came in the form of another question: Did Hitler make sense?

The new post-war suburbanites began spending their money building bomb shelters deep under their back yards instead of building an extra bedroom for the new baby –underground shelters from plans in magazines such as Popular Mechanics which were purported to withstand nuclear attack. Our government subverted its own constitution to root out suspected spies in every quarter. We began Atomic Bomb Drills in our elementary schools, showing films that described the impending destruction of a Soviet attack and instructed six year-olds to hide under their desks in order to save themselves. Our strategy to stave off a pre-emptive strike was to assure the Soviets that even after we had been reduced to ashes there would be thousands of our nuclear warheads already launched and in the air –our last act as a nation – to ensure complete annihilation of the Soviet Union. The policy was called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short, and it showed our enemy our resolve to kill them all if they chose to start WWIII. And that was the world we lived in.

Were we the victims of propaganda? Did the press, in turn, willingly allow themselves to become the dupes of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex that Eisenhower warned us about belatedly in his last speech to the nation in January, 1961? (The original speech, as written, described a triumvirate which included Congress, but Eisenhower was strongly advised to keep Congress out of the picture, which he did just before going on the air.) More to the point: Was the threat of a pre-emptive strike, as perceived by nearly everyone in this supposedly free and open democracy with a supposedly free and independent press, real?

The prevailing opinion was that good risk management demanded we assumed the worst because if we were wrong, it would have been the end of the United States and possibly the world. Besides, we had just fought a war the start of which had become too late to stop because the world, all except for Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, had refused to build proper defenses after the appalling destruction of WWI. The U.S. was determined not to fall into the same predicament that France and England found themselves in 1939: suddenly faced with almost a million modern, mechanized troops controlled by another madman, another predator, along the same old Western Front of only twenty years before. Never. The arguments for this MADness were overwhelming. Anyone arguing against it was immediately suspected to have communist sympathies.

In the late 1970s, a reporter asked Henry Kissinger to describe MAD and Kissinger said it was like two men in a basement up to their knees in gasoline with one holding ten matches and the other holding nine—and the one who held ten matches thought that he was ahead. Everyone thought that it was funny, and that Kissinger was right that it was madness, but the only thing that changed throughout those years before 1992 was that sometimes we could laugh about it.

@Espiritus_Corvus Great details, but it was a little hard to stay focused on reading because the further I got, the more Ecclesiastes 1:8–11 intruded upon my thoughts.

All things are wearisome, more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come
will not be remembered by those who follow them.

@jerv Very interesting. I also recalled part of that passage when reading @Espiritus_Corvus‘s comment. I couldn’t remember whether it was Shakespeare or The Bible, so went and looked it up.