December 3 - Cold War Ends

This Day in History: 3 December 2019

 

3 December 1989

 

30 years ago, today, Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, and US President, George H. W. Bush, declare the Cold War over. After the Second World War, the communistic Soviet Union and the capitalist United States no longer had a common enemy, with that being Nazi Germany in the war. The different political systems made co-operation between the two countries virtually impossible, and so they distrusted each other too much, and drifted into a 'cold war'. This meant that there was no open military conflict, but had characteristics of a traditional war, such as military alliances and nuclear weapons being developed. This war caused extreme tension around the world, as the threat of mass destruction across the globe loomed, because both sides owned powerful nuclear weapons and allies that societies feared would cause Earth's end.

 

On December 3, 1989, Gorbachev and Bush met at the Malta Summit and declared the Cold War over. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader, he knew things had to change from the previous disasters of the previous leader, Leonid Brezhnev, as the Soviet Union was faced with low economy and low living standards. Gorbachev was therefore determined to reform communism within the Soviet Union, and introduced a series of policies, such as Perestroika (reconstruction) and Glasnost (transparency). Ronald Reagan, the president of the time, saw this as a real opportunity to end the Cold War. At the Malta Summit, the last summit out of 5 that took place between 1985 to 1989 between Gorbachev and the US president at the time, Gorbachev met with new US president, George Bush. No agreements were made, but both sides saw this as a mark of the end of the Cold War.

 

After this, Gorbachev made an impactful effort to remove symbols of the Cold War, through ending Soviet control over Eastern Europe and their satellite states, as well as taking down the Berlin Wall, the biggest symbol of the war.

 

Want to find out more on the Cold War and its end? Visit https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War for more details.