The Cold War: Origins, Key Conflicts, and Final Collapse

The Cold War: A Global Political Rivalry

The Cold War was a political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II.

The conflict began after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the alliance between the United States and Great Britain on one side 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 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 brought certain Western countries under American influence and the Soviets established communist regimes. It was waged mainly on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and lasted until 1991.

The Decline of the Communist Bloc

The unity in the communist bloc was unraveling throughout the 1960s and ’70s as a split occurred between China and the Soviet Union. Japan and Western countries were becoming more economically independent. International relationships became increasingly complex, and smaller countries became more resistant to superpower cajoling.

The Cold War 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
• Czechoslovakia

This was followed by the reunification of West and East Germany under NATO auspices. Gorbachev’s reforms weakened his own communist party and allowed power 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 anti-communist leader.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

In the late 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. In 1962, the Soviet Union began to secretly install missiles in Cuba to launch attacks on U.S. cities. The confrontation that followed, known as the Cuban missile crisis, brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles.

The conflict showed that both superpowers were wary of using their nuclear weapons against each other for fear of mutual atomic annihilation. The signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty followed in 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear weapons testing. Still, after the crisis, the Soviets were determined not to be humiliated by their military inferiority again, and they began a buildup of conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.