The Cold War was a state of political and military tension after World War II between powers in the

Western Bloc and powers in the Eastern Bloc .

Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 19451991 is common. It was "cold" because there
was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars in
Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan that the two sides supported. The Cold War split the temporary
wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound
economic and political differences: the former being a single-party MarxistLeninist state, and the latter
being a capitalist state with free elections. A self-proclaimed neutral bloc arose with the Non-Aligned
Movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia; this faction rejected association with either the US-
led West or the Soviet-led East. The two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat
but they each armed heavily in preparation of an all-out nuclear World War III. Each side had a nuclear
deterrent that deterred an attack by the other side, on the basis that such an attack would lead to total
destruction of the attacker: the doctrine of mutually assured destruction or MAD. Aside from the
development of the two sides' nuclear arsenals, and deployment of conventional military forces, the
struggle for dominance was expressed via proxy wars around the globe, psychological warfare,
propaganda and espionage, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.
The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in
1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc while the United States
began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power, extending military and financial aid to
the countries of Western Europe and creating the NATO alliance. The Berlin Blockade was the first
major crisis of the Cold War.
With victory of the Communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the
conflict expanded. The USSR and USA competed for influence in Latin America and decolonizing states of
Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was stopped
by the Soviets. The expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis, the Berlin
Crisis of 1961, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Following this last crisis a new phase began that saw the
Sino-Soviet split complicate relations within the Communist sphere while US allies, particularly France,
demonstrated greater independence of action. The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization
program in Czechoslovakia and the Vietnam War ended with a defeat of the US-backed Republic of
South Vietnam, prompting further adjustments.
By the 1970s both sides had become interested in accommodations to create a more stable and
predictable international system, inaugurating a period of dtente that saw Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks and the US opening relations with the People's Republic of China as a strategic counterweight to
the Soviet Union. Dtente collapsed at the end of the decade with the Soviet war in Afghanistan
beginning in 1979.
The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines
Flight 007, and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises . The United States increased diplomatic,
military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already
suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika and glasnost and ended Soviet involvement in
Afghanistan. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
Gorbachev meanwhile refused to use Soviet troops to bolster the faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had
occurred in the past. The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully overthrew all of the
Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost
control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the
formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist regimes in other
countries such as Mongolia, Cambodia and South Yemen. The United States remained as the world's
only superpower.
The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy, and it is often referred to in popular culture,
especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare.
Origins of the term
At the end of World War II, English author and journalist George Orwell used cold war, as a general
term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper
Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare, Orwell wrote:

In The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that "fter the Moscow conference last December,
Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire."
The first use of the term to describe the postWorld War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and
its satellites and the United States and its western European allies is attributed to Bernard Baruch, an
American financier and presidential advisor. In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech
written by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope and saying, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the
midst of a cold war." Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency,
with the book The Cold War; when asked in 1947 about the source of the term, he referred it to a
French term from the 1930s, la guerre froide.
Background
There is disagreement among historians regarding the starting point of the Cold War. While most
historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began
towards the end of World War I, although tensions between the Russian Empire, other European
countries and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th century. Leader Vladimir Lenin
stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement", and he viewed
diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with the establishment of the Soviet
Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals abroad. Subsequent leader Joseph Stalin, who
viewed the Soviet Union as a "socialist island", stated that the Soviet Union must see that "the present
capitalist encirclement is replaced by a socialist encirclement." As early as 1925, Stalin stated that he
viewed international politics as a bipolar world in which the Soviet Union would attract countries
gravitating to socialism and capitalist countries would attract states gravitating toward capitalism, while
the world was in a period of "temporary stabilization of capitalism" preceding its eventual collapse.
Various events before the Second World War demonstrated the mutual distrust and suspicion between
the Western powers and the Soviet Union, apart from the general philosophical challenge the Bolsheviks
made towards capitalism. There was Western support of the anti-Bolshevik White movement in the
Russian Civil War, the 1926 Soviet funding of a British general workers strike causing Britain to break
relations with the Soviet Union, Stalin's 1927 declaration of peaceful coexistence with capitalist
countries "receding into the past," conspiratorial allegations during the 1928 Shakhty show trial of a
planned British- and French-led coup d'tat, the American refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until
1933 and the Stalinist Moscow Trials of the Great Purge, with allegations of British, French, Japanese
and Nazi German espionage. However, both the US and USSR were generally isolationist between the
two world wars.
The Soviet Union initially signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. But after the German Army
invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the
Soviet Union and the Allied powers formed an alliance of convenience. Britain signed a formal alliance
and the United States made an informal agreement. In wartime, the United States supplied both Britain
and the Soviets through its Lend-Lease Program. However, Stalin remained highly suspicious and
believed that the British and the Americans had conspired to ensure the Soviets bore the brunt of the
fighting against Nazi Germany. According to this view, the Western Allies had deliberately delayed
opening a second anti-German front in order to step in at the last moment and shape the peace
settlement. Thus, Soviet perceptions of the West left a strong undercurrent of tension and hostility
between the Allied powers.