1945 was a chaotic year, both for the world and for Winston Churchill. Soon after the death of Roosevelt, Churchill arrived at the Potsdam Conference expecting to broker peace with Stalin and Truman, only to find himself unable to attend the final summit sessions following a notoriously lopsided General Election result. Having spent the late 1930s warning of Nazism, Churchill found himself again sounding the alarm about the Communist threat to the freedom that he and his Allies had won at such a cost.

En dybtgående, veldokumenteret analyse af britisk udenrigspolitik i gennem de første 10 efterkrigsår, herunder bl. a. den engelsk-amerikansk-franske manøvre for at afværge Sovjetunionens bestræbelser for at genforene Tyskland.

It was forty-two years ago that Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain." This speech, according to Fraser Harbutt, set forth the basic Western ideology of the coming East-West struggle. It was also a calculated move within, and a dramatic public definition of, the Truman administration's concurrent turn from accommodation to confrontation with the Soviet Union. It provoked a response from Stalin that goes far to explain the advent of the Cold War a few weeks later. This book is at once a fascinating biography of Winston Churchill as the leading protagonist of an Anglo-American political and military front against the Soviet Union and a penetrating re-examination of diplomatic relations between the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. in the postwar years. Pointing out the Americocentric bias in most histories of this period, Harbutt shows that the Europeans played a more significant part in precipitating the Cold War than most people realize. He stresses that the same pattern of events that earlier led America belatedly into two world wars, namely the initial separation and then the sudden coming together of the European and American political arenas, appeared here as well. From the combination of biographical and structural approaches, a new historical landscape emerges. The United States appears at times to be the rather passive object of competing Soviet and British maneuvers. The turning point came with the crisis of early 1946, which here receives its fullest analysis to date, when the Truman administration in a systematic but carefully veiled and still widely misunderstood reorientation of policy (in which Churchill figured prominently) led the Soviet Union into the political confrontation that brought on the Cold War.

Provides the dramatic history of Winston Churchill's 1946 trip to Fulton, Missouri, where he delivered his Iron Curtain Speech--a speech which served to fundamentally define the dangers of Soviet totalitarian Communism.

These powerful essays offer a fresh appreciation of the speech's political, historical, diplomatic, and rhetorical significance."--Jacket.

Largely because of his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech, Churchill is often remembered as a determined Cold Warrior. Yet, for all his fervent anti-communism, he saw the creation of the Western Alliance as a step not towards war, but towards negotiations with the USSR. John Young shows how, as Prime Minister in the 1950s, he hoped for a summit meeting with Soviet leaders, an end to the Cold War, and an era of peaceful scientific advancement by humankind. He exmaines the reasons why Churchill failed in this, his last great political campaign, reasons which included his own failing health, the scepticism of allies abroad. and the opposition of his ministers at home. Nonetheless, argues the author, the outlook which Churchill developed in the first decade of the Cold War made him the father of the European detente. This is the first full critical analysis of the issue which dominated the last active years of one of the greatest statesmen of the twentieth century.

Covering the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the origins and early course of the Cold War, and the advent of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War explores a still neglected aspect of Winston Churchill's career – his relationship with and thinking on nuclear weapons. Kevin Ruane shows how Churchill went from regarding the bomb as a weapon of war in the struggle with Nazi Germany to viewing it as a weapon of communist containment (and even punishment) in the early Cold War before, in the 1950s, advocating and arguably pioneering "mutually assured destruction†? as the key to preventing the Cold War flaring into a calamitous nuclear war. While other studies of Churchill have touched on his evolving views on nuclear weapons, few historians have given this hugely important issue the kind of dedicated and sustained treatment it deserves. In Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War, however, Kevin Ruane has undertaken extensive primary research in Britain, the United States and Europe, and accessed a wide array of secondary literature, in producing an immensely readable yet detailed, insightful and provocative account of Churchill's nuclear hopes and fears.