CAUSES:
The events of the late 1940s — the NKVD’s atomic bomb spy-ring of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Iron Curtain (1945–91) around Eastern Europe, and the USSR’s nuclear weapon — surprised the US public, influencing popular opinion about US national security, that, in turn, connected to fear of the Soviet Union atomic-bombing the US, and fear of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). In Canada, the 1946 Kellock-Taschereau Commission investigated espionage after top secret documents concerning RDX, radar and other weapons were handed over to the Soviets by a domestic spy-ring. [9] At the House Un-American Activities Committee, former CPUSA members and NKVD spies, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified that Soviet spies and communist sympathizers had penetrated the US government before, during, and after the Second World War. In 1949, anti–communist fear was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War against the Western-sponsored Kuomintang, their founding of the People's Republic of China, and later Chinese intervention in the Korean War (1950–53) against US client state South Korea.
It caused the USA to spend (waste) a huge amount of it's wealth in an insane arms race.
The US arms manufacturers used this time period to build up a unhealthy lobbying power inside the US governmet, even to the point of shaping US internatinal foreign policy.
Outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower saw this and warned his countrymen of the "US industrial military complex".
Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, inevitably, communism was collapsing under it's own weight.
in the 1980's the CIA had valued the size of the Soviet economy as almost three times it's actual worth.
In retrospect, liberals and socialists reacted indecisively to the Red Scare. As the excesses of the Scare came to threaten the civil liberties of even the most conservative leftists, the liberal press became vociferous in regards to political hysteria.
The events of the late 1940s — the NKVD’s atomic bomb spy-ring of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Iron Curtain (1945–91) around Eastern Europe, and the USSR’s nuclear weapon — surprised the US public, influencing popular opinion about US national security, that, in turn, connected to fear of the Soviet Union atomic-bombing the US, and fear of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). In Canada, the 1946 Kellock-Taschereau Commission investigated espionage after top secret documents concerning RDX, radar and other weapons were handed over to the Soviets by a domestic spy-ring. [9] At the House Un-American Activities Committee, former CPUSA members and NKVD spies, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified that Soviet spies and communist sympathizers had penetrated the US government before, during, and after the Second World War. In 1949, anti–communist fear was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War against the Western-sponsored Kuomintang, their founding of the People's Republic of China, and later Chinese intervention in the Korean War (1950–53) against US client state South Korea.
It caused the USA to spend (waste) a huge amount of it's wealth in an insane arms race.
The US arms manufacturers used this time period to build up a unhealthy lobbying power inside the US governmet, even to the point of shaping US internatinal foreign policy.
Outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower saw this and warned his countrymen of the "US industrial military complex".
Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, inevitably, communism was collapsing under it's own weight.
in the 1980's the CIA had valued the size of the Soviet economy as almost three times it's actual worth.
In retrospect, liberals and socialists reacted indecisively to the Red Scare. As the excesses of the Scare came to threaten the civil liberties of even the most conservative leftists, the liberal press became vociferous in regards to political hysteria.