What was the Cold War?

Question

Hello. I need to know what the cold war was, how it effected the world, and all that wonderful historical stuff.
I do know it was mostly between the US and the USSR, as the world's two largest superpowers at the time, and I know that the Iron Curtain was put up as a result, or maybe it wasn't? =0.
xD. As you can see, help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies from the mid 1940s until the early 1990s. The main U.S. allies were Western Europe, Japan and Canada. The main Soviet allies were Eastern Europe and (until the Sino-Soviet split) China. Throughout the period, the rivalry between the two superpowers was played out in multiple arenas: military coalitions; ideology, psychology, and espionage; military, industrial, and technological developments; costly defense spending; a massive conventional and nuclear arms race; and many proxy wars.
Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of the Second World War. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the U.S. sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, 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). There were also periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought détente. Direct military attacks on adversaries were deterred by the potential for massive destruction using deliverable nuclear weapons.

The Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s following the launching of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programs, perestroika and glasnost. The Soviet Union consequently ceded power over Eastern Europe and was dissolved in 1991

Answer 2

The chilly conflict is misnamed. there are various of diverse concepts of what a chilly conflict is which consists of a conflict of words, many small skirmishes international huge, a conflict that no one stated, no direct battling between 2 tremendous powers. in truth, more desirable people died interior the chilly conflict than in WW1 and WW2. also, the chilly conflict has no fastened beginning, center or end. It only looks to rumble on. For international places the position armies and tremendous scale promoting of armaments are needed for the commercial equipment, the chilly conflict is gigantic agency (stating no names yet rearrange SUA!)

Answer 3

The cold war as it was called was a state of perpetual readiness to unleash the most destructive forces know to man. It was a strategy aptly named M.A.D. Mutually assured destruction. It was fought with espionage and proxy battles. It created one of the most horrific arms races known to man.

Answer 4

In Asia, the Communist cause gained great impetus when the Communists under Mao Zedong gained control of mainland China in 1949. The United States continued to support Nationalist China, with its headquarters on Taiwan. President Truman, fearing the appeal of Communism to the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, created the Point Four program, which was intended to help underdeveloped areas. Strife continued, however, and in 1950 Communist forces from North Korea attacked South Korea, precipitating the Korean War. Chinese Communist troops entered the conflict in large numbers, but were checked by UN forces, especially those of the United States. The focus of the cold war in Asia soon shifted to the southeast. China supported insurgent guerrillas in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; the United States, on the other side, played a leading role in the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and provided large-scale military aid, but guerrilla warfare continued.

The newly emerging nations of Asia and Africa soon became the scene of cold-war skirmishes, and the United States and the Soviet Union (and later China) competed for their allegiance, often through economic aid; however, many of these nations succeeded in remaining neutral. As the cold-war struggle continued in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa (in nations such as Congo (Kinshasa), Angola, and others), and in Latin America (where the United States supported the Alliance for Progress to counter leftist appeal), both the Soviet Union and the United States supported and maintained sometimes brutal regimes (through military, financial, and other forms of aid) in return for their allegiance.

In Europe, the East German government erected the Berlin Wall in late 1961 to check the embarrassing flow of East Germans to the West. In 1962 a tense confrontation occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union after U.S. intelligence discovered the presence of Soviet missile installations in Cuba. Direct conflict was avoided, however, when Premier Khrushchev ordered ships carrying rockets to Cuba to turn around rather than meet U.S. vessels sent to intercept them (see Cuban missile crisis). It was obvious from this and other confrontations that neither major power wanted to risk nuclear war.

Hopes for rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the West had been raised by a relaxation in Soviet policy after the death (1953) of Joseph Stalin. Conferences held in that period seemed more amiable, and hopes were high for a permanent ban on nuclear weapons. However, the success of the Soviet artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957, attesting to Soviet technological know-how, introduced new international competition in space exploration and missile capability. Moreover, both Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles grimly threatened "massive retaliation" for any aggression, and the Soviet Union's resumption (1961) of nuclear tests temporarily dashed disarmament hopes. While Khrushchev spoke of peaceful victory, extremists in both camps agitated for a more warlike course, even at the risk of nuclear catastrophe. China began to accuse the USSR of conciliatory policies toward the West, and by the early 1960s ideological differences between the two countries had become increasingly evident.

Detente and the End of the Cold War

During the late 1950s and early 60s both European alliance systems began to weaken somewhat; in the Western bloc, France began to explore closer relations with Eastern Europe and the possibility of withdrawing its forces from NATO. In the Soviet bloc, Romania took the lead in departing from Soviet policy. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia led to additional conflict with some of its European allies and diverted its attention from the cold war in Europe. All these factors combined to loosen the rigid pattern of international relationships and resulted in a period of detente.

In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan revived cold-war policies and rhetoric, referring to the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and escalating the nuclear arms race; some have argued this stance was responsible for the eventual collapse of Soviet Communism while others attribute it to the inherent weakness of the Soviet state. From 1989 to 1991 the cold war came to an end with the opening of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communist party dictatorship in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.