The Cold War was the state of conflict, tension and competition that existed between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. Throughout this period, rivalry between the two superpowers was expressed through military coalitions, propaganda, espionage, weapons development, industrial advances, and competitive technological development, e.g., the space race. Both superpowers engaged in costly defence spending, a massive conventional and nuclear arms race, and numerous proxy wars.
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The Cold War. Video hosted on Google. Although the US and the Soviet Union were allied against the Axis powers during World War II, the two states disagreed sharply both during and after the conflict on many topics, particularly over the shape of the post-war world. The war had either exhausted or eliminated all of the pre-war great powers leaving the US and USSR as clear economic, technological and political superpowers. In this bipolar world, countries were prompted to align themselves with one or the other of the superpower blocs (a Non-Aligned Movement would emerge later, during the 1960s). The suppressed rivalry during the war quickly became aggravated first in Europe, then in every region of the world, as the US sought the "containment" and "rollback" of communism and forged myriad alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union fostered Communist revolutionary movements around the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The Cold War period saw both periods of heightened tension and relative calm. On the one hand, international crises such as the Berlin Blockade (1948–49), the Korean War (1950–53), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–89), and especially the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis raised fears of a Third World War. The last such crisis moment occurred during NATO exercises in November 1983. However, there were also periods of reduced tension 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 and the early 1990s. With the coming to power of US President Ronald Reagan, the US increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressure on the Soviet Union, which was already suffering from severe economic stagnation. In the second half of the 1980s, newly appointed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika and glasnost. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the sole superpower in a unipolar world.
The first use of the term "Cold War" to describe post-World War II geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the US has been attributed to American financier and US presidential advisor Bernard Baruch. On April 16, 1947, Baruch gave a speech in South Carolina, in which he said, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war". Columnist Walter Lippmann also gave the term wide currency, with the publication of his 1947 book titled Cold War. However George Orwell's use of the term may predate Baruch's. Orwell used it in an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb" on 19 October 1945 in Tribune, he wrote: "We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."
If anything defined the 20th century as the age of anxiety, it's the cold war with its ultimate no-win nuclear endgame. While conflicts in Korea and Vietnam dragged on, providing the traditional images of modern warfare, some of the conflict's most dangerous battles were invisible--tactical, intellectual, and fought primarily in the minds and war rooms of U.S. and Soviet leaders: Kennedy, Krushchev, Castro, Kissinger, Gorbachev, and Reagan. This 8-volume, 24-episode series, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, is a comprehensive history that examines the key events of the arc of the Soviet Union, from its birth to its fall, and provides a thorough analysis of what was going on behind closed doors. Informed by the stories of 500 eyewitnesses--from citizens and soldiers to historians and statesmen--and strengthened by painstaking reconstruction of archival historical film footage, CNN's Cold War is a heroic undertaking and a sweeping chronicle of the world's most fragile decades.
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