What kept the Cold War from becoming Hot?

Answer 1

Global suicide was the greatest deterrent, this was part of the MAD doctrine. The two superpowers with over 30,000 nuclear warheads, enough to kill the world twice over was enough to keep it a Cold War....the result was the 'proxy' wars. eg Korean Conflict, Vietnam, & Afganistan to name three. We didn't square off directlt with the Communist Bloc, but fought each other thru proxies.

Answer 2

It's a tough question and there are many opinions. What has become very clear since the collapse of the Berlin Wall is how little the Americans and the Soviets really understood about each other - however the generally accepted view (which I share) is that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) whereby each side would risk being obliterated by the other if anything kicked off.

Essentially this rested on the assumption that both the USA and USSR had the same amount to lose if war started. This assumption underlied most of the strategic planning of the pentagon, which has led in turn to the modern term "assymetric conflict", which is talking about someone who basically has a lot less to lose than you have - such as suicide bombers in palestine or al qaeda in Afghanistan.

This is one of the reasons many people see the current seeming conflict as qualitatively different between the original cold war.

Answer 3

Of course it did become "hot" from time to time. The Korean War pitted the United States and its allies against China and North Korea--both essentially Russian surrogates at the time--and Russia provided war materials and advisors to both and even surreptitiously some pilots in the air war.

Then of course there was the Cuban missile crisis in which Russian surrogate Cuba had Soviet missiles installed on its territory within range of the southeastern U.S.. That nearly became very hot indeed.

Vietnam was more or less a repeat of the scenario in Korea with Russia and China assisting our adversaries in North Vietnam and the insurgency (which we called Viet Cong) in South Vietnam.

The tables were turned in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded and we assisted the Afghan insurgency with was materials and advisors.

Then too there were various encounters at sea all through the Cold War, particularly between the nuclear sub fleets, and at least one or two resulted in "accidental" sinkings.

Why did none of these lead to a direct all out confrontation? In some cases at the point of crisis cooler heads prevailed. In others the relative forces one side or the otehr was able to muster at the point of conflict was so decidedly lopsided as to enjoin the weaker party from takingf further action. Then too, there was always the threat that a head-to-head conflict would result in an unwinnable nuclear exhange in which both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would be decimated.

Answer 4

One reason was a policy or notion called MAD, mutually assured destruction. The rationale being that both the US and the Soviet Union had the capability to annihalate the other. Each side understood this. Therefore, neither side would launch an attack on the other because doing so would initiate an immediate counterattack. I.e., there was no way to win a nuclear war.

This is also the reason that the arms race existed between the US and Soviet Union. If one side feared that the other side had an advantage that could somehow nullify MAD, that side would be forced to produce better weapons.

Answer 5

The fact that we didn't engage in battle, war, launching of nuclear weapons, etc.

It was also an economic and idealogical war. We weren't fighting for land or resources per se but ideas and political and economic systems, competing to show which one was better.

Answer 6

Reagan he was a no pulse Jim Henson anamatronics puppet. Therefore it stayed cold. Also the Reagan adim knew the Russia had a lack of funds and eventually we bankrupted them by the mass production. Just as the middle east is doing to us. It is coming full circle on us.

Answer 7

Mutually assured destruction

Answer 8

The fear of a nuclear war,

Answer 9

The nuclear standoff.

Answer 10

The fear of the cost of all that heating oil...we could not afford it