how long did the cold war last?

Answer 1

Sorry Joseph, but once again Wikipedia has proven why you shouldn't use it as a source. The Cold War's beginnings are debatable. Certainly it was sometime during WWII that Stalin realized things weren't going to work out between the "allies". An important event was what is often referred to as the Italian Precedent. In 1943 after the invasion of Italy Churchill and Roosevelt got together to decide the fate of the country. When Stalin's boys showed up to help make some decisions, the US and UK basically asked "how many divisions did you have in Italy?". The answer was "none" and the USSR was sent home. Well, there's reasons why that happened (mainly the allies were worried about the USSR propping up the communist party in Italy), but the Soviets wouldn't forget. Later, when the fate of Eastern Europe was being decided, Stalin asked the US and UK how many divisions they'd had there. Ahem... whoops, looks like the US and UK don't get a say in Eastern Europe.

Stalin wanted buffer states on the border of the USSR for good reasons: they'd been attacked from the west before, and the west was securing allies in Europe by giving away Marshall Plan money (a plan by the US to rebuild Europe, the Marshall Plan basically gave money to governments, but only if they met certain democratic requirements and spent all the money in the US!). So you can see that as early as 1943, relations between the US and the USSR were getting a bit chilly.

It wasn't until 1947 when Stalin closed off access to West Berlin (which was buried in the middle of the state of East Germany) that things got REALLY chilly (1947-48 is always a good spot to say the actual Cold War began). You can read up on the Berlin Blockade and Airlift online (use wikipedia, but don't believe everything it says!).

A couple years following that the Soviets had the bomb (1949), and things went downhill from there.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

PS. I guess I should say that 1991 is a good end date (since that's when the Soviet Union fell - well, the end of 1991), but you could argue that 1989 was the end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. Best of luck!

Answer 2

Sorry the answer given to you is incorrect, this is the right one:

The Cold War was the period of protracted conflict and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. The main U.S. allies were Western Europe and Japan. The main Soviet allies were Eastern Europe and (until the Sino-Soviet Split), China. Throughout the period, the rivalry was played out in multiple arenas: military coalitions, ideology; a massive conventional and nuclear arms race; and proxy wars.

In 1947 the term "Cold War" was introduced by Americans Bernard Baruch and Walter Lippmann to describe emerging tensions between the two former wartime allies. There never was a major battle between the U.S. and the Soviets. But there was a half-century of military buildups, and political battles for support around the world. There also were proxy wars, such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War.[1] The term later entered modern political vocabulary, having been popularized by the U.S. columnist Walter Lippmann.[2]

Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies against Nazi Germany, even before the end of the Second World War, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the U.S. sought "containment" of communism and forged alliances, particularly in Western Europe, the Mideast, and Southeast Asia.

There were repeated crises that threatened to escalate into world wars (but never did), notably the Korean War (1950-1953), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the Vietnam War (1964-1975), but there were also periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought détente. The Cold War ended in the late 1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev's launching of his internal reform programs perestroika and glasnost and gave up power over Eastern Europe

Answer 3

give it to James B......a triumph of knowledge over cut and paste from wikipedia............which is no more authoritative than yahoo answers when you get to it.....and the Cold War, for all it's vague starting date ( the Berlin Blockade?) has a definitive end.....when the Berlin Wall was torn down by the German people........marking an end to 50 odd years when we were only one mistake, one miscalculation, one misunderstanding from a nuclear exchange that would have killed most human life on the planet, and as a quote of the time had it, "would have left the survivors envying the dead"

Answer 4

It lasted from about 1945 to 1991, so that's about 46 years.