Lippmann’s account is especially plausible, as indeed the sister-term “white war” – referring variously to “economic war,” “propaganda war” or “simply bloodless war” – is present in both English- and French-language publications throughout the 1930s, and especially towards the end of the decade. Though clearly at odds, both Lippmann and Swope rightly root the term “cold war” in the period immediately preceding World War II. Swope, for his part, said he had thought of the term as early as 1939, believing it to be a fitting contrast to the looming prospect of “hot war” – that is, actual war – and denied ever hearing such French expressions. Lippmann maintained that it was not Baruch’s speech, but rather the recollection of a pair of French expressions from the 1930s, la Guerre froide (“cold war”) and la Guerre blanche (“white war”), that had first given him the idea. A good starting point is a 1950 exchange of letters between Walter Lippmann and Herbert Swope, in which they shared with each other how they had first conceived of “cold war”. The gap between 1914 – Bernstein’s latter usage – and 1945 – Orwell’s invocation – is a considerable one, and needs clarifying. Ultimately, though, this account of the term’s origin is still incomplete. “An arms race to end all arms races,” to quote then US Senator Brien McMahon, was on the horizon. The anticipation of an arms race between the two super-powers is apparent in the western press essentially from Victory/VE Day onwards, an anticipation which would only increase following the US dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. There is no shooting, but there is bleeding.”Īnd then in May 1914, mere weeks before this “cold war” would indeed turn hot, Bernstein, now a Social Democratic member of the Reichstag, used the term once more: “We continue this silent war, this cold war, as it has been called, the war of armaments, the outbidding of arms.”īernstein’s use of “cold war” to characterize the arms race preceding the First World War thus shares something crucially in common with its application to the Soviet-American conflict. Writing in 1893, Bernstein criticized the tit-for-tat arms race underway between Imperial Germany and her fellow Great Powers of Europe: “I don’t know if the expression has already been used, but one could call it cold warfare. Given this rather accidental usage, however, it makes more sense to credit the German socialist theorist and politician Eduard Bernstein with having first used the term. The year 1860, then, is the earliest date (so far discovered) that the term “cold war” appears in any language. Westad thus plausibly classifies “cold war” as a “late twentieth-century neologism” which didn’t exist “prior to World War II.” Orwell therefore anticipates with considerable insight and trepidation a world-order which, while ostensibly post-war, moves not towards peace but instead into a wholly new and uncertain period of indefinite standoff under the constant threat of mutually assured destruction. In his October 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, Orwell described an emerging post-war order in which “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds…would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” The atom bomb, then, given its enormous cost and technical sophistication, was “likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.” The eminent historian of the Cold War Odd Arne Westad instead awards this distinction to the British writer George Orwell. Others, however, reject either Baruch or Swope as coiners. Just months earlier, for instance, in April 1947, the financial magnate Bernard Baruch gave a speech in which he singled out “Russia” as the lone resistor to the American “way of life” and quest to reign as a “global guardian of safety”: “Let us not be deceived,” continued Baruch, “we are today in the midst of a cold war.” Multiple sources thus credit Baruch with coining the term, though technically the credit should go to his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope. Lippmann, however, was not the first person to use the term.
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