Cold War History

The history of cold war is a very important subject today. It stemmed from the tensions that sparked from the WWII. It was a bog rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The war continued throughout the last half of the 20th century leading to mutual suspicions, heated tensions and a number of international occurrences that created a disaster to the superpowers of the world. It was a state of military and political tension following the WWII that saw the US and its allies engage in a political tussle. These conflicts started moments after the Second World War. The documented period is between 1947 and 1991. The war was referred to as “cold” because of the non-fighting nature that the war took without wide-scale fighting between the two opposing sides. However, there were fights in various regions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Korea supported by both sides.

The cold war divided the temporary war-period alliance that was armed against Nazi Germany, leaving the US and the USSR as the two main superpowers with great political and economic differences: the USSR was a single-party Marxist-Leninist state while the United States was a capitalistic in nature with habitually free elections. Following these events, a self-proclaimed neutral bloc came up with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia and India. This group of nations opposed their association with either the Soviet-led East or the US-led west sides.

The two superpowers never took part in direct and full-scale war conflict although they each armed immensely in preparation for a probable all-out nuclear war affecting the whole world. Both of these sides had nuclear deterrents that prevented any attack from either sides based on the beliefs that such attacks would amount to total destruction of whoever attacked them in what was commonly known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Far away from the development of nuclear arsenals from the two sides and the deployment of traditional military forces, the fight for dominances was very explicit through proxy wars all over the world, propaganda, espionage, psychological warfare and espionage and competitions in technology like the ones seen in space race.

Cold war history stemmed out of the events that took place during the WWII that led to the emergence of two major super powers. There was no real combat although there were preparations in what would be a world nuclear battle. The war last for more than four decades with supporters from each side engaging in war conflicts.