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Cold War History

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 26, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension marked by competition and confrontation between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and Western democracies including the United States. During World War II , the United States and the Soviets fought together as allies against Nazi Germany . However, U.S./Soviet relations were never truly friendly: Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and Russian leader Joseph Stalin ’s tyrannical rule. The Soviets resented Americans’ refusal to give them a leading role in the international community, as well as America’s delayed entry into World War II, in which millions of Russians died.

These grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity that never developed into open warfare (thus the term “cold war”). Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as U.S. officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and strident approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.

Containment

By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” In his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree].” As a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

“It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.

Did you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.'

The Cold War: The Atomic Age

The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending.

In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly “ arms race .” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.

As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.

HISTORY Vault: Nuclear Terror

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The Cold War and the Space Race

Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. Sputnik’s launch came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to most Americans.

In the United States, space was seen as the next frontier, a logical extension of the grand American tradition of exploration, and it was crucial not to lose too much ground to the Soviets. In addition, this demonstration of the overwhelming power of the R-7 missile–seemingly capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into U.S. air space–made gathering intelligence about Soviet military activities particularly urgent.

In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission , became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. 

U.S. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The Cold War and the Red Scare

Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC ) brought the Cold War home in another way. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

In Hollywood , HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these “blacklisted” writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government. 

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and “loyalty oaths” became commonplace.

The Cold War Abroad

The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option. Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

In 1955, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made West Germany a member of NATO and permitted it to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact , a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria that set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union.

Other international disputes followed. In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World.” 

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam , where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict .

The End of the Cold War and Effects

Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile, “bi-polar” place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

At the same time, he adopted a policy of “détente”—”relaxation”—toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine .

Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took office in 1985 and introduced two policies that redefined Russia’s relationship to the rest of the world: “glasnost,” or political openness, and “ perestroika ,” or economic reform. 

Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall –the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.

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The Cold War (1945-1989) essay

The Cold War is considered to be a significant event in Modern World History. The Cold War dominated a rather long time period: between 1945, or the end of the World War II, and 1990, the collapse of the USSR. This period involved the relationships between two superpowers: the United States and the USSR. The Cold War began in Eastern Europe and Germany, according to the researchers of the Institute of Contemporary British History (Warner 15).  Researchers state that “the USSR and the United States of America held the trump cards, nuclear bombs and missiles” (Daniel 489). In other words, during the Cold War, two nations took the fate of the world under their control. The progression of the Cold War influenced the development of society, which became aware of the threat of nuclear war. After the World War II, the world experienced technological progress, which provided “the Space Race, computer development, superhighway construction, jet airliner development, the creation of international phone system, the advent of television, enormous progress in medicine, and the creation of mass consumerism, and many other achievements” (Daniel 489). Although the larger part of the world lived in poverty and lacked technological progress, the United States and other countries of Western world succeeded in economic development. The Cold War, which began in 1945, reflected the increased role of technological progress in the establishment of economic relationships between two superpowers.   The Cold War involved internal and external conflicts between two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, leading to eventual breakdown of the USSR.

• The Cold War: background information

The Cold War consisted of several confrontations between the United States and the USSR, supported by their allies. According to researchers, the Cold War was marked by a number of events, including “the escalating arms race, a competition to conquer space, a dangerously belligerent for of diplomacy known as brinkmanship, and a series of small wars, sometimes called “police actions” by the United States and sometimes excused as defense measures by the Soviets” (Gottfried 9). The Cold War had different influences on the United States and the USSR. For the USSR, the Cold War provided massive opportunities for the spread of communism across the world, Moscow’s control over the development of other nations and the increased role of the Soviet Communist party.

In fact, the Cold War could split the wartime alliance formed to oppose the plans of Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the United States as two superpowers with considerable economic and political differences. The USSR was based on a single-party Marxist–Leninist system, while the United States was a capitalist state with democratic governance based on free elections.

The key figure in the Cold War was the Soviet leader Gorbachev, who was elected in 1985. He managed to change the direction of the USSR, making the economies of communist ruled states independent. The major reasons for changing in the course were poor technological development of the USSR (Gottfried 115). Gorbachev believed that radical changes in political power could improve the Communist system. At the same time, he wanted to stop the Cold War and tensions with the United States. The cost of nuclear arms race had negative impact on the economy of the USSR. The leaders of the United States accepted the proposed relationships, based on cooperation and mutual trust. The end of the Cold War was marked by signing the INF treaty in 1987 (Gottfried 115).

• The origins of the Cold War

Many American historians state that the Cold War began in 1945. However, according to Russian researchers, historians and analysts “the Cold War began with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, for this was when the capitalist world began its systematic opposition to and effort to undermine the world’s first socialist state and society” (Warner13). For Russians, the Cold War was hot in 1918-1922, when the Allied Intervention policy implemented in Russia during the Russian Civil War. According to John W. Long, “the U.S. intervention in North Russia was a policy formulated by President Wilson during the first half of 1918 at the urgent insistence of Britain, France and Italy, the chief World War I allies” (380).

Nevertheless, there are some other opinions regarding the origins of the Cold War. For example, Geoffrey Barraclough, an outstanding English historian, states that the events in the Far East at the end of the century contributed to the origins of the Cold War. He argues that “during the previous hundred years, Russia and the United States has tended to support each other against England; but now, as England’s power passed its zenith, they came face to face across the Pacific” (Warner 13). According to Barraclough, the Cold War is associated with the conflict of interests, which involved European countries, the Middle East and South East Asia. Finally, this conflict divided the world into two camps. Thus, the Cold War origins are connected with the spread of ideological conflict caused by the emergence of the new power in the early 20-th century (Warner 14). The Cold War outbreak was associated with the spread of propaganda on the United States by the USSR. The propagandistic attacks involved the criticism of the U.S. leaders and their policies. These attacked were harmful to the interests of American nation (Whitton 151).

• The major causes of the Cold War

The United States and the USSR were regarded as two superpowers during the Cold War, each having its own sphere of influence, its power and forces. The Cold War had been the continuing conflict, caused by tensions, misunderstandings and competitions that existed between the United States and the USSR, as well as their allies from 1945 to the early 1990s (Gottfried 10). Throughout this long period, there was the so-called rivalry between the United States and the USSR, which was expressed through various transformations, including military buildup, the spread of propaganda, the growth of espionage, weapons development, considerable industrial advances, and competitive technological developments in different spheres of human activity, such as medicine, education, space exploration, etc.

There four major causes of the Cold War, which include:

• Ideological differences (communism v. capitalism);
• Mutual distrust and misperception;
• The fear of the United State regarding the spread of communism;
• The nuclear arms race (Gottfried 10).

The major causes of the Cold War point out to the fact that the USSR was focused on the spread of communist ideas worldwide. The United States followed democratic ideas and opposed the spread of communism. At the same time, the acquisition of atomic weapons by the United States caused fear in the USSR. The use of atomic weapons could become the major reason of fear of both the United States and the USSR. In other words, both countries were anxious about possible attacks from each other; therefore, they were following the production of mass destruction weapons. In addition, the USSR was focused on taking control over Eastern Europe and Central Asia. According to researchers, the USSR used various strategies to gain control over Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the years 1945-1980. Some of these strategies included “encouraging the communist takeover of governments in Eastern Europe, the setting up of Comecon, the Warsaw Pact, the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, and the Brezhnev Doctrine” (Phillips 118). These actions were the major factors for the suspicions and concerns of the United States. In addition, the U.S. President had a personal dislike of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his policies. In general, the United States was concerned by the Soviet Union’s actions regarding the occupied territory of Germany, while the USSR feared that the United States would use Western Europe as the major tool for attack.

• The consequences of the Cold War

The consequences of the Cold War include both positive and negative effects for both the United States and the USSR.

• Both the United States and the USSR managed to build up huge arsenals of atomic weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
• The Cold War provided opportunities for the establishment of the military blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
• The Cold War led to the emergence of the destructive military conflicts, like the Vietnam War and the Korean War, which took the lives of millions of people (Gottfried13).
• The USSR collapsed because of considerable economic, political and social challenges.
• The Cold War led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the unification of the two German nations.
• The Cold War led to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact (Gottfried 136).
• The Cold war provided the opportunities for achieving independence of the Baltic States and some former Soviet Republics.
• The Cold War made the United States the sole superpower of the world because of the collapse of the USSR in 1990.
• The Cold War led to the collapse of Communism and the rise of globalization worldwide (Phillips 119).

The impact of the Cold War on the development of many countries was enormous. The consequences of the Cold War were derived from numerous internal problems of the countries, which were connected with the USSR, especially developing countries (India, Africa, etc.). This fact means that foreign policies of many states were transformed (Gottfried 115).

The Cold War (1945-1989) essay part 2

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Essay on the Cold War: it’s Origin, Causes and Phases

After the Second World War, the USA and USSR became two Super Powers. One nation tried to reduce the power of other. Indirectly the competition between the Super Powers led to the Cold War.

Then America took the leadership of all the Capitalist Countries.

Soviet Russia took the leadership of all the Communist Countries. As a result of which both stood as rivals to each other.

Definition of the Cold War:

ADVERTISEMENTS:

In the graphic language of Hartman, “Cold War is a state of tension between countries in which each side adopts policies designed to strengthen it and weaken the other by falling short by actual war”.

Image Source: i.ytimg.com/vi/y9HjvHZfCUI/maxresdefault.jpg

Infact, Cold War is a kind of verbal war which is fought through newspapers, magazines, radio and other propaganda methods. It is a propaganda to which a great power resorts against the other power. It is a sort of diplomatic war.

Origin of Cold War:

There is no unanimity amongst scholars regarding the origin of the Cold War In 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia, Roosevelt the President of USA sent armaments to Russia. It is only because the relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin was very good. But after the defeat of Germany, when Stalin wanted to implement Communist ideology in Poland, Hungery, Bulgaria and Rumania, at that time England and America suspected Stalin.

Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England in his ‘Fulton Speech’ on 5 March 1946 said that Soviet Russia was covered by an Iron Curtain. It led Stalin to think deeply. As a result of which suspicion became wider between Soviet Russia and western countries and thus the Cold War took birth.

Causes of the Cold War:

Various causes are responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War. At first, the difference between Soviet Russia and USA led to the Cold War. The United States of America could not tolerate the Communist ideology of Soviet Russia. On the other hand, Russia could not accept the dominance of United States of America upon the other European Countries.

Secondly, the Race of Armament between the two super powers served another cause for the Cold War. After the Second World War, Soviet Russia had increased its military strength which was a threat to the Western Countries. So America started to manufacture the Atom bomb, Hydrogen bomb and other deadly weapons. The other European Countries also participated in this race. So, the whole world was divided into two power blocs and paved the way for the Cold War.

Thirdly, the Ideological Difference was another cause for the Cold War. When Soviet Russia spread Communism, at that time America propagated Capitalism. This propaganda ultimately accelerated the Cold War.

Fourthly, Russian Declaration made another cause for the Cold War. Soviet Russia highlighted Communism in mass-media and encouraged the labour revolution. On the other hand, America helped the Capitalists against the Communism. So it helped to the growth of Cold War.

Fifthly, the Nuclear Programme of America was responsible for another cause for the Cold War. After the bombardment of America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Soviet Russia got afraid for her existence. So, it also followed the same path to combat America. This led to the growth of Cold War.

Lastly, the Enforcement of Veto by Soviet Russia against the western countries made them to hate Russia. When the western countries put forth any view in the Security Council of the UNO, Soviet Russia immediately opposed it through veto. So western countries became annoyed in Soviet Russia which gave birth to the Cold War.

Various Phases of the Cold War:

The Cold War did not occur in a day. It passed through several phases.

First Phase (1946-1949 ):

In this phase America and Soviet Russia disbelieved each other. America always tried to control the Red Regime in Russia. Without any hesitation Soviet Russia established Communism by destroying democracy in the Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungery, Yugoslavia and other Eastern European Countries.

In order to reduce Russia’s hegemony, America helped Greece and Turkey by following Truman Doctrine which came into force on 12 March 1947. According to Marshall Plan which was declared on 5 June, 1947 America gave financial assistance to Western European Countries.

In this phase, non withdrawal of army from Iran by Soviet Russia, Berlin blaockade etc. made the cold was more furious. After the formation of NATO in 1949, the Cold War took a halt.

Second Phase (1949-1953 ):

In this phase a treaty was signed between Australia, New Zeland and America in September, 1957 which was known as ANZUS. America also signed a treaty with Japan on 8 September, 1951. At that time by taking armaments from Russia and army from China, North Korea declared war against South Korea.

Then with the help of UNO, America sent military aid to South Korea. However, both North Korea and South Korea signed peace treaty in 1953 and ended the war. In order to reduce the impact of Soviet Communism, America spent a huge amount of dollar in propaganda against Communism. On the other hand, Soviet Russia tried to be equal with America by testing atom bomb.

Third Phase (1953-1957):

Now United States of America formed SEATO in 1954 in order to reduce Soviet Russia’s influence. In 1955 America formed MEDO in Middle East. Within a short span of time, America gave military assistance to 43 countries and formed 3300 military bases around Soviet Russia. At that time, the Vietnamese War started on 1955.

To reduce the American Power, Russia signed WARSAW PACT in 1955. Russia also signed a defence pact with 12 Countries. Germany was divided into Federal Republic of Germany which was under the American control where as German Democratic Republic was under Soviet Russia. In 1957 Soviet Russia included Sphutnick in her defence programme.

In 1953 Stalin died and Khrushchev became the President of Russia. In 1956 an agreement was signed between America and Russia regarding the Suez Crisis. America agreed not to help her allies like England and France. In fact West Asia was saved from a great danger.

Fourth Phase (1957-1962):

In 1959 the Russian President Khrushchev went on a historical tour to America. Both the countries were annoyed for U-2 accident and for Berlin Crisis. In 13 August 1961, Soviet Russia made a Berlin Wall of 25 Kilometres in order to check the immigration from eastern Berlin to Western Berlin. In 1962, Cuba’s Missile Crisis contributed a lot to the cold war.

This incident created an atmosphere of conversation between American President Kenedy and Russian President Khrushchev. America assured Russia that she would not attack Cuba and Russia also withdrew missile station from Cuba.

Fifth Phase (1962-1969 ):

The Fifth Phase which began from 1962 also marked a mutual suspicion between USA and USSR. There was a worldwide concern demanding ban on nuclear weapons. In this period Hot Line was established between the White House and Kremlin. This compelled both the parties to refrain from nuclear war. Inspite of that the Vietnam problem and the Problem in Germany kept Cold War between USA and USSR in fact.

Sixth Phase (1969-1978 ):

This phase commencing from 1969 was marked by DETENTE between USA and USSR- the American President Nixon and Russian President Brezhnev played a vital role for putting an end to the Cold War. The SALT of 1972, the summit Conference on Security’ of 1975 in Helsinki and Belgrade Conference of 1978 brought America and Russia closer.

In 1971, American Foreign Secretary Henry Kissinger paid a secret visit to China to explore the possibilities of reapproachment with China. The American move to convert Diego Garcia into a military base was primarily designed to check the Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean. During the Bangladesh crisis of 1971 and the Egypt-Israel War of 1973 the two super powers extended support to the opposite sides.

Last Phase (1979-1987 ):

In this phase certain changes were noticed in the Cold War. That is why historians call this phase as New Cold War. In 1979, the American President Carter and Russian President Brezhnev signed SALT II. But in 1979 the prospects of mitigating Cold War were marred by sudden development in Afghanistan.

Vietnam (1975), Angola (1976), Ethiopia (1972) and Afghanistan (1979) issues brought success to Russia which was unbearable for America. American President Carter’s Human Rights and Open Diplomacy were criticised by Russia. The SALT II was not ratified by the US Senate. In 1980 America boycotted the Olympic held at Moscow.

In 1983, Russia withdrew from a talk on missile with America. In 1984 Russia boycotted the Olympic game held at Los-Angeles. The Star War of the American President Ronald Regan annoyed Russia. In this way the ‘New Cold War’ between America and Russia continued till 1987.

Result of the Cold War:

The Cold War had far-reaching implications in the international affairs. At first, it gave rise to a fear psychosis which resulted in a mad race for the manufacture of more sophisticated armaments. Various alliances like NATO, SEATO, WARSAW PACT, CENTO, ANZUS etc. were formed only to increase world tension.

Secondly, Cold War rendered the UNO ineffective because both super powers tried to oppose the actions proposed by the opponent. The Korean Crisis, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War etc. were the bright examples in this direction.

Thirdly, due to the Cold War, a Third World was created. A large number of nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America decided to keep away from the military alliances of the two super powers. They liked to remain neutral. So, Non-Alignments Movement became the direct outcome of the Cold War.

Fourthly, Cold War was designed against mankind. The unnecessary expenditure in the armament production created a barrier against the progress of the world and adversely affected a country and prevented improvement in the living standards of the people.

Fifthly, the principle ‘Whole World as a Family’, was shattered on the rock of frustration due to the Cold War. It divided the world into two groups which was not a healthy sign for mankind.

Sixthly, The Cold War created an atmosphere of disbelief among the countries. They questioned among themselves how unsafe were they under Russia or America.

Finally, The Cold War disturbed the World Peace. The alliances and counter-alliances created a disturbing atmosphere. It was a curse for the world. Though Russia and America, being super powers, came forward to solve the international crisis, yet they could not be able to establish a perpetual peace in the world.

Related Articles:

• Essay on the Cold War, 1945
• Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO): Structure, Principles and Other Details
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World History

Cold war introduction.

The uneasy alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union that defeated Nazi Germany began to unravel after World War II, giving rise to an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that became known as the Cold War, a name coined separately by English writer George Orwell  and American presidential adviser Bernard Baruch . The United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from the World War II as the planet’s only superpowers, and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while the U.S. was employing  the Marshall Plan to help resurrect the economies and democracies of western Europe, the U.S.S.R. was establishing communist regimes in eastern Europe and keeping them on a tight leash. By the mid-1950s the two camps had formed competing military alliances, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. With the triumph of the communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Soviet bloc had gained another formidable ally in the People’s Republic of China.

Over the next four plus decades the two sides engaged in ideological battle for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world, especially the decolonized nations of the so-called Third World. Sometimes that competition heated up in wars fought indirectly through surrogates or by one side facing forces supported by the other (most notably the Korean and Vietnam wars). In 1962, with both sides in possession of arsenals of nuclear weapons, the world was poised on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. Thereafter the Soviet Union and United States threatened Earth with massive annihilation as they raced each other in the accumulation of thermonuclear weapons even as they sought to negotiate disarmament. Seeking to persuade the world of the superiority of their respective ideologies—Soviet communism, American democratic capitalism—the U.S.S.R and U.S., each convinced of their opponent’s unquenchable desire to dominate the world, competed on every field imaginable, from the race to space to the dash for Olympic finish lines. Their tools also included persuasion, propaganda, and lots of military and financial aid. By the early 1990s, the Cold War came to end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its bloc, though why that came about is still debated.

Iron Curtain

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Wartime Big Three Conferences​

Believing that the maintenance of postwar peace depended on friendly relations with the Soviet Union, U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to win the confidence of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the wartime meetings between himself, Stalin, and British Minister Winston Churchill , at which they planned military strategy and postwar policy. The “Big Three” met first at Tehrān (November 1943) and then in Yalta (February 1945). At the final wartime meeting of the U.S., U.K., and U.S.S.R. leaders, in Potsdam (August 1945), Roosevelt, who had died, was replaced by Pres. Harry Truman and Churchill gave way to Clement Attlee after a change of government in the U.K.

Tehran Conference

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Cold War Pages

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Rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Space Race and sports were an extension of their attempts to prove the superiority of their respective systems.

The Red Scare, Spies, & Cold War Fiction and Film

As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, anti-communism and fears of communist subversion pervaded American society.

Nuclear War & Arms Control​

The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during World War II began the Atomic Age of nuclear warfare and strategy.

Cold War Alliances & Leaders

Cold War alliances were formed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and their respective allies.

Cold War Policies, Propaganda, & Speeches

The Cold War was a strategic and tactical contest to influence the nature of the governments and societies of the world’s countries.

Major Cold War Events

On occasion actions by both sides of the Cold War divide resulted in confrontations that brought the ideological adversaries to the brink of war.

Origins of the Cold War

The Cold War was the global, ideological rivalry between the Soviet Union-led Eastern bloc and American-dominated “Free World.” It emerged in the aftermath of World War II and was fought on many fronts—political, economic, military, cultural, ideological, and in the Space Race. It led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, and the Warsaw Pact alliance (1955-1991). Under the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the two nuclear powers—the United States since 1945 and the Soviet Union since 1949—and military alliances avoided direct confrontations, the reason why the term “cold” is used to describe the conflict. However, they eagerly supported their allies and fought proxy wars; for example, the Korean War from 1950-1953, the Vietnam War from 1955-1975, and Afghanistan from 1979-1989.  

Who Was Responsible for Starting the Cold War?

Two scholars debate this question.

Written by: (Claim A) John E. Moser, Ashland University; (Claim B) Stephen Tootle, College of the Sequoias

Suggested sequencing.

• Use this point-counterpoint with  The Berlin Airlift  Narrative and the  Winston Churchill, “Sinews of Peace,” March 1946  Primary Source to have students analyze the start of the Cold War and tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies.

Issue on the Table

Was one superpower primarily responsible for starting the Cold War, or did both the United States and the Soviet Union contribute to its rise?

Instructions

Read the two arguments in response to the question posed, paying close attention to the supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Then, complete the comparison questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.

During the Cold War, Americans were convinced the Soviet Union posed a grave threat to their country and the rest of the planet and that, as the leader of the free world, the United States had a responsibility to resist Soviet  expansionism . But might a different approach to foreign affairs by the United States in the years immediately after World War II have prevented the Cold War altogether?

Consider that the Soviet Union in 1945, although victorious in Europe, emerged from the war economically and demographically exhausted, and having lost a staggering 20 million soldiers and civilians (approximately 10 percent of its population). The Soviet Union had suffered far more than the United States or Great Britain, because German forces had occupied large sections of the country and waged a racial war of annihilation against its people. And although the United States had made critical material contributions to the war, it was the Soviets who did the bulk of the fighting against Nazi Germany. At no point after mid-1941 did British or U.S. forces face more than 25 percent of the fighting strength of the German  Wehrmacht , whereas the Red Army fought millions of Germans in the East. The British and Americans did not even attempt to open a second front in France until 1944 (despite Joseph Stalin’s constant requests for such action during the previous two years), by which time German forces had already been driven from Soviet soil.

Stalin was a brutal dictator, but his foreign policy goals were understandable. Hitler’s invasion in 1941 had sparked the second major war against Germany in 20 years, and Russian leadership had legitimate security concerns. Moreover, he believed, not unreasonably, that as a Communist nation, the Soviet Union could not trust the capitalist world in the long term. The best way to protect the Soviet Union was to ensure that the countries along its western borders were friendly. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had recognized this fact at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. What they did not appreciate was, given the extent of anti-Russian sentiment in eastern Europe, no freely elected, democratic government from Poland to Romania could be counted on to be friendly. Nor was there any real history of democracy in those countries. In fact, Hungary and Romania had been Nazi allies during the war. The Red Army already occupied Eastern Europe, and the Russians imposed pro-Soviet governments there to establish a buffer zone against future attacks.

The United States chose to respond to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe with outright hostility. When Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov traveled to the United States in April 1945, the new president, Harry Truman, subjected him to an undiplomatic tongue lashing. After the end of the war, U.S. policy became downright militant. Although Truman withdrew most U.S. troops from Europe after 1945, the administration made massive expenditures on naval and air forces, stepped up testing and production of atomic bombs, and established a network of air bases in the United States and abroad with long-range bombers capable of carrying nuclear bombs. “Containment” of Soviet communism—that is, preventing it from spreading beyond its current borders—became the administration’s guiding strategy. In 1947, the president put forward his famous “Truman Doctrine,” in which he asked Congress to spend $400 million on economic aid to Greece and Turkey, and committed the United States “to support free peoples” around the world who were “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Two years later, the United States joined Great Britain, France, Canada, and a number of other nations in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an alliance aimed at the defense of Western Europe.

Truman’s approach to the Soviet Union was not without its critics at home. Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, begged the president to consider how it would “look to us if Russia had the atomic bomb and we did not, if Russia had 10,000-mile bombers and air bases within a thousand miles of our coastlines, and we did not?” Wallace called on Truman to appreciate the Soviet Union’s fear of being invaded again and “to agree to reasonable Russian guarantees of security.” Eventually, Wallace’s outspoken criticism of Truman’s “get tough” approach cost him his job, but he continued to speak out. The Truman Doctrine, he warned, would ultimately lead to war. “There is no regime too reactionary for us provided it stands in Russia’s expansionist path,” he said in a March 1947 speech. “There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war.” Similar arguments could be heard coming from Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, one of the most conservative men in the Senate. When asked why he voted against ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Taft replied, “How would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border, Mexico, for instance?”

Such views were very much in the minority, however. Most Americans, by the late 1940s, had come to regard the Soviet Union as a serious menace to world peace, and containment became the prevailing U.S. strategy for nearly 50 years. We will never know whether a more conciliatory policy on the part of the United States would have produced a different outcome.

With the opening of American archives in the 1970s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, scholars now have access to all the documents describing the intentions and assumptions of decision-makers in both countries in the years after World War II. Supposed mysteries have been solved. Old questions have been answered. The documentary evidence is in. The United States and the Soviet Union both contributed to the rise of the Cold War. They were  ideological nation-states  with incompatible and mutually exclusive ideologies. The founding purpose of the Soviet Union was global domination, and it actively sought the destruction of the United States and its allies. If the United States wanted to continue as a nation-state that protected the rights enshrined in its founding documents, it needed to wage an active opposition to the Soviet Union.

As an ideological nation-state, the United States has always, by its very existence, found itself at odds with nations, states, tribes, or groups of people with conflicting ideas. Those conflicts would typically become important or violent once an entity threatened the interests of the United States. By 1945, communism had been around for a century, and violent, radical, Marxist communists had been in control of the Soviet Union for decades. But even though the United States and the free world needed the help of the Soviet Union to destroy Nazi Germany in World War II, the conclusion of that war put the Soviet Union in a position to directly threaten the United States and its allies.

The Communist Soviet Union had suffered tremendous losses in World War II, perhaps around 27 million deaths, but found itself with significant global influence at its conclusion. Its leader, Joseph Stalin, was one of the most ruthless dictators in human history and a dedicated  Marxist  communist. How many tens of millions died at his hand depends on how one categorizes his victims, but the most common estimates range between 20 million and 25 million.

At the same time, the United States, under the leadership of President Harry Truman, undertook the task of trying to guide the nations of the world toward a set of ideas that would make another such war less likely. Stalin and the Soviets wanted to expand communism into Europe and around the world; Truman, his nation, and the free world wanted to preserve freedom where it existed and spread it where it did not. World War II had merely revealed that the ideals of two former allies directly conflicted with one another. And the conflict became global as Stalin and the Soviets moved to expand their ideology, insecurity, and violence on the world stage.

Even before Stalin took power, the Soviets had recruited spies and taken over  leftist  movements in the United States. Their espionage efforts paid tremendous dividends. Within the State Department, Alger Hiss, Julian Wadleigh, Laurence Duggan, and Noel Field were all Communist spies. Within the Treasury Department alone there were at least nine spies, including Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the treasury. The Soviets stole military secrets, including the suspension system for American tanks, the atomic bomb, the D-Day invasion plans, defense readiness plans, and the locations of atomic bomb stockpiles. Spies were also able to give the Soviets critical information that led (perhaps) to the Berlin blockade and the invasion of Korea.

After World War II, Stalin believed the Soviet Union was the vehicle for spreading communism throughout the world. Stalin stated his purposes plainly in 1945 that “whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system. . . It cannot be otherwise.” The Soviets forced Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany into replicas of the Soviet Union under the complete control of the Soviet Union. The Soviets forced constitutions, economic plans, and police states on the nations of Eastern Europe. Political freedom vanished, and Communists executed dissenters.

Stalin’s daily attitude toward the United States was unpredictable. On some days, he feared war; on others, he reaffirmed his ideological commitment to the idea that war was inevitable. The people around him were relieved after his death that his erratic and impulsive risk taking and paranoia had not led to a general war with the United States. Stalin believed security only came from the elimination of challengers. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov described why Stalin waged the Cold War: “Stalin looked at it this way: World War I has wrested one country from capitalist slavery; World War II has created a socialist system; and the third will finish off imperialism forever.” In almost any other scenario, one could dismiss such rhetoric, but in the Soviet Union, dismissing Stalin’s rhetoric carried a probable death sentence.

If the United States, along with other countries the Soviets considered to be “imperialistic,” did not wish to be “finished off” by the Soviet Union, they would need to resist Communist aggression. The United States and its Western democratic allies came to believe that history had taught some hard lessons by the end of World War II. They forged collective security arrangements on the basis of a relatively new idea that the success of an ally was not a threat to the United States. The United States was clear and unapologetic in this worldview, which directly contradicted that of the Soviet Union.

The Cold War was not a war. It was a global military, diplomatic, intellectual, social, and cultural contest. Both sides considered success essential to survival, and in that regard, both were right.

Historical Reasoning Questions

Use  Handout A: Point-Counterpoint Graphic Organizer  to answer historical reasoning questions about this point-counterpoint.

Primary Sources (Claim A)

“Crimea (Yalta) Conference, 1945.” Pages 1005-1022 https://www.loc.gov/item/lltreaties-ustbv003/

“Potsdam Declaration: Potsdam Conference.” July 26, 1945.  https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/potsdam-declaration/

Truman, Harry. “Truman Doctrine, 1947.”  https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=81#

Primary Sources (Claim B)

Kennan, George. “The Long Telegram.” February 1946.  https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-long-telegram/

Marshall, George C. “The Marshall Plan Speech.”  https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/the-marshall-plan/marshall-plan-speech/

Suggested Resources (Claim A)

Kolko, Joyce, and Gabriel Kolko.  The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 . New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

LaFeber, Walter.  America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2002 . New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Williams, William Appleman.  The Tragedy of American Diplomacy . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Suggested Resources (Claim B)

Andrew, Christopher.  For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush . New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin.  The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB . New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin.  The World was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World . New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Conquest, Robert.  Reflections on a Ravaged Century . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Courtois, Stephanie, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin.  The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Gaddis, John Lewis.  The Cold War: A New History . New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Gaddis, John Lewis.  Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War . New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gaddis, John Lewis.  We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hamby, Alonzo L.  Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush . New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr.  Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

Judt, Tony.  Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.  New York: Penguin Press, 2005

McCauley, Martin.  Russia, America and the Cold War: 1949–1991.  London: Pearson Education, 1998.

McMahon, Robert J.  The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

McMeekin, Sean.  The Russian Revolution: A New History . New York: Basic Books, 2017.

McNeal, Robert H.  Stalin: Man and Ruler . New York: New York University Press, 1988.

Montefiore, Simon Sebag.  Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. p. 634

Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev.  The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era . New York: Random House, 1999.

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 7.

• READ: Devastation of Old Markets
• READ: Connecting Decolonization and the Cold War
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War
• WATCH: USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War

READ: Cold War — An Overview

• READ: The Cold War Around the World
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• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Decolonization and Nationalism Triumphant
• WATCH: Decolonization and Nationalism Triumphant
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Chinese Communist Revolution
• WATCH: Chinese Communist Revolution
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Conflict in Israel and Palestine
• WATCH: Conflict in Israel and Palestine
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• End of Empires and Cold War

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• According to the author, what was the basic difference at the heart of the Cold War conflict?
• What does this author identify as the three main features of the Cold War?
• Why did Stalin want to expand Soviet influence in Eastern Europe?
• What was the policy of containment and what conflicts does the author use as an example of this policy?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• The Cold War was a conflict that was all about methods of production and distribution that divided communities across the world along communist and capitalist lines. How would you describe the Cold War through each course frame?

Cold War: An Overview

What was the cold war, a divided europe, the cold war heats up around the world, the end of the cold war, want to join the conversation.

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Cold War: Origins, combatants and leaders

The Cold War was a decades-long diplomatic and military standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States

Who started the Cold War?

The arms race, the korean war, the space race, berlin and the cold war, mccarthyism and the red scare, the cuban missile crisis, the global cold war, what was détente, soviet war in afghanistan, the reagan administration, perestroika and glasnost, fall of the berlin wall, the end of the cold war, additional resources, bibliography.

The Cold War was an ideological conflict between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union , and their respective allies. Despite being called a war, it was not a direct military confrontation between the two sides. Merriam Webster defines a cold war as a "conflict over ideological differences carried on by methods short of sustained overt military action and usually without breaking off diplomatic relations."  

Tensions and hostilities between the two superpowers fluctuated throughout the 20th century, becoming stronger at the end of World War II, before the conflict finally collapsed in the early 1990s. 

The Cold War was not a war in the traditional sense, though it did feature outbreaks of armed conflict such as in Vietnam and Korea. According to Odd Arne Westad, professor of history at Yale University, the instigator of the Cold War is tricky to identify, because the conflict emerged gradually from ideological differences. 

"To me, the Cold War is primarily a conflict about how best to organize society between liberal capitalist ideas and socialist ideas that come out of the period of industrialization in the late 19th century," Westad told All About History magazine . "Sometime during the Second World War this ideological conflict became a conflict centred on two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union."

In August 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . This event signaled the end of World War II, following VE day earlier in the year. 

By 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb. No longer the world's only nuclear power, the U.S. began building its stockpile of nuclear bombs and developing larger, more destructive weapons. President Truman approved the development of the hydrogen bomb only for the Soviet Union to once again quickly catch up, according to History Today .

The first hotspot of the Cold War, when the two sides came into military conflict — albeit indirectly — was the Korean War, which took place between 1950 and 1953. At the end of World War II, Korea, a former territory of Japan, was divided along its 38th parallel, and an internal border was established between the communist North Korea backed by the Soviet Union and the Western-leaning South Korea, according to the Imperial War Museum . 

On June 25, 1950, North Korea, with support from the USSR (including covert operations and providing aircraft and medical support), invaded South Korea. The United Nations quickly arranged support for the south, and troops from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa, among others, were sent to oppose North Korea. In 1951, China , another communist nation, sent troops in support of North Korea, and the two sides reached a stalemate. In 1953 an armistice was agreed  that established a new border close to the 38th parallel. 

As the arms race continued on the ground, another technological race was taking place to reach space. The space race began in 1955 when the U.S. announced that it intended to launch its first satellite. The Soviet Union responded by declaring it intended to also launch a satellite, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich . 

In 1957 the Soviet satellite   Sputnik 1 was successfully launched into orbit. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to space, orbiting the Earth once and returning safely in the spacecraft Vostok 1. 

However, in 1969 the U.S. achieved one of the most significant victories in the space race when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon . The space race came to a symbolic end in 1975 when the first joint U.S.-Soviet mission was launched and Tom Stafford and Alexi Leonov shook hands in space. 

Following the defeat of the Nazis on VE Day — the end of World War II in Europe — Germany and Austria were divided into four separate zones governed by France, the U.K., the U.S. and the Soviet Union, according to the National Army Museum in London.

Berlin was similarly divided into four zones of occupation, despite the city falling within the Soviet Zone of the country. In June 1948, the first major international crisis of the Cold War occured when the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin from the rest of the country following controversial currency reforms, according to the Imperial War Museum in London. With food supplies running out in West Berlin, a massive airlift was organized by the U.S. and its allies, which continued until May 1949 when the blockade was lifted. In total, the U.S. and its allies delivered about 2.3 million tons of cargo.

According to NATO , between 1949 and 1961 3 million citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the Soviet-operated zone fled into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), which was formed in 1949 when the American, British and French zones of Germany were unified. The loss of so many workers caused major economic issues for East Berlin, so in response to this exodus the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall in the early hours of Aug. 13, 1961, which physically divided the city and stopped East Berliners from leaving freely. 

"This is a city that has to be taken apart and put back together again," journalist Mildred Raynolds Trivers wrote in The Virginia Quarterly Review in 1962. "Berlin is not even one city, it is two cities, each with its separate government, separate currency, separate telephone systems, separate transportation systems." 

Senator Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing Republican caused a nationwide panic during the late 1950's when he launched a number of probes into communist infiltration of various state departments and organisations, including the White House and the U.S. Army, according to The Miller Centre . What resulted was not just a governmental panic, but a witch hunt across the entire United States.

One of the most highly publicised aspects of the 'Red Scare' was the impact upon Hollywood. McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities investigated a number of Hollywood artists suspected of having communist links. The 'Hollywood Ten' were the ten most prominent figures, who were placed on a blacklist and forbidden from working in Hollywood until they were cleared of charges. 

According to Stanford Business , artists who worked with those who had their name on the blacklist saw their chances of employment dropping by 13%. The effect of the blacklist would only be broken when one of its key victims, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, was hired to write the screenplay to the 1960 Kirk Douglas film Spartacus, according to The Guardian .

In 1959, Fidel Castro took control of Cuba following a long revolution against the island’s capitalist government and aligned his country with the Soviet Union. This intensified tensions between Cuba and the U.S., and the U.S. responded by becoming involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion —  an attempt by exiled Cubans backed by U.S. intelligence services to land in Cuba and overthrow Castro’s government. 

According to John T. Cortell at the U.S. Department of Defense , U.S. spy planes first discovered Soviet nuclear missile bases in Cuba on Aug. 29, 1962 and then discovered ballistic missiles in October. These followed a number of intelligence reports gathered over the preceding years which provided further evidence of missiles on the island. The missiles were discovered to be able to reach U.S. shores. 

U.S. president John F. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, and on Oct. 22 he briefed the nation on the gravity of the situation, according to the JFK Library . 

"Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril. Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift, that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace," Kennedy said in his address to the nation . The naval blockade was underpinned by a threat of military retaliation and Kennedy was supported by a number of nations.

After a tense five-day standoff, the Soviet Union agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba. However, in a deal that remained secret, the U.S. similarly agreed to remove all nuclear weapons from its bases in Turkey. "Kennedy privately offered a hedged promise on 27th October to withdraw the Jupiter Missiles from Turkey at a future time," Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of History at Stanford University, wrote in 1980 in the journal Political Science Quarterly . The years following the crisis saw a distinct relaxation of tensions, at least directly, between the USSR and the U.S., and led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty which prohibited the testing of Nuclear Weapons.

The Cold War wasn’t just a conflict between two superpowers; instead, the two superpowers each had a sphere of influence that drew multiple countries into the conflict, and the war’s  effect reached almost every corner of the globe. "Some of the most significant effects of the Cold War were outside of Europe and the two superpowers, in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America," Westad told All About History. "Not in a sense that the Cold War came in from the outside but because it had some kind of effect everywhere. It influenced most things, and mostly for the worse, particularly during the latter phase of the 20th century," he said. 

One of the key aspects to the global Cold War was the interventions in other countries undertaken by the United States, the USSR and other powers. But what forms did these interventions take? "They are diplomatic and propagandist and you also have a lot of covert operations which are not just military operations," Westad explained. "So when we talk about intervention we are not talking purely about military intervention. Perhaps the most noticeable one from today's perspective, as the after effects have not entirely gone away, is the combined British and American operation in Iran in the early 1950s. The aim was to unseat the government there and replace it with a government led by the then Sha, much more to Western liking. There was a covert operation with people on the ground but also a massive propaganda campaign and economic pressure," Westad said.

During the 1970s the Cold War entered a phase known as détente, described as "an improvement in the relationship between two countries that in the past were not friendly and did not trust each other," according to the Cambridge online dictionary . 

Détente represented a new chapter in diplomatic relations between the superpowers. "During the first half of the 1970s Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford responded to the aftermath of Vietnam by avoiding the extremes of the era: massive military retrenchment (left) and massive military escalation (right)," Julian E. Zelier, professor of political history at Princeton University, wrote in the journal Diplomatic History in 2009. Instead, a middle ground was reached, and there was significant warming of tensions between the East and the West occurred. 

In May 1972, according to the Nixon Foundation , Nixon met with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev for the first of three major summits. In particular, as the Office of the Historian noted , this period was particularly important in terms of arms regulation and led to several important treaties, including the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties I and II. 

By the end of the 1970s détente was beginning to wane, and hostilities between the two superpowers became more intense. One of the key events that led to this cooling of relations was the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. The USSR sent 1000,000 troops into the country to support the communist government that was under threat from mujahideen rebels, covertly supported by the United States. After a nine-year war in which 122,500 people were killed, the Soviet Union was forced to withdraw. 

Many historians have named the Soviet Union’s failed intervention in Afghanistan as the event that marked the beginning of the end for the USSR. "Failure in Afghanistan led to the abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which mandated Soviet intervention to save communism from counter-revolution in neighboring states,” David C. Gompert, a former U.S. diplomat and acting director of national intelligence, wrote in " Blinders, Blunders, and Wars: What America and China Can Learn " (RAND Cooperation, 2014). “It also set the stage of Mikhail Gorbachev's futile attempt to reform Soviet Politics and economics, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the abandonment of communism and the dissolution of the USSR," Gompert wrote. 

In response to the war in Afghanistan, President Ronald Reagan, who was elected on Nov. 4, 1980, sought a more aggressive approach to Soviet-U.S. relations.

Reagan's strategy was to intensify the arms race. On June 18, 1980, prior to his election, he told staff at the Washington Post that, "it would be of great benefit to the United States if we start a build up [of nuclear weapons]," believing that the USSR would be unable to compete, Lou Cannon, a journalist and biographer, wrote for The Miller Center . Once elected, Reagan openly pursued a more hardline approach toward the USSR, and in a famous speech on March 8, 1983, he referred to the Soviet Union as an " evil empire ." 

In 1983, Reagan also proposed the Strategic Defence Initiative, a space-based anti-missile system nicknamed "Star Wars" and described by the Atomic Heritage Foundation as "an anti-ballistic missile program that was designed to shoot down nuclear missiles in space." Although never developed, the concept was intended to threaten the USSR by demonstrating both technological and financial advancement. 

Mikhail Gorbachev took over as president of the Soviet Union in 1985 and ushered in a number of reforms, perhaps the most famous of which was the policy of glasnost. The word glasnost is a,"Russian word, commonly translated in English as 'openness',” Joseph Gibbs, journalism professor at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, wrote in " Gorbachev's Glasnost: The Soviet Media in the First Phase of Perestroika " (Texas A&M University Press, 1999). “Gorbachev aggressively promoted glasnost as a component of his program of reconstruction, or perestroika, of the USSR's sagging economy and inefficient governmental system," Gibbs wrote. 

Glasnost allowed Soviet citizens to reflect critically on the country’s own past for the first time, particularly the October Revolution of 1917. "The policy of glasnost in the perestroika era and its continuing, unstoppable momentum allow us to look at ourselves with open eyes, providing us with new knowledge about the many-sided nature of October and its consequences, and enabling us to reflect on many aspects of post-October developments in their true dimensions and significance," Gorbachev wrote in "On My Country and The World" (Columbia University Press, 1999). 

Glasnost and the other reforms were intended to modernize the USSR, but they ultimately helped bring the Soviet Union to an end. The policy soon "expanded into pressure for democratization of the Soviet political system," a report from the research organization RAND said in 1990 .

Due to Glasnost and Gorbachev’s policies, by 1989, Cold War tensions had begun to thaw across Europe, including in East and West Germany. An increasing number of public protests had led to the decision to loosen border restrictions between east and West Berlin, though the intention was never completely. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, East German official Gunter Schabowski announced that border restrictions between East and West Berlin would be permanently relaxed. 

"East Germans will be able to obtain exit visas without delay, allowing them to cross into the West through all border points within Berlin and along the border with West Germany. Tourists who want to return to East Germany can also obtain immediate permission," journalist Anna Tomforde reported in The Guardian at the time.

However, excited Berliners did not wait for visas. By 9pm local time crowds had flocked to the wall, and at midnight the borders were opened fully and people began to chip away at the wall. 

Eleven months later the reunification of Germany occurred and it would not be until 1991 that the Soviet Union collapsed, but for many the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolically marked the end of the Cold War. "Ordinary people demanding change took matters into their own hands. They brought down the wall, not armies or world statesmen. And then they danced upon it," Michael R. Meyer, former dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at Aga Khan University in Kenya and speechwriter for U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon, wrote in " The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story of the Fall of the Berlin Wall " (Scribner, 2009). 

By 1990, Gorbachev had acquiesced to the reunification of Germany and removed all Soviet soldiers from the country. By this time the Soviet Union had also been forced to grant many of its satellite countries independence, such as Ukraine in 1991, according to the Wilson Center . An unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev by communist hardliners further increased support for Boris Yeltsin, who was standing for the pluralist movement and advocated increased liberalization and reforms. Yeltsin led a short campaign of civil resistance which ended the Coup and simultaneously weakened Gorbachev’s influence. On Dec. 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned — effectively ending the Soviet Union, and the conflict with the U.S.

"The Cold War, within the international system of states, ended very clearly with the collapse and fall of the Soviet Union," Westad said.

The John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum contains a number of articles and papers relating to JFK's time in the White House and the Cuban Missile Crisis. For those interested in the role played by nuclear weapons during the Cold War, Atomic Heritage Foundation has a variety of interesting sources. The Hoover Institution contains a wealth of information regarding the Red Scare.

• History Today
• Imperial War Museum
• Royal Museums Greenwich
• National Army Museum
• "Building the Berlin Wall" NATO  official site
• The Virginia Quarterly Review
• The Miller Centre
• U.S. Department of Defense
• JFK Library
• Political Science Quarterly .
• Nixon Foundation
• Office of the Historian
• David C. Gompert; " Blinders, Blunders, and Wars: What America and China Can Learn " (RAND Cooperation, 2014)
• Joseph Gibbs; " Gorbachev's Glasnost: The Soviet Media in the First Phase of Perestroika " (Texas A&M University Press, 1999)
• Michael R. Meyer; " The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story of the Fall of the Berlin Wall " (Scribner, 2009)

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Callum McKelvie is features editor for All About History Magazine . He has a both a Bachelor and Master's degree in History and Media History from Aberystwyth University . He was previously employed as an Editorial Assistant publishing digital versions of historical documents, working alongside museums and archives such as the British Library . He has also previously volunteered for The Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum , Gloucester Archives and Gloucester Cathedral . 

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The Cold War

Cold war historiography.

As an event spanning almost 50 years and touching all corners of the globe, the Cold War has been closely studied by hundreds of historians. Histories of the period have reached different conclusions and formed different interpretations about the Cold War, why it occurred and how it developed and evolved. This page provides a brief survey of Cold War historiography and its three main schools of thought.

The role of historians

Our understanding of the Cold War has been shaped by the work of historians. Since the outbreak of global tensions in 1945, the events, ideas and complexities of the Cold War have been researched, studied and interpreted by thousands of historians.

These historians have explored and hypothesised about the causes and effects of the Cold War. They have examined the ideas, motives and actions of significant Cold War leaders. They have weighed the numerous political, social, economic and cultural factors of the period. They have evaluated the outcomes and effects of the Cold War, both globally and in particular countries and regions.

Like most historians studying a long and complex period, they formed different interpretations and reached different conclusions. As a consequence, the historiography of the Cold War, like the Cold War itself, contains a range of views, perspectives and arguments.

Why differing perspectives?

Why have Cold War historians formed different and often competing arguments? Fundamentally, there are two main reasons for this.

The first pertains to historians and their unique perspectives. Historians come from different backgrounds, learn history from different people and embrace different values and methodologies. Their views and priorities are shaped by their places of origin, the times in which they live and the company they keep.

Secondly, the recency of the Cold War and its political divisiveness are complicating factors. The Cold War ended a little over 30 years ago and its political tensions and competing viewpoints still reverberate through modern societies. Unlike historians who focus on the Middle Ages or the French Revolution , for example, most Cold War historians actually lived through the event they are studying.

There are three main movements or schools of thought in Cold War historiography. These are broadly known as the Orthodox, Revisionist and Post-Revisionist schools. Historians in these schools do not think alike on every or any issue, nor do they always advance similar arguments – but their general approach to or position on the Cold War tends to be similar.

The Orthodox school

Orthodox views of the Cold War emerged among historians in the United States and other Western nations in the early 1950s. Though less used today, this perspective has also been known as the ‘Traditional view’.

Broadly speaking, Orthodox historians attribute the outbreak of the Cold War to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. They argue that the Soviet regime initiated the Cold War by seeking to expand and exert control over Europe and Asia. They attribute this to Russia’s inherent expansionism, the doctrine of Marxist-Leninism which preached international revolution and world communism, as well as Stalin’s anti-Western paranoia.

Orthodox historians argue that Stalin broke agreements forged at Yalta and Potsdam in order to expand Soviet communism into eastern Europe and throughout the world. The Soviet leader’s duplicitous actions led to the collapse of the Grand Alliance and the beginnings of the Cold War.

“According to the influential Orthodox account, the conflict was unavoidable owing to the nature of Soviet objectives and Stalin’s character. It was an illusion to believe that the ‘Uncle Joe’ of pro-Soviet wartime propaganda corresponded to reality. Stalin was no horse-trading statesman or American-style political boss, but a ruthless dictator determined to extend his totalitarian system far beyond the strict requirements of Soviet security. Nothing the United States or Britain might have done would have persuaded him to moderate his designs.” John Lamberton Harper, historian

American passivity

In the Orthodox mind, the United States had only a passive or reactive role in these events. American leaders entered the negotiations in 1945 with benign objectives: they sought no territory and were guided by principles rather than self-interest. Roosevelt and Truman both sought conciliation with Stalin and a post-war working relationship with the Soviet Union.

When Stalin violated the agreements of 1945, however, American leaders, particularly Truman, acted in defence of self-determination and democracy. Many Orthodox histories also offer scathing criticisms of economic policy and political repression within the Soviet system, while ignoring the shortcomings of American capitalism.

The Orthodox view became the accepted historical position of the United States during the 1950s – not surprisingly, since it aligned with American interests and justified US policies like the Truman Doctrine and the Domino Theory . It remained the prevailing explanation of the Cold War until the emergence of Revisionist historians in the 1960s.

Notable advocates of the Orthodox school included Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr , Herbert Feis , Thomas A. Bailey and Louis J. Halle. It may come as no surprise that many of these historians held official positions with the US State Department or other government bodies.

Revisionist historians

Revisionist historians attribute greater responsibility for the Cold War to the United States. According to Revisionists, US policy after World War II was neither passive nor benign. It was driven more by economic considerations and national self-interest than the principles of democracy and self-determination.

American policymakers pushed to contain Soviet communism in Europe for selfish reasons: they wanted a European continent populated with capitalist nations open to trade and American exports. Policies such as lend-lease, post-war loans and the Marshall Plan all worked toward this objective.

Some Revisionist historians also point to America’s “atomic diplomacy” in 1945. Gar Alperovitz , for example, argues that Truman used nuclear weapons against Japan, not for military reasons but to flex America’s diplomatic muscle when negotiating with Stalin. Justifiably or not, the Soviet Union felt threatened by America’s policies and diplomatic approaches of the mid to late 1940s, which contributed to the collapse of their alliance and a lost opportunity for post-war conciliation.

“The Revisionists disagree among themselves on a wide range of specific issues [but] tend to divide into two recognisable groups. The ‘soft’ Revisionists place far more emphasis upon individuals than they do on the nature of institutions or systems. They see a sharp break between the foreign policies of Roosevelt and Truman and the men around him. Truman, according to this view, broke apart a functioning coalition soon after he took office… The ‘hard’ Revisionists raise more fundamental issues [about] the American system as it developed over the years.” Robert James Maddox, historian

The spread of Revisionism

The first significant Revisionist work was William Appleman Williams ‘ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy , published in 1959. In this thorough but controversial book, Williams concluded that since the 1890s, the overriding function of US foreign policy has been to secure foreign markets for American-made goods and services. He calls this the ‘open door policy’ because it seeks to open up other nations for American capitalists by removing tariffs and other trade barriers.

Williams’ analysis shattered two popular illusions: first, that the United States was an isolationist, anti-imperialist neutral power, and second, that US foreign policy during the Cold War was reactive, peace-seeking and not agenda-driven.

Revisionist perspectives gained traction and popularity in the United States during the 1960s, a period when the failures of Vietnam led many to question America’s foreign policy. Aside from Williams and Alperovitz, other notable historians of the Revisionist school include Denna Fleming , Christopher Lasch , Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner. During the 1960s and 1970s these historians were often referred to as the ‘New Left’, though this label oversimplified their perspectives.

The Post-Revisionists

Orthodox and Revisionist accounts of the Cold War had many advocates – but some historians were dissatisfied with the extremities of both perspectives. A new approach, pioneered by John Lewis Gaddis and dubbed Post-Revisionism, began to emerge during the 1970s.

Post-Revisionist historians looked for a middle ground between Orthodox and Revisionist histories of the Cold War. These academics synthesised ideas and conclusions from both schools of thought – but they also had the advantages of time, hindsight, the cooling passions of Détente and, later, access to newly-declassified documents from both sides of the struggle.

The Post-Revisionist movement was sometimes referred to as ‘Eclecticism’ because it borrowed heavily from existing research. Revisionists called it ‘New Orthodoxy’ because they believed it pushed responsibility for the Cold War back onto the Soviet Union.

The work of Gaddis

The first significant Post-Revisionist account was Gaddis’ 1972 book The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 . In this text, Gaddis considered existing explanations for the Cold War but also widened his focus, examining “external and internal influences, as perceived by officials responsible for [policy] formulation” in Washington.

Gaddis also acknowledged the limitations faced by previous Cold War historians of not having access to official Soviet archives, meaning they had to assess Soviet policy “from without”.

Gaddis identified several factors that contributed to the emergence of a US-Soviet cold war. There was entrenched political attitudes and rivalry before 1941, including a lack of communication and formal recognition. The Allies’ delay in opening up a second front in Europe left the Soviets three years to battle the Nazis unaided. Washington’s refusal to recognise a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe was another source of tension, as was Truman’s ‘atomic diplomacy’ and refusal to share nuclear technology with the Soviets.

Other Post-Revisionists

Gaddis’ account gave birth to numerous Post-Revisionist histories of the Cold War. Among the historians to embrace this new approach were Ernest May , Melvyn Leffler and Marc Trachtenberg.

Like the Revisionist school, the Post-Revisionist movement contains a diversity of perspectives and arguments, though there are identifiable trends. Most Post-Revisionists suggest that Stalin was an opportunist and a pragmatist, rather than an international revolutionary hell-bent on exporting communism around the world. They also accept that American foreign policy often involved overreach and was driven, at least in part, by economic imperatives.

Post-Revisionists also tend to focus on internal systems and factors that may shape or determine Cold War policies. They may include domestic political conditions, economic pressures and cultural influences.

“Starting in the 1970s, the study of the Cold War began to move beyond the simple application of blame and responsibility. While still focusing mainly on the diplomatic and military aspects of the Cold War, scholars started to view the conflict as a result of a complex interaction between all the parties involved… As befits a general international atmosphere of détente, most Post-Revisionists deemphasised the role of ideas and ideologies and instead explained the Cold War increasingly in a realist manner: decision-makers on all sides became, in effect, rational geopolitical calculators, advancing their respective national interests in the unique context of the post-war world.” Jussi M. Hanhimäki, historian

Post-Cold War perspectives

The end of the Cold War has also caused a shift in perspectives. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed the opening of Soviet archives once denied to historians. This access has led to new research and shifting perspectives.

As a consequence, some Revisionist and Post-Revisionist historians have modified their positions, particularly with regard to Joseph Stalin and Soviet policy. Gaddis, for example, published a new text in 1997 after “slogging dutifully through archives in Moscow, Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Beijing, Hanoi and Havana”. He took a much firmer line on Stalin, who “partly driven by ideological and geostrategic ambitions, partly responding to the opportunities that lay before him, built a post-war European empire”.

Other historians have also returned to claiming the Cold War as an ideological struggle, rather than a conflict driven by geopolitical rivalry and economic factors.

Huntington and Fukuyama

Some writers and academics have pondered what the Cold War means for the future. Two of the best-known theories were developed by political scientists Samuel P. Huntington and Francis Fukuyama .

Writing in 1992, Fukuyama claimed that the end of the Cold War was the final victory for democracy and capitalism. Liberal democracy had emerged as mankind’s highest-evolved and best form of government, surpassing all other systems. According to Fukuyama, this marked the “end of history” – not the end of historical events or change but of the great historical struggle between ideologies.

Huntington’s view of the future was more pessimistic. A former advisor to the US government during the Vietnam War , Huntington suggested that the collapse of the Soviet Union would produce significant changes in the world order. Future tensions and conflicts, he argued, would be driven not by ideology or competing economic interests but by fundamental differences in social structure, culture and religious values. Huntington’s thesis became known as the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory.

1. Historians have reached different conclusions and formed different arguments about the Cold War, including how it began, who was responsible and what conditions and factors perpetuated it.

2. Orthodox historians attribute the origins of the Cold War to Joseph Stalin and Soviet aggression. Stalin’s violation of post-war agreements led to a defensive policy response from the US and the West.

3. In contrast, Revisionist historians argue that US foreign policy was unnecessarily belligerent, seeking to contain Soviet communism to create a Europe that was more amenable to American trade and exports.

4. Post-Revisionists draw on the Orthodox and Revisionist schools and seek a middle ground. They suggest that neither superpower was wholly or mostly responsible but that complex factors were at play.

5. Post-Cold War historians, some of them with access to previously unavailable Soviet archives, have returned to describing the Cold War as an ideological conflict. Some, like Huntington and Fukuyama, have attempted to understand the implications for the future.

Citation information Title: ‘Cold War historiography’ Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn , Steve Thompson Publisher: Alpha History URL: https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/historiography/ Date published: October 14, 2019 Date updated: November 18, 2023 Date accessed: August 14, 2024 Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use .

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Cold War on File

Why did the cold war emerge, teachers' notes, introduction, external links.

About this classroom resource

The majority of the sources in this themed collection have been taken from our Cold War web resource with which many users of the Education Website will be familiar. However, we have upgraded the quality of the images, shown more of the original document in some cases and included additional sources from The National Archives exhibition: Britain’s Cold War revealed: Protect and Survive, April-November 2019.

The purpose of this document collection is to allow students and teachers to develop their own questions and lines of historical enquiry on the Cold War. Students could work with a group of sources or single source on a certain aspect. Teachers may wish to use the collection to develop their own resources or encourage students to ‘curate’ their own ‘exhibition’ of the most significant sources on the topic. Another idea would be to challenge students to use the documents to substantiate or dispute points made in the introduction with this collection. We hope that the documents will offer students a chance to develop their powers of evaluation and analysis and enrich their understanding of this topic.

Alternatively, teachers could use the Cold War website alongside this collection for specific questions or activities connected to these documents.

Students will find more documents in our recommended resources and can also consider film sources as interpretations of these events in relation to the documents by following the links to British Public Information films and British Pathé.

Themes covered in this collection include:

How strong was the wartime alliance, 1941-45?

The records provided here give context for a study of the Cold War, with reference to the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences which bridge the period of wartime co-operation and the post war tensions that followed.

Who caused the Cold War?

The attitudes and responses of important individuals in the early stages of the Cold War – Stalin, Truman and Churchill are explored through various cabinet discussions and foreign office reports.

How did the Cold War work?

Documents for this theme highlight the nature of the Cold War including the conflict over Berlin in 1948, the blockade and airlift. Other sources reflect the conflict in Korea and Soviet actions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) as told through political, military or personal themes.

How close was world nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s?

Records included in the collection relate to the development of nuclear weapons, British defence policy and the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962.

Britain in the nuclear age

For this theme we have included some documents featured in our exhibition called Britain’s Cold War revealed: Protect and Survive which concern civil defence, protests against the bomb at Aldermaston and Greenham Common.

Connections to the Curriculum

These documents can be used to support any of the exam board specifications covering the Cold War, such as:

AQA: GCE History Unit 2R: The Cold War, c1945-1991

OCR: GCE History Unit Y113: Britain 1930-1997: British Period Study: Britain’s position in the world 1951-1997 (Enquiry topic: Churchill 1930-1951) Unit Y223: Non-British Period Study: The Cold War in Europe, 1941-1995

Edexcel: GCE History Paper 3, Option 37.1: The changing nature of warfare, 1859–1991: perception and reality

Edexcel: GCSE History Period Study 4: Superpower relations and the Cold War, 1941–91

AQA: GCSE History BC Conflict and tension between East and West, 1945–1972

Who first coined the phrase “Cold War”? The general consensus among historians is that it was the celebrated author and journalist, George Orwell, in his essay ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ published in the Tribune magazine on 19 October 1945 (though one biographer has traced his use of the phrase back to 1943). In the 1945 article Orwell reflected on the repercussions of ‘a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “Cold War” with its neighbours’. He envisaged ‘the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states’ dominating the world, and possessing weapons which can kill millions in seconds. Orwell concluded that the atomic bomb was likely ‘to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

Seeing into the future

Looking back at Orwell’s predictions, he possessed amazing foresight. The Cold War (1945-1991) was a confrontation, both military and ideological, between two superpowers, the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union (and their respective allies), made all the more tense by the threat of nuclear war. This highly charged stand-off was a thread running through historic developments such as the iron curtain, the Cuban missile crisis and the construction and dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

Because there was so much at stake – arguably, the very future of civilisation – the superpowers avoided direct confrontation but fought a series of savage proxy wars, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, supporting local factions. Orwell’s “peace that is no peace” prediction was borne out.

Revelations

Contemplating the Cold War from today’s perspective, one aspect cannot be predicted – the surprises that can emerge from documents you haven’t seen before. Many narratives are available for the Cold War: it is the subject of many books, documentaries and films. However, this package of documents from The National Archives shows us that archives still have the capacity to surprise us about this period in history. There are many instances of this. For example, it is well-known that Churchill’s famous quotation “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” was part of a speech given in Fulton, Missouri, USA, on 5 March 1946. But did you know that he used the phrase ‘iron curtain’ almost a year earlier, in a personal telegram to President Truman on 12 May 1945? This is a heartfelt message in which Churchill expresses his ‘deep anxiety’ about Russian intentions in Eastern Europe.

Another surprise is a report by the Joint Planning Staff which puts forward a plan, (little known today) entitled ‘Operation Unthinkable’, advocating an attack on Soviet Forces in order to push them out of East Germany and Poland in July 1945. This document has real ‘shock value’: ‘If they [the Russians] want total war, they are in a position to have it’. The strident language of this document is striking: the intention was ‘to impose on Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire’. However, it is acknowledged that ‘to win would take us a very long time’.

Dramatic language is also a feature of a report called ‘The Threat to Western Civilisation’ from the Foreign Secretary to the British Cabinet in March 1948. This refers to the possibilities of the Soviet Union establishing a ‘world dictatorship’ or the ‘collapse of organised society over great stretches of the globe’. The writing style is so powerful, the words leap from the page. Yet another example of vivid writing can be seen in a Foreign Office telegram reporting back to London about the uprising in Hungary on 25 October 1956: ‘the populace are terrified of massive reprisals’.

In some cases, document content is not dramatic in itself but is, none the less, surprising. A great example of this is the last paragraph of Atomic Spy Klaus Fuch’s confession on 27 January 1950, when he suddenly begins to ‘wax lyrical’ about his admiration for English people:  ‘since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from and I don’t think they do, but it is there’. This incongruous piece of reflectiveness at the end of a confession statement shows how Fuchs was somewhat detached from reality at the time he made it – the does not seem to realise the import of what he had just confessed to, the giving of vital atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

As well as the textual documents, visual sources can also tell a powerful story. Grainy black and white photographs of the early days of the construction of the Berlin Wall make us reflect on the predicament of Berliners, looking on at the partially constructed wall, the barbed wire, the turrets, and the ‘death strip’. For another striking example of visual material, see the illustrations in the leaflet advising householders on protection against nuclear attack (1963), which are strangely cosy, hinting at elements of normality even during fall-out conditions.

Value of archives

The National Archives is the nation’s memory – we preserve the integrity of the public records, stretching back some 1,000 years. George Orwell truly understood the value of authoritative records: Winston Smith, the anti-hero of Orwell’s 1984 , worked in the ‘Ministry of Truth’, falsifying back-numbers of The Times so that the information contained in them corresponded with the current pronouncements of Big Brother’s regime. The corollary of this imagined scenario, of course, is that archives you can trust are essential for a true understanding of the past.

Mark Dunton Principal Records Specialist The National Archives

Pathe Archive film collections covering various conflicts during the Cold War – https://www.britishpathe.com/pages/collections 

Related resources

Leaders and controversies, cabinet papers, fifties britain, public information films.

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The Origins of the Cold War - A Review Essay

Following the logic of earlier scholarly debates on which side is to be blamed for the Cold War it appears that in fact both or neither: it was the inevitable consequence of the fact that two superpowers emerged after the conflagration of WWII. The ideology confrontation mattered much less vis-a-vis this immense global power shift.

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Aigul Kazhenova , Tsotne Tchanturia , Marijn Mulder , Ahmet Ömer Yüce , Sergei Zakharov , Mirkamran Huseynli , Pınar Eldemir , Angela Aiello , Rastko Lompar

This bibliography attempts to present the publications on the history of the Cold War published after 1989, the beginning of the „archival revolution” in the former Soviet bloc countries. While this first edition is still far from complete, it collects a huge number of books, articles and book chapters on the topic and it is the most extensive such bibliography so far, almost 600 pages in length. An enlarged and updated edition will be completed in 2018.

Tsotne Tchanturia , Vajda Barnabás , Gökay Çınar , Barnabás Vajda , Lenka Thérová , Simon Szilvási , Irem Osmanoglu , Rastko Lompar , Aigul Kazhenova , Pınar Eldemir , Natalija Dimić Lompar , Sára Büki

This bibliography attemts to present the publications on the history of the Cold War published after 1989, the beginning of the „archival revolution” in the former Soviet bloc countries. While this first edition is still far from complete, it collects a huge number of books, articles and book chapters on the topic and it is the most extensive such bibliography so far, almost 600 pages in length. An enlarged and updated edition will be completed in 2018. So, if you are a Cold War history scholar in any country and would like us to incude all of your publications on the Cold War (published after 1989) in the second edition, we will gladly do that. Please, send us a list of your works in which books and articles/book chapters are separated and follow the format of our bibliography. The titles of non-English language entries should be translated into English in square brackets. Please, send the list to: [email protected] The Cold War History Research Center owes special thanks to the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (formerly: on NATO and the Warsaw Pact) in Zurich–Washington D.C. for their permission to use the Selective Bibliography on the Cold War Alliances, compiled by Anna Locher and Cristian Nünlist, available at: http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/lory1.ethz.ch/publications/bibliography/index.html

The Bibliography of New Cold War History (second enlarged edition)

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This bibliography attempts to present the publications on the history of the Cold War published after 1989, the beginning of the „archival revolution” in the former Soviet bloc countries.

Soshum: Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities

Adewunmi J Falode , Moses Yakubu

The Cold War that occurred between 1945 and 1991 was both an international political and historical event. As a political event, the Cold War laid bare the fissures, animosities, mistrusts, misconceptions and the high-stake brinksmanship that has been part of the international political system since the birth of the modern nation-state in 1648. As a historical event, the Cold War and its end marked an important epoch in human social, economic and political development. The beginning of the Cold War marked the introduction of a new form of social and political experiment in human relations with the international arena as its laboratory. Its end signaled the end of a potent social and political force that is still shaping the course of political relationship among states in the 21 st century. The historiography of the Cold War has been shrouded in controversy. Different factors have been given for the origins of the conflict. This work is a historical and structural analysis of the historiography of the Cold War. The work analyzes the competing views of the historiography of the Cold War and create an all-encompassing and holistic historiography called the Structuralist School.

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fabio capano

In Rosella Mamoli Zorzi e Simone Francescato (eds.), American Phantasmagoria. Modes of representation in US culture

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The first section shows that the presence of ghosts in the foreign policy decision making processes of both the United States and the Soviet Union has been detected mainly in relatively recent works. The second, third and fourth sections are dedicated to distinguishing between three different kinds of apparitions—ghosts of the past, specters of the future, and phantasmagorias, respectively. The concluding section attempts some reflections on the possible meanings of such interest of Cold War historiography for spectral figures, particularly in connection with the ongoing debates about the “very notion of Cold War.”

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Geoffrey Roberts

Review of Jonathan Haslam's Russia's Cold War, published in International Affairs

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The Cold War Timeline

This post is a comprehensive timeline of the Cold War, from the origins of the Russian-American conflict following World War Two to the final dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 20th century.

Scroll down to learn more. Alternatively, watch this nine-minute explainer video for an overview of the Cold War.

This article is part of our larger collection of resources on the Cold War. For a comprehensive outline of the origins, key events, and conclusion of the Cold War, click here. 

This article is also part of our larger selection of posts about the Vietnam War. To learn more, click here for our comprehensive guide to the Vietnam War .

This article is part of our larger selection of posts about the Cold War. To learn more,  click here for our comprehensive guide to the Cold War .

Additional Resources About Cold War

What was the iron curtain and how did it collapse, the origins of the cold war timeline, cold war detente — us/soviet enmity cools, when did china become communist, cite this article.

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Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World

George Orwell and the origin of the term ‘cold war’

Oxford Dictionaries

• By Katherine Connor Martin
• October 24 th 2015

On 19 October 1945, George Orwell used the term cold war in his essay “ You and the Atom Bomb ,” speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.”

This wasn’t the first time the phrase cold war was used in English (it had been used to describe certain policies of Hitler in 1938), but it seems to have been the first time it was applied to the conditions that arose in the aftermath of World War II. Orwell’s essay speculates on the geopolitical impact of the advent of a powerful weapon so expensive and difficult to produce that it was attainable by only a handful of nations, anticipating “the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them,” and concluding that such a situation is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘ peace that is no peac e’.”

Within years, some of the developments anticipated by Orwell had emerged. The Cold War (often with capital initials) came to refer specifically to the prolonged state of hostility, short of direct armed conflict, which existed between the Soviet bloc and Western powers after the Second World War. The term was popularized by the American journalist Walter Lippman, who made it the title of a series of essays he published in 1947 in response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s ‘Mr. X’ article, which had advocated the policy of “ containment .” To judge by debate in the House of Commons the following year (as cited by the Oxford English Dictionary ), this use of the term Cold War was initially regarded as an Americanism: ‘The British Government … should recognize that the ‘cold war’, as the Americans call it, is on in earnest, that the third world war has, in fact, begun.” Soon, though, the term was in general use.

The end of the Cold War was prematurely declared from time to time in the following decades—after the death of Stalin, and then again during the détente of the 1970s—but by the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War era was clearly over. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously posited that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such,” with the global ascendancy of Western liberal democracy become an inevitability.

A quarter of a century later, tensions between Russia and NATO have now ratcheted up again, particularly in the wake of the Ukrainian crisis of 2014; commentators have begun to speak of a “ New Cold War .” The ideological context has changed, but once again a few great powers with overwhelming military might jockey for global influence while avoiding direct confrontation. Seventy years after the publication of his essay, the dynamics George Orwell discussed in it are still recognizable in international relations today.

A version of this article first appeared on the OxfordWords blog. 

Image Credit: “General Douglas MacArthur, UN Command CiC (seated), observes the naval shelling of Incheon from the USS Mt. McKinley, September 15, 1950.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Katherine Connor Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

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Orwell always surprises us. He was and still is a genius.

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Cold War — Analysis of How Did The Cold War Shaped American Politics, Society, and Economy

Analysis of How Did The Cold War Shaped American Politics, Society, and Economy

• Categories: 20Th Century Cold War Cuban Missile Crisis

About this sample

Words: 714 |

Published: Sep 4, 2018

Words: 714 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

The essay explores the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, tracing its origins to the aftermath of World War II and the historical backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The Cold War was a multifaceted conflict encompassing ideology, economics, politics, and military posturing, but it notably never escalated into a direct battlefield confrontation between the two superpowers. Instead, it was characterized by tensions and hostilities on a global scale, marked by a mutual understanding of the catastrophic consequences of direct conflict.

The essay delves into the impact of the Cold War on American society, highlighting the emergence of strong anti-communist sentiments that led to McCarthyism. During this period, the fear of communism and the obsession with identifying and removing communists from American society resulted in various actions, including the establishment of organizations like the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Laws such as the Communist Control Act and the McCarran Act were enacted, leading to questioning, job loss, and even fatalities, as exemplified by the Rosenberg case.

The essay also discusses the pervasive fear that gripped both American and Soviet societies during the Cold War, often driven by the arms race and events like the Cuban missile crisis. Despite the absence of direct military conflict, the constant threat of nuclear warfare loomed large, shaping the psychology of the era.

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