the cold war?

Question

was it a physical war? why did economic problems happen after the war?

i know it isnt a phycial war. my main question is: why did economic problems develop on both sides?

Answer 1

The Cold War was the protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. It lasted from about 1947 to the period leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. Between 1985 and 1991, Cold War rivalries first eased and then ended.

The global contest was popularly named The Cold War because open hostilities never occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead, the "war" took the form of an arms race involving nuclear and conventional weapons, networks of military alliances, economic warfare and trade embargos, propaganda, espionage, and proxy wars, especially those involving superpower support for opposing sides within civil wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most important direct confrontation, together with a series of confrontations over the Berlin Blockade and the Berlin Wall. The major civil wars polarized along Cold War lines were the Greek Civil War, Korean War, Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War, along with more peripheral conflicts in Angola, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

Answer 2

The cold war was started by concern that communist powers were successfully seizing countries by supporting communist rebellions with arms and finances. It's actually the same thing Putin did in his war with Georgia and is doing in the Ukraine. The US, in particular, formed a series of alliances to create a cordon around Russia (Soviet Union), China and the countries they had then incorporated into their respective empires. Conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam met with mixed success. However, they did serve to increase the cost of conquest. The end of the cold war resulted from a plan by President Regan to raise US armed forces capabilities and force the Soviets to follow until their economy collapsed, which it ultimately did. The Soviet empire crumbled into countries wishing to remain allied and those not wishing to do so, or only to do so on a nominally independent basis. In the East this gave rise to the Stans. In the West if freed Eastern Europe as far as Bealrus and the Ukraine.

Answer 3

The economic problem was over spending on dead end production. It bankrupted the Soviet Union and damn near bankrupted the U.S. Consider this:

If you spend a million on a missile, it sits in the silo and hopefully, is never used. It is dead end production.

If you spend a million on say... TV sets. People have to sell them, actors get paid, advertisers spend money, and the consumer needs to buy a new one. So you produce many millions of dollars of wealth by the million spent on one item.

That is one of the keys to economic expansion. After the end of the soviet Union, like I said, bankrupted, not socially, but economically, that is what we called the peace dividend and is one of the reasons that we had such great prosperity in the 90s.

Also, there was pleanty of shooting in the cold war. It is just that the US and USSR could not afford to shoot at each other. So the Arabs shot at Israelies. We shot at Viet Cong, and The Soviets shot at Afghans. It is called proxy war. Lots and lots of examples. Nice clean little limited wars. Clean, unless you were hangin in El Savador at the time.

Answer 4

The economic problems was more cute on the side of the eastern European ex-communist bloc.

This was namely due to forced collectivism & economies centrally controlled by the communist parties. This led to a lacking in individual impetus & initiatives & diseconomies of scale. The problems look bigger after the collapse of communism than it really is as the fall of communism also meant the fall of state controlled media, which led to the real conditions of communist countries being exposed.

Even during the cold war, the soviet government was cash strapped which was very obvious in his foreign exchange reserves.

Answer 5

It wasnt physical, just the two powers of the time, the Soviet Union and USA competed to have the largest army.

Answer 6

Of course not, it wasn't physical. Haven't you heard that the USSR took control of all the territory it conquered along the way to defeating Hitler in WWII. Then it created satellite nations to "protect" itself from the West. Then Stalin continued to massacre millions of his own people........this is basic history 101....