Proper noun

Singular Cold War

Plural -

Cold War

1. A period of history from 1945-1991 in which the threat of nuclear annihilation was high between the United States and Soviet Union.

The Cold War (1945–1991) was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II (1939–1945), primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States. Although the primary participants' military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, a nuclear arms race, espionage, proxy wars, propaganda, and technological competition, e.g. the Space Race.

Despite being allies against the Axis powers, the USSR, the US, the United Kingdom and France disagreed during and after World War II, especially about the configuration of the post-war world. At war's end, they occupied most of Europe, with the US and USSR the most powerful military forces.

The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some as Soviet Socialist Republics and maintaining others as satellite states, some of which were later consolidated as the Warsaw Pact (1955–1991). The US and some western European countries established containment of communism as a defensive policy, establishing alliances (e.g. NATO, 1949) to that end.

Several such countries also coordinated the rebuilding of western Europe, especially western Germany, which the USSR opposed. Elsewhere, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR fostered communist revolutions, opposed by several western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, yet non-aligned country blocs also emerged.

The Cold War featured periods of relative calm and of international high tension – the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would likely guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures against the USSR, which had already suffered severe economic stagnation. Thereafter, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power, and Russia possessing most of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.