What Was The Main Cause Of The Cold War

At the time of the Cold War, communism was one of the big issues. The Soviet Union wanted to expand its power, and gain control of Europe. Americans were worried that a nuclear war could begin, and communism would keep spreading. There were also Civil Rights movements, technological improvements, historical elections, and important events that were happening in the middle of the Cold War. In Peace Without Conquest by Lyndon B. Johnson, he states, "We will always oppose the effort of one nation to conquer another nation. We will do this because our own security is at stake" (Shi and Mayer 316). I think it 's important to remember this, because it 's one of the main reasons why the United States was always there to help Europe, and other countries …show more content…
Along with those issues, there was also a lot of worry about communism, which lead to another Red Scare. One person who took advantage of the Red Scare was Joseph McCarthy. In Democrats and Communists, he stated that he had a list of 205 communists in the State Department (Shi and Mayer 254). When he went too far with his accusations, it came to be known as McCarthyism, and he was eventually jailed. When Harry Truman became president, there was a lot of worry in the United States of a nuclear war happening, and the immense damage that such a war would cause. "Stalin 's promises at the Yalta Conference to allow open elections in the nations of Eastern Europe controlled by Soviet armies had turned out to be lies" (Shi and Tindall 1004). Stalin was acting upon things that he promised he wouldn 't do, which in turn made President Truman angry after he met Stalin at the Potsdam Conference (Shi and Tindall 1004). Since the spread of communism was growing, the United States felt like they needed to stop it from spreading, therefore President Truman asked for "containment" of communism. In Massive Retaliation (1954) by John Foster Dulles, he stated that, "We need allies and collective security. Our purpose is to make these relations more effective, less constly" (Shi and Mayer 278). Dulles had a point, since in the end of the Cold War, the United States was in much greater debt, and during the war it was constantly increasing defense spending. The United States was always there to help those in need, especially Europe, but that didn 't mean that the United States didn 't have problems of its own. In the election of 1948, Harry S. Truman had a divided democratic party. He was for Civil Rights, while some democrats were not, and this caused some trouble between both sides of the divided democratic party, but in