How Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech launched the Cold War 80 years ago

Churchill reminded people how he had warned in the 1930s against the appeasement of Hitler and Nazi Germany but “no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool”. He added that “surely we must not let that happen again”. While he did not believe that the USSR sought another conflict, he said that they wanted “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines”. He warned that if Western democracies did not stand together in defence of the UN Charter, the founding document that outlines the major principles of international relations, “then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all”.

Veteran BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke recalled 50 years on in his long-running weekly Letter from America how much of the public reaction in the West to Churchill’s warning had been muted. “Only 10 months after the Nazi surrender was surely no time to start warning everybody about the Soviet Union as a threat,” he said. “Most people, I think, in most free countries either sighed at Churchill’s words or got good and mad.” Cooke said many saw Churchill as being “his old cantankerous self, the warmonger”, but “unfortunately we were wrong and the old growler was right again”.

The establishment of Nato

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin reacted to the speech by his former ally with outrage, comparing Churchill to the Nazis. He wrote in Pravda, the official Communist newspaper: “Hitler began to set war loose by announcing his racial theory, declaring that only people speaking the German language represent a fully valuable nation. Mr Churchill begins to set war loose, also by a racial theory, maintaining that only nations speaking the English language are fully valuable nations, called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.”

To calm the situation, both the US and British governments initially distanced themselves from Churchill’s speech. But a year later, President Truman committed the US to the role of defender of global democracy, pledging to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. The Truman Doctrine, as it became known, led to the establishment of Nato and later US involvement in conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

In the end, the iron curtain as described by Churchill would become a physical as well as metaphorical barrier, with the Berlin Wall going up in 1961. For 28 years, it separated not just family and friends but an entire country. After the wall finally came down in 1989, Westminster College was visited separately by the leaders of the two superpowers: a symbolic location chosen to signify that the Cold War was over. In 1990, US President Ronald Reagan marked the first anniversary of the wall’s dismantling by dedicating a sculpture by Churchill’s granddaughter, Edwina Sandys.