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The Cold War
The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and
competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their
respective allies from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s. Throughout the
period, the rivalry between the two superpowers was played out in multiple
arenas: military coalitions; ideology, psychology, and espionage; military,
industrial, and technological developments, including the space race; costly
defense spending; a massive conventional and nuclear arms race; and many
proxy wars.
The term "Cold War" was introduced in 1947 by Americans Bernard Baruch and
Walter Lippmann to describe emerging tensions between the two former wartime
allies. There never was a direct military engagement between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union, but there was a half-century of military buildup, and
political battles for support around the world, including significant
involvement of allied and satellite nations. Although the U.S. and the
Soviet Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on
how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of the World War
II. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every
region of the world, as the U.S. sought the "containment" of communism and
forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the
Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
There were repeated crises that threatened to escalate into world wars but
never did, notably the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1959-1975),
the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989).
There were also periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought
détente. Direct military attacks on adversaries were deterred by the
potential for mutual assured destruction using deliverable nuclear weapons.
The Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s following the launching of
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programs, perestroika and glasnost.
The Soviet Union consequently ceded power over Eastern Europe and was
dissolved in 1991.
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