Student Question
What was the Cold War?
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The Cold War was a prolonged period of political and ideological tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, following World War II. It was termed "cold" because it did not escalate into direct military conflict between the superpowers, although proxy wars occurred globally. The conflict involved an arms race, space race, and espionage, with each side promoting its ideology—capitalism versus communism. It ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Cold War was a conflict that lasted for decades between the communist countries of the world, led by the Soviet Union, and the non-communist countries of the world, led by the United States. It was a conflict in which both sides tried to dominate the world with their ideology. It is called “cold” because it was not an actual “shooting war” between the US and the USSR.
The Soviet Union was a communist country. Communists believed that their ideology was superior to that of the democratic, capitalistic countries of the West. They believed that communism would eventually take over the world and they wanted to speed that process as much as they could.
The United States was strongly opposed to communism. It felt that communism was economically inefficient and that it trampled on people’s fundamental human rights. For these reasons, it wanted to prevent the spread of communism.
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the end of WWII, the Cold War started. The US and the USSR tried to influence other countries to take their side. Sometimes, wars ended up being fought, as they were in Korea and Vietnam, to try to prevent the spread of communism. At other times, the competition between the two ideologies took the form of athletic competition or competition to land a man on the moon. The purpose of such competition was to show which side had a superior system.
The Cold War ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Cold War was basically the result of an ideological difference between a group of countries that opposed communism and another that opposed capitalism. The former comprised the US and its allies in Europe that formed the NATO. The latter was primarily made up of the former USSR and other communist nations around the world.
The Cold War did not result in any physical battles in the US or USSR but there were several incidents around the World that involved military forces supported by both the US and the USSR. Wars like those in Vietnam and Korea actually had American troops fighting opposing armies armed with weapons provided by the USSR and led to the death of over 100,000 Americans.
Huge sums of monetary resources were spent both by the US as well as the USSR in building massive stockpiles of weapons so that they could protect themselves from an actual attack by the other. Each of the nations had an extensive network of spies to gather military intelligence.
From the wasteful use of resources that harmed the citizens of both the sides, the effects of the Cold War were in a way equivalent to that of a real physical battle. The one small thing missing here was human blood spilt on land belonging to the US or the USSR.
The Cold War was the term used to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War. After the defeat of the Axis powers and the fall of Hitler, the Soviet Union possessed the world's largest army. The United States possessed the most powerful weapon in the atomic bomb, which had just been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to defeat Japan. Both nations had allied with one another in the war to defeat their common enemy, but this was merely a front to mask the contempt both had for one another. The Cold War was the term used to describe the antagonism between democratic America and communist Russia. While there was never any armed notions of conflict between both nations, the Cold War was the battle of ideologies and was waged in nations all over the world between proxy nations. Whereas a traditional war has a defined field of conflict, the Cold War was expansive, all over the world. Eastern European nations, South East Asia, as well as other regions of the world served as the setting for nations that were either advocating the Russian or American thought processes of democracy or communism.
After the Japanese surrender in August 1945 the focus shifted towards rebuilding Europe with representative governments and the democratic processes as its guide. It became increasingly clear that Stalin had no intention of allowing free elections to take place in Germany. The failure of the Allies to reach a peace agreement at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences left post war Europe in a quagmire. The old European powers had disintegrated and in its place, the "superpowers". The United States and the Soviet Union would dominate world politics for more than forty years. The Cold War was a war of idealogies between these two nations. Both nations are guilty of battling their idealogical point of view on nations that were either left vulnerable after the war or were politically unable to withstand their political, and or military might. Most historians agree that with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 that The Cold War has ended, however history is never black and white. All the shades of grey left from The Cold War are responsible for the state of global politics we live with today.
The Cold War describes a period of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. The reason it is known as "cold" is because there was no actual physical combat. There was a race to see who could develop space technology first; there was a lot of espionage that took place; proxy wars were fought where each country used smaller countries to battle each other; there were threats of nuclear warfare and an arms race big enough to alarm countries everywhere. Nuclear warfare meant annihilation of huge parts of the world, and the world knew that the US was not afraid to use them because of the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The Cold War ensued because the US and the Soviet Union could not agree on post-World War II rebuilding strategies. Even though the two were allies during WWII, they could not compromise on their visions of the postwar world. The Soviet Union pushed communism, which the US fought hard against.
The Cold War ended in December of 1989 when President George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev terminated hostilities because the Soviet Union was about to collapse.
A really fantastic allegory to read if you're interested in the Cold War is The Golden Kite the Silver Wind by Ray Bradbury.