The second time was pretty much a year later, when the United States discovered through its U-2 overflights over Cuba that the Soviet Union was installing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Cuba, aimed directly at the United States. That's the reason why the Wall went up and that they, therefore, couldn't afford to give in either. About one-fifth to one-sixth of the entire East German population left East Germany through West Berlin in the late 1950s. Although the East Germans believed that what they were doing in putting up the Berlin Wall, was preventing the haemorrhage of their population. The Soviet Army then brought up 40 tanks on its side and the standoff went on for several days. It would demoralise the Germans and so they decided to resist with tanks. The Americans immediately feared that if this happened, it could lead to the end of West Berlin as a Western capitalist enclave. And at the time, Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht the East German leader, were actively talking about the Soviets signing a separate peace treaty with the GDR whereby the Soviets would have handed over their control of access roads into Berlin and Berlin itself to the East Germans. The US considered that this was a breach of the Four Power Agreement of Potsdam on the status of Berlin. The United States diplomats were refused permission to go into East Berlin unless they showed their identity cards. The first was in October 1961 at Checkpoint Charlie looking over the Berlin Wall which had gone up on the 13 th August 1961, the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall as East Germany used to refer to that wall in a very Orwellian 1984-ish evocation of the distortion of language. Indeed, in the early 60s on two occasions we came closer to the Third World War and an East-West nuclear exchange at any time since 1945 and at any time since. And no doubt my quick evocation of the 60s is also based largely on the distortions of nostalgia, because it is true that if one goes beyond hippies at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Woodstock rock festivals and flower power, and looks at the NATO scene and East-West relations, we were still very much in the Cold War in the 1960s. Now, Wordsworth quickly soured on the French Revolution once it turned into the guillotine and the terror. As one very famous slogan at the time put it "If it is wrong for me to hit the policeman, then it must also be wrong for the policeman to hit me." Indeed, sometimes looking back on the 60s, I am reminded of what the British poet and English poet William Wordsworth said of the French Revolution "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven." It seemed therefore a time when social relations were being changed and equality, particularly vis-à-vis repressive authority, would be henceforth the name of the game. Or, to recall a slogan that I saw painted on the walls of the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1968: " L'imagination au pouvoir" everything seemed possible. The dominant image is Easy Rider on his Harley Davidson riding off into the sunset. It was a time when the drabness and the austerity of the 1950s gave way to a period of prosperity and endless human freedom. And it's therefore for me a great pleasure to recall today the 1960s.įor those of us who lived through the 60s, and I probably see a couple of people here, this was a golden talismanic age. This is for me a pleasurable moment, at least in terms of going through NATO's history, because this marks the turning point from talking about things that I was too young to have lived through and, therefore, I have had to discover them through research to a point, the 60s, which basically corresponds to my generation – let's use that phrase from The Who – a period when of course I was young enough but also mature enough to know what was going on, or more or less what was going on. This is lecture number three in this series on the turning points in the history of NATO. Well, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
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