Cold War Dbq

I agree to some extent that the USA was responsible for starting the Cold War during the period of 1945 to 1950. In Source 4, Edwards describes how Stalin become increasingly intimidated by the USA. On August 6, 1945, upon Truman deciding to use the atom bomb on Hiroshma, Stalin realised that "the balance [had] been destroyed". His fear became even greater when he realised that it would be difficult to fight back due to the USSR's lack of "long-range bombing capacity" and "inferior navy". If the USA had not acted in such a hostile manner, tensions between Stalin and Truman would not have been as intense–this was a major factor in the breaking out of the Cold War that could have been prevented had the USA not raised tensions through both these

factors and others, such as denying Stalin a naval base in the Mediterranean Sea at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945.
In addition, in the third source, Marshall states that the country's policy "is not directed against any country or doctrine" but towards other factors such as poverty.

However, this source is slightly biased, as Marshall does not mention containment–preventing the spread of communism, which is why tensions between the USA and USSR were so high at this time; the USA believed very strongly in capitalism, while the USSR's ideology was strictly communist. This extract is from June 1947, which is when Marshall Aid was introduced, and the aim of this policy was for the USA to provide economic aid to European countries that suffered from "hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos" (due to the fact that the USA believed these factors would result in these countries electing communists). This lead to another factor in the Cold War starting: Stalin believed that Marshall Aid was merely a means of America enslaving European countries, and refused to let eastern European countries accept it. The USA saw this as further evidence of Stalin attempting to spread communism throughout the world, and realised they needed to take action in order to stop this. The Marshall Plan is another way in which the USA were responsible for the start of the Cold War during the

period.
Source 5 reveals that during the period, the USA "accounted for one-third of the world's exports", and in 1949, donated "$1.314 billion in arms aid to NATO". NATO was a military organisation whose aim was to defend western European countries from attack. This was inevitably frowned upon by the USSR (Stalin eventually established the Warsaw Pact in direct response to the organisation in 1955), who found it more difficult to spread communism to these countries. This is another factor caused by the USA that lead to the start of the Cold War, as is the huge amount of money the region possessed, along with their "expansionist foreign policy".
Source 2 provides evidence towards both points of view. It is merely a question of interpretation. Stalin expresses that he is baffled as to how anyone can see the USSR's aspirations as "expansionist tendencies"; if the latter point of view were accurate, the Soviet Union would be responsible for the start of the Cold War in that respect.
Conversely, I disagree to an extent for several reasons.

In Source 1, Winston Churchill's famed Iron Curtain (a metaphor he used to describe the post-war divison of European countries) speech, he states that the USSR-influenced Polish government has made "enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany". At the time, Britain and America were very eager to protect Germany because they had seen the effect that factors such as reparations had had on the country at the end of the Great War in the 1918. The USSR clearly had a very different ideology, as at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin wished to take more reparations from Germany than Truman thought was necessary. This clash of ideas, perhaps the most important factor in the breakout of the Cold War in the first place, is one reason as to why the Soviet Union is partially responsible–they saw a re-built Germany as a threat, whereas America wanted to protect

it.
Finally, in Source 5, Paterson and Clifford state that because the Soviet Union's military budgets were so high at the time and preferred "confrontation and intervention" to diplomacy, they "share for the extremes of the long Cold War".