The Cold War was a sustained period of political and military tension during the mid-late 20th Century (roughly 1947-1991) between what became known as the Western Bloc (the US and its NATO allies) and the Eastern Bloc (the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies). It was known as the Cold War because no direct fighting ever occurred between America and Russia, although several regional ‘proxy wars’ were fought. The period has even retrospectively been described as World War 3.
Following a brief alliance against Nazi Germany during World War 2, profound ideological differences between the US and the USSR – essentially capitalism and democracy on one side versus socialism/communism on the other – made it clear that cooperation and collaboration between the two ‘Super Powers’ of the post-war world would be all but impossible. Worse, both sides began to arm heavily with the newly invented super-weapon, the deadly Nuclear Bomb that annihilated Japan and ended World War 2. We’ll get onto nuclear weapons later in the blog.
The so-called ‘proxy wars’ and shifting balance of power between the two sides saw the following events: America supporting the Greek government against a Communist uprising in the late 1940s; China becoming Communist in 1950 after a long drawn out civil war; the Korean War of 1950-53 (with America and Russia/China supporting opposing sides in the conflict resulting in a North-South divide that splits Korea to this day); Russia brutally crushing attempted anti-Soviet revolutions first in Hungary and later in Czechoslovakia; the Berlin Crisis of 1961 that saw the German city divided by a wall between the US-backed west and Soviet-backed east; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that almost resulted in all-out nuclear war; a messy propaganda struggle with both sides trying to exert ideological influence in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia; and the long, drawn-out, bloody Vietnam War of 1955-1975 with the US and USSR again supporting opposing sides in a regional conflict.
One of the (very) few positives to be drawn from the Cold War became the ‘Space Race’ where both sides attempted to out-do each other technologically as well as militarily. Key points saw Russia launch the first satellite, Sputnik, into space in 1957 and America land the first man on the Moon in 1969.
The 1970s saw something of a thaw in East-West relations as both sides attempted to reach out to one another, but the contentious Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979-1989) set relations back yet again and proved to be a foreign intervention too far for Russia. International conflicts having drained their reserves, the USSR began to suffer economic stagnation in the 1980s and America increased diplomatic, military and economic pressure on the Eastern Bloc. A wave of revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 saw one after another Communist regime topple and this time Russia did not attempt to suppress the uprisings by force as they had done in the past. The USSR was dissolved in 1991 and more distant communist regimes in Mongolia, Cambodia and Yemen fell soon after. Without ever actually physically fighting the Soviets, the US found itself the ‘winner’ of the ideological Cold War, and now the world had just one remaining superpower.
To learn more about the Soviets’ final war in Afghanistan and its ongoing influence today, jump to Chapter 10: Soviet War in Afghanistan
To learn more about man’s aggressive race to the moon and beyond, jump to Chapter 11: Space Race
