The Cold War is so important a part of American history because it so directly affected the United States and because the United States was one of two major global powers involved in a protracted stand-off the consequences of which could have been nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. That is pretty significant.

The Cold War is officially considered to have existed from the end of World War II in 1945 to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent, in 1991, collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union. By any historical measure, that is a sufficiently long period of time to warrant its own nomenclature. The stakes involved, as noted, involved the destruction of the world as we know it.

The Cold War was in some respects a “Hot War.” While it was labeled “Cold War” because direct full-scale war between the United States and the Soviet Union was gratefully avoided, there were certainly armed conflicts involving many deaths, including the deaths of American and Russian/Soviet citizens and soldiers. Throughout the Cold War, the armed forces of the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies/satellites continuously faced-off against each other with mistakes and errors in judgement a regular occurrence. American military pilots and aircraft crews flying reconnaissance missions along the borders of the Soviet Union were occasionally shot down or simply disappeared, the fate of the air crews a mystery to the American public. American and Soviet warships regularly maneuvered among each other in menacing ways that came perilously close to armed confrontations. Ships and aircraft of each side regularly prodded the other side in an effort to both attain intelligence on the adversary and to reaffirm rights of navigation in contested areas. Again, mistakes occurred with losses of life.

The Cold War was often “hot” as well in major conflicts on the Korean Peninsular and in Vietnam, where North and South in both locations reflected the Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers, each of which supported its ally with arms, money, intelligence and propaganda. Proxy warfare between allies of the two sides occurred throughout what was called “the Third World” in places like Angola and Nicaragua in which hundreds of thousands perished. Few foreign policy issues during these years did not reflect concerns about superpower conflicts, as in Chile and South Africa as well as in Southeast Asia.

The Cold War had major domestic implications, ranging from concerns bordering on paranoia in the United States about the spread of communism (exhibited in its extreme during the late 1940s and 1950s when McCarthyism and the Red Scare gripped America) and in the manner in which the Soviet Union imposed severe repressive practices on its own citizenry and the citizens of countries the governments of which were controlled from Moscow (i.e., countries like Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) in the name of preserving the Marxist-Leninist order.

Other major domestic repercussions included the amounts of money countries spent on their armed forces. The Cold War was expensive. The costs of maintaining large armies is exorbitant, especially when levels of technological sophistication and operating schedules are considered. Trillions of dollars were spent on each side in the development and fielding of large militaries. Finally, the populations of both sides lived with the daily fear of nuclear conflagration. The reason the Cuban Missile Crisis continues to be studied so thoroughly six decades after its resolution is because of how close the two sides came to nuclear war—a development that was only one mistake by one ship commander, bomber pilot or missile crew away.