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Cold war (term) A cold war is a state of conflict between nations that does not involve direct military action but is pursued primarily through economic and political actions, propaganda, acts of espionage or proxy wars waged by surrogates. This term is most commonly used to refer to the American-Soviet Cold War of 1947–1989.
- Overview
- Origins of the Cold War
- The struggle between superpowers
The Cold War was an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II. This hostility between the two superpowers was first given its name by George Orwell in an article published in 1945. Orwell understood it as a nuclear stalemate between “super-states”: each possessed weapons of mass destruction and was capable of annihilating the other.
The Cold War began after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the uneasy alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other started to fall apart. The Soviet Union began to establish left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe, determined to safeguard against a possible renewed threat from Germany. The Americans and the British worried that Soviet domination in eastern Europe might be permanent. The Cold War was solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid had brought certain Western countries under American influence and the Soviets had established openly communist regimes. Nevertheless, there was very little use of weapons on battlefields during the Cold War. It was waged mainly on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and lasted until 1991.
How did the Cold War end?
The Cold War came to a close gradually. The unity in the communist bloc was unraveling throughout the 1960s and ’70s as a split occurred between China and the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Japan and certain Western countries were becoming more economically independent. Increasingly complex international relationships developed as a result, and smaller countries became more resistant to superpower cajoling.
The Cold War truly began to break down during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, who changed the more totalitarian aspects of the Soviet government and tried to democratize its political system. Communist regimes began to collapse in eastern Europe, and democratic governments rose in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, followed by the reunification of West and East Germany under NATO auspices. Gorbachev’s reforms meanwhile weakened his own communist party and allowed power to shift to the constituent governments of the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, giving rise to 15 newly independent nations, including a Russia with an anticommunist leader.
Why was the Cuban missile crisis such an important event in the Cold War?
Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to unravel. By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red ...
The Cold War reached its peak in 1948–53. In this period the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded the Western-held sectors of West Berlin (1948–49); the United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe (1949); the Soviets exploded their first atomic warhead (1949), thus ending the American monopoly on the atomic bomb; the Chinese communists came to power in mainland China (1949); and the Soviet-supported communist government of North Korea invaded U.S.-supported South Korea in 1950, setting off an indecisive Korean War that lasted until 1953.
Britannica Quiz
Comprehension Quiz: Cold War
From 1953 to 1957 Cold War tensions relaxed somewhat, largely owing to the death of the longtime Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953; nevertheless, the standoff remained. A unified military organization among the Soviet-bloc countries, the Warsaw Pact, was formed in 1955; and West Germany was admitted into NATO that same year. Another intense stage of the Cold War was in 1958–62. The United States and the Soviet Union began developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and in 1962 the Soviets began secretly installing missiles in Cuba that could be used to launch nuclear attacks on U.S. cities. This sparked the Cuban missile crisis (1962), a confrontation that brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles.
The Cuban missile crisis showed that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other’s retaliation (and thus of mutual atomic annihilation). The two superpowers soon signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear weapons testing. But the crisis also hardened the Soviets’ determination never again to be humiliated by their military inferiority, and they began a buildup of both conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.
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- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, that started in 1947, two years after the end of World War II, and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no large-scale ...
Apr 16, 2010 · By Andrew Glass. 04/16/2010 05:03 AM EDT. On this day in 1947, Bernard Baruch, the multimillionaire financier and adviser to presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman, coined the term ...
Oct 24, 2015 · October 24th 2015. On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “ You and the Atom Bomb,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of ...
Nov 13, 2009 · The term “Cold War” was instantly embraced by American newspapers and magazines as an apt description of the situation between the United States and the Soviet Union: a war without fighting or ...
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t. e. The Cold War emerged from the breakdown of relations between two of the primary victors of World War II: the United States and Soviet Union, along with their respective allies in the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc. This ideological and political rivalry, which solidified between 1945-49, would shape the global order for the next four decades.
