How did the Cold War end?
Outline of the Cold War
End of the Cold War – While many observers state the 1989 Malta Summit was the end of the Cold War, it was December 1991 before the Presidents of the United States and the Soviet Union formally recognised the conflict's end, with the Soviet Union also being dissolved at that time. Some key events leading up to the end include:
Cold War (1953–1962)
The Cold War (1953–1962) discusses the period within the Cold War from the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Following the death of Stalin, new leaders attempted to "de-Stalinize" the Soviet Union causing unrest in the Eastern Bloc and members of the Warsaw Pact. In spite of this there was a calming of international tensions, the evidence of which can be seen in the signing of the Austrian State Treaty reuniting Austria, and the Geneva Accords ending fighting in Indochina. However, this period of good happenings was only partial with an expensive arms race continuing during the period and a less alarming, but very expensive space race occurring between the two superpowers as well. The addition of African countries to the stage of cold war, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo joining the Soviets, caused even more unrest in the west.
Joe 90
In the fictional universe of "Joe 90", the Cold War—significant at the time of the series' TV debut, owing to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968—has ended, and a world government has been established. WIN is the successor organisation to MI6, the CIA and the KGB, all of which have been merged in the formation of the global network. Although the pilot sees Joe hijacking a Russian jet fighter to expose the secrets of its construction to the West, the storyline is ultimately revealed to be a speculative fiction posited by Weston as an example of the espionage that Joe would have to perform if he were to join WIN. The plot twist, in particular the revelation that Russia and the West are allies in the future, is praised by academic Nicholas J. Cull for its "progressiveness of spirit", and for exemplifying Anderson's "[taking] an end to the Cold War as a given in his work". Anderson was motivated by what he perceived as a "duty to the rising generation to avoid perpetuating Cold War stereotypes", once stating that he "tried very hard not to put [his] ten cents into creating World War Three".
History of the United States (1980–1991)
Nationalist agitation in the Baltic States for independence led to first Lithuania and then the other two states, Estonia and Latvia, declaring independence from the Soviet Union. On December 26, 1991, the USSR was officially disbanded, breaking up into fifteen constituent parts. The Cold War was over, and the vacuum left by the collapse of governments such as in Yugoslavia and Somalia revealed or reopened other animosities concealed by decades of authoritarian rule. While there was a certain reluctance among the U.S. public, and even within the government, to get involved in localized conflicts in which there was little or no direct U.S. interest at stake, these crises served as a basis for the renewal of Western alliances while communism was becoming less relevant. To this effect, President Bill Clinton would declare in his inaugural address: "Today, as an old order passes, the new world is more free but less stable. Communism's collapse has called forth old animosities and new dangers. Clearly America must continue to lead the world we did so much to make."
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
Although the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US and Russia retained thousands of nuclear weapons ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Proliferation and the threat of nuclear terrorism have added to the nuclear danger in the post-Cold-War world.
Cold War
In February 1972, Nixon achieved a stunning rapprochement with China, traveling to Beijing and meeting with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. At this time, the USSR achieved rough nuclear parity with the United States; meanwhile, the Vietnam War both weakened America's influence in the Third World and cooled relations with Western Europe. Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease.
Cold War
On 18 November 1956, while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Khrushchev used his famous "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you" expression, shocking everyone present. He later claimed that he had not been talking about nuclear war, but rather about the historically determined victory of communism over capitalism. In 1961, Khrushchev declared that even if the USSR was behind the West, within a decade its housing shortage would disappear, consumer goods would be abundant, and within two decades, the "construction of a communist society" in the USSR would be completed "in the main".
International communication
Since the cold war officially ended in 1990, the intense relations of super powers halted with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of the Third World countries, the unequally developed communication order can no longer exist. The Third World called for ceasing their marginalized communication status. Especially when international communications stepped into the information age, 'the convergence of telecommunication and computing and the ability to move all type of data – pictures, words, sounds – via the Internet have revolutionized international information exchange.'
Peacekeeping
The end of the Cold War presented an opportunity to reshape the international system. This opportunity was afforded to the Cold War's victor's-- that is to say—the United States and other western capitalist states governed by liberal-democratic values that put a premium on basic human rights and democratization. In the preceding decades the state was the only entity to receive special status. While there were exceptions, such as groups struggling against colonial powers, the state possessed the ultimate degree of legitimacy. As a result, the international community rarely meddled with the internal machinations of a given country. Sovereignty was not to be violated and this was a system which benefited both superpowers, their allies, as well as third world governments.
Cold War (TV series)
Cold War is a twenty-four episode television documentary series about the Cold War that aired in 1998. It features interviews and footage of the events that shaped the tense relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Outline of the Cold War
Cold War – period of political and military tension that occurred after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc (the United States, its NATO allies and others) and powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact). Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 1947–1991 is common. It was termed as "cold" because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides. Based on the principle of mutually assured destruction, both sides developed nuclear weapons to deter the other side from attacking. So they competed against each other via espionage, propaganda, and by supporting major regional wars, known as proxy wars, in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Red Army
The Winter War (, , ) was a war between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939—three months after the start of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland, and ended on 13 March 1940 with the Moscow Peace Treaty. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union on 14 December 1939.
History of Western civilization
Following the end of the Cold War, Communism largely died out as a major political movement. After the fall of USSR, the United States became the world's only superpower.
Cold War (1953–1962)
Prior to his election in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was already displeased with the manner that Harry S. Truman had handled the war in Korea. After the United States secured a resolution from the United Nations to engage in military defense on behalf of South Korea, whom had been invaded by North Korea in an attempt to unify all of Korea under the communist North Korean regime, President Truman engaged U.S. land, air, and sea forces; United States involvement in the war quickly reversed the direction of military advancement into South Korea to military advancement into North Korea; to the point that North Korean forces were being forced against the border with China, which led to the involvement of hundreds of thousands of communist Chinese troops heavily assaulting U.S. and South Korean forces. Acting on a campaign pledge made during his United States presidential election campaign, Eisenhower visited Korea on December 2, 1952 to assess to the situation. Eisenhower's investigation consisted of meeting with South Korean troops, commanders, and government officials, after his meetings Eisenhower concluded, "we could not stand forever on a static front and continue to accept casualties without any visible results. Small attacks on small hills would not end this war". Eisenhower urged the South Korean President Syngman Rhee to compromise in order to speed up peace talks. This coupled with the United States' threat of using nuclear weapons if the war did not end soon, lead to the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953. The armistice concluded the United States initial Cold War concept of "limited war". Prisoners of war were allowed to choose where they would stay, either the area that would become North Korea or the area to become South Korea, and a border was placed between the two territories in addition to an allotted demilitarized zone. The "police action" implemented by the Korean U.N. agreement prevented communism spreading from North Korea to South Korea. United States involvement in the Korean War demonstrated its readiness to the world to rally to the aid of nations under invasion. particularly communistic invasion, and resulted in President Eisenhower's empowered image as an effective leader against tyranny; this ultimately led to a strengthened position of the United States in Europe and guided the development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The primary effect of these developments for the United States were the military buildup called for in response to Cold War concerns as seen in NSC 68.
Brave New World (role-playing game)
The Cold War began in the aftermath, much like in the real world. The United States did not develop nuclear weapons for several more years (they didn't need to finish them, as Superior's early victory in the war meant the Manhattan Project was canceled late in development). However, the real arms race was in the new "Alpha" class super-humans. A handful of other "Alphas" emerged at the end of the war, and in the aftermath, and the Soviet Union was able to "create" several new Alphas, none as powerful as Superior, but still enough to challenge him. In 1949 they also detonated an atomic bomb, and the Cold War began in earnest. Even Superior was uncertain he could survive a nuclear blast. The United States quickly finished its own nuclear program, and like the real world, the fear and paranoia of the Cold War gripped the nation. Senator Joseph McCarthy held his HUAC hearings, but Superior's moral superiority eventually shamed him into closing them.
Cold War
However, the aftermath of the Cold War is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure.
Cold War
The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc, while the United States began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power, extending military and financial aid to the countries of Western Europe (for example, supporting the anti-communist side in the Greek Civil War) and creating the NATO alliance. The Berlin Blockade (1948–49) was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the Communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–53), the conflict expanded. The USSR and the US competed for influence in Latin America and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. The Soviets suppressed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which was perhaps the closest the two sides came to nuclear war. Meanwhile, an international peace movement took root and grew among citizens around the world, first in Japan from 1954, when people became concerned about nuclear weapons testing, but soon also in Europe and the US. The peace movement, and in particular the anti-nuclear movement, gained pace and popularity from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and continued to grow through the '70s and '80s with large protest marches, demonstrations, and various non-parliamentary activism opposing war and calling for global nuclear disarmament. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began that saw the Sino-Soviet split complicate relations within the Communist sphere, while US allies, particularly France, demonstrated greater independence of action. The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, while the US experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War (1955–75), which ended with the defeat of the US-backed Republic of Vietnam, prompting further adjustments.
Eduard Shevardnadze
Shevardnadze subsequently played a key role in the détente that marked the end of the Cold War. He negotiated nuclear arms treaties with the United States. He helped end the war in Afghanistan, allowed the reunification of Germany, and withdrew Soviet forces from Eastern Europe and from the Chinese border. He earned the nickname "The Silver Fox".
Cold War
As a result of the Sino-Soviet split, tensions along the Chinese–Soviet border reached their peak in 1969, and United States President Richard Nixon decided to use the conflict to shift the balance of power towards the West in the Cold War. The Chinese had sought improved relations with the Americans in order to gain advantage over the Soviets as well.
Cold War
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia drastically cut military spending, and restructuring the economy left millions unemployed. The capitalist reforms culminated in a recession in the early 1990s more severe than the Great Depression as experienced by the United States and Germany. In the 25 years following the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the rich and capitalist world while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take several decades to catch up to where they were before the collapse of communism.
Fast for Life
Unfortunately, the IFFL open-ended fast failed to elicit a supportive public response from either U.S. President Reagan or Russian Secretary Yuri Andropov. However, within less than a decade the world would see the Malta Summit and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and in 1991, the official end of the Cold War that had lasted for almost half a century, as well as the US and Soviet Union signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I, which set a framework for the reduction of U.S./Russian nuclear stockpiles.
Cold War liberal
Some notable pioneers of Cold War liberalism included Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. World War II ended under the Presidency of 33rd President Harry S. Truman. Although Truman is criticized in some quarters now for his decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, popular opinion at the time was a positive one. Johnson succeeded to the presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, completed Kennedy's term and was elected President in his own right, winning by a large margin over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election. Johnson was greatly supported by the Democratic Party and as President, he was responsible for designing the "Great Society" legislation that included laws that upheld civil rights, public broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, aid to education, and his "War on Poverty". Johnson was renowned for his domineering personality and the "Johnson treatment," his coercion of powerful politicians in order to advance legislation. All of his accomplishments were influenced by the idea of Cold War liberalism which was according to most, implemented by JFK.
History of socialism
The term "Cold War" was introduced in 1947 by Americans Bernard Baruch and Walter Lippmann to describe emerging tensions between the two former wartime allies. There never was a direct military engagement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but there was a half-century of military buildup, and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and satellite nations. Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. 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.
The End of History and the Last Man
After the September 11, 2001, attacks, "The End of History" was cited by some commentators as a symbol of the supposed naiveté and undue optimism of the Western world during the 1990s, in thinking that the end of the Cold War also represented the end of major global conflict. In the weeks after the attacks, Fareed Zakaria called the events "the end of the end of history", while George Will wrote that history had "returned from vacation".
Superpower
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 which ended the Cold War, the post–Cold War world has in the past been considered by some to be a unipolar world, with the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower. In 1999, Samuel P. Huntington wrote, "The United States, of course, is the sole state with preeminence in every domain of power – economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural – with the reach and capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world." However, he rejected the claim that the world was unipolar: "There is now only one superpower. But that does not mean that the world is unipolar," describing it instead as "a strange hybrid, a uni-multipolar system with one superpower and several major powers." He further wrote that "Washington is blind to the fact that it no longer enjoys the dominance it had at the end of the Cold War. It must relearn the game of international politics as a major power, not a superpower, and make compromises."
Cold War II
Past sources,
such as academics Fred Halliday,
Alan M. Wald, and David S. Painter,
used the interchangeable terms to refer to the 1979–1985 and/or 1985–1991 phases of the Cold War.
Some other sources used interchangeable terms to refer to the Cold War of the mid-1970s. Columnist William Safire argued in a 1975 "New York Times" editorial that the Nixon administration's policy of détente with the Soviet Union had failed and that "Cold War II" was now underway. Academic Gordon H. Chang in 2007 used the term "Cold War II" to refer to the Cold War period after the 1972 meeting in China between US President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong.
Cold War (video game)
"Cold War" takes place in 1986 and follows the story of a freelance journalist Matthew Carter who finds himself in the midst of an international conspiracy that aims to control the U.S.S.R.. Twelve hours after arriving in Moscow in hopes of gathering material for a Pulitzer Prize winning story, he finds himself thrown into KGB's political prison and framed for an attempted murder of the president. The reason for this was unknown, however, a unidentified female agent placed a prototype X-Ray camera in replacement with his original one. Carter noticed this unknown device and decided to capture a fire extinguisher for testing, but the chemicals in the flash powder caused the object to explode, making him visible to the guards.
Afterfall: Insanity
In the "Afterfall" universe, World War II ended differently. In the final moments of the war, German Führer Adolf Hitler managed to create his Wunderwaffe—a team of Nazi physicists who finished the German atomic bomb project. In January 1945, a V-2 rocket armed with a nuclear warhead fell on the Soviet army that was preparing to cross the Polish-German border. Military activities were stopped, and truce talks began. During these talks, first the United States and then the Soviet Union developed their own nuclear weapons. The border between Germany and Poland was not ultimately set and the Armia Krajowa announced the creation of New Poland. In the aftermath of the treaties between Germany, United States, and the Soviet Union, New Poland became a buffer zone with United States military bases spread around its territory. Thus begun the global Cold War.
Modern history
The Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The United States under President Ronald Reagan increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressure on the Soviet Union, which was already suffering from severe economic stagnation. In the second half of the 1980s, newly appointed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the "perestroika" and "glasnost" reforms. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power, though Russia retained much of the massive Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Reagan Doctrine
Among others, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, has credited the Reagan Doctrine with aiding the end of the Cold War. In December 1997, Thatcher said that the Reagan Doctrine "proclaimed that the truce with communism was over. The West would henceforth regard no area of the world as destined to forego its liberty simply because the Soviets claimed it to be within their sphere of influence. We would fight a battle of ideas against communism, and we would give material support to those who fought to recover their nations from tyranny".
Ronald Reagan
Reagan's major achievement was that the USSR and Soviet Communism collapsed, causing the U.S. to become the world's only superpower. His admirers say he won the Cold War. After 40 years of high tension, the USSR pulled back in the last years of Reagan's second term. In 1989 the Kremlin lost control of all its East European satellites. In 1991, Communism was overthrown in the USSR, and on December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The resulting states were no threat to the U.S. Reagan's exact role is debated, with many believing that Reagan's defense policies, economic policies, military policies and hard line rhetoric against the Soviet Union and Communism, as well as summits with General Secretary Gorbachev played a significant part in ending the Cold War.
Effects of the Cold War
The legacy of Cold War conflict, however, is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and a large increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure.
1964 T-39 shootdown incident
Following the cessation of hostilities at the end of World War II, a situation which came to be known as the Cold War developed between the United States, Canada, and Western European nations on one side, and the Soviet bloc on the other. Tensions between the United States and Soviet Union were most felt in the regions bordering the Iron Curtain, notably West Germany and East Germany, and during this time relations between the two superpowers were characterized by hostile attitudes, spying, and numerous incidents resulting in loss of life and equipment. One of the most famous of these is the shooting down of a Lockheed U-2 spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, over the Soviet Union in May 1960.
Soviet Union–United States relations
In December 1989, both the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union [[Malta Summit|declared]] the Cold War over, and in 1991, the two were partners in the [[Gulf War]] against [[Iraq]], a longtime Soviet ally. On 31 July 1991, the [[START I]] treaty cutting the number of deployed nuclear warheads of both countries was signed by Soviet General Secretary [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] and U.S. President [[George H. W. Bush|George Bush]]. However, many consider the Cold War to have truly ended in late 1991 with the [[dissolution of the Soviet Union]].
[[Category:Soviet Union–United States relations| ]]
[[Category:Bilateral relations of the United States]]
[[Category:Bilateral relations of the Soviet Union|United States]]
[[Category:History of the foreign relations of the United States]]
[[Category:1933 in international relations]]
Soviet Union
With the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the union republics, Gorbachev tried to avert a dissolution of the Soviet Union. A March 1991 referendum, boycotted by some republics, resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation. Gorbachev's power was greatly diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin played a high-profile role in facing down an abortive August 1991 coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned, and on 26 December 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the Soviet Union, thereby ending the Cold War, and the remaining twelve constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as the successor state of the Soviet Union. In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological and economic significance".
History of liberalism
The Cold War featured extensive ideological competition and several proxy wars, but the widely feared Third World War between the Soviet Union and the United States never occurred. While communist states and liberal democracies competed against one another, an economic crisis in the 1970s inspired a move away from Keynesian economics, especially under Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. This classical liberal renewal, called pejoratively "neoliberalism" by its opponents, lasted through the 1980s and the 1990s. Meanwhile, nearing the end of the 20th century, communist states in Eastern Europe collapsed precipitously, leaving liberal democracies as the only major forms of government in the West.
The End of History and the Last Man
According to several studies, the end of the Cold War and the subsequent increase in the number of liberal democratic states were accompanied by a sudden and dramatic decline in total warfare, interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and the number of refugees and displaced persons.
Origins of the Cold War
Following decades of struggle, in 1949 the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist armies and took control of the mainland. The Nationalist leaders and much of China's upper class fled to Taiwan where they had American protection. Stalin had long supported Chiang Kai-shek, while also giving some help to the Communists. The United States had tried in 1945–1948 to bring the Nationalists and Communists together in a coalition, but had no success. The conflict was not therefore part of the Cold War until 1949–1959. By the late 1950s, however, China and the USSR were at sword's point, and became bitter enemies over ideological control of the Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy. The two set up rival communist organizations in countries across the world. The Cold War then became a three-way conflict.
Cold War
As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet–US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.
Cold War (1953–1962)
When Harry S. Truman was succeeded in office by Dwight D. Eisenhower as the 34th US President in 1953, the Democrats lost their two-decades-long control of the U.S. presidency. Under Eisenhower, however, the United States' Cold War policy remained essentially unchanged. Whilst a thorough rethinking of foreign policy was launched (known as "Project Solarium"), the majority of emerging ideas (such as a "rollback of Communism" and the liberation of Eastern Europe) were quickly regarded as unworkable. An underlying focus on the containment of Soviet communism remained to inform the broad approach of U.S. foreign policy.
Cold War (1953–1962)
Shortly after the battle, the war ended with the 1954 Geneva accords, under which France agreed to withdraw from its former Indochinese colonies. The accords partitioned the country in two; fighting later resumed, in 1959, among rival Vietnamese forces as the Vietnam War (Second Indochina War).
NATO Double-Track Decision
On December 8, 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It provided for the destruction of all middle range weapons and ended this episode of the Cold War.
Timeline of events in the Cold War
This is a timeline of the main events of the Cold War, a state of political and military tension after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc (the United States, its NATO allies and others) and powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union, its allies in the Warsaw Pact and later the People's Republic of China).
Big Four Conference
Cold War tension relaxed after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the end of the Korean War in 1953.
On 16 August 1953 the Soviet Union proposed a Big Four conference to discuss a German peace treaty that would reunite the nation.
The French agreed, and in December 1953 Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain, threw his weight behind a conference of the foreign ministers of the Big Four that would discuss how to progress with peace talks, or at least find a way to stabilize the present situation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the US was in favor of such a conference, at least as a gesture of good will, while his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was opposed.
Chilean transition to democracy
Among various causes of Pinochet's decision to resume this procedure, the situation in the Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev had initiated the glasnost and the perestroika democratic reforms, which would finally lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and to the official end of the Cold War, is clearly an important factor. The Cold War had important consequences in South America, considered by the United States to be a full part of the Western Bloc, in contrast with the Eastern Bloc, a division born with the end of World War II and the Yalta Conference. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the local implementation in several countries of Che Guevara's foco theory, the US waged a war in South America against the "Communists subversives," leading to support in Chile of the right-wing, which would culminate with the coup of 1973 in Chile. In a few years, all of South America was covered by similar military dictatorships, called "juntas". In Paraguay, Alfredo Stroessner was in power since 1954; in Brazil, left-wing President João Goulart was overthrown by a military coup in 1964; in Bolivia, General Hugo Banzer overthrew leftist General Juan José Torres in 1971; in Uruguay, considered the "Switzerland" of South America, Juan María Bordaberry seized power in the June 27, 1973 coup. A "Dirty War" was waged all over the continent, culminating with Operation Condor, an agreement between security services of the Southern Cone and other South American countries to repress and assassinate political opponents. Militaries also took power in Argentina in 1976, and then supported the 1980 "Cocaine Coup" of Luis García Meza Tejada in Bolivia, before training the Contras in Nicaragua where the Sandinista National Liberation Front, headed by Daniel Ortega, had taken power in 1979, as well as militaries in Guatemala and in El Salvador. In the 1980s, however, the situation progressively evolved in the world as in South America, despite a renewal of the Cold War from 1979 to 1985, the year during which Gorbatchev replaced Konstantin Chernenko as leader of the USSR.
Harry E. Soyster
The end of the Cold War resulted in a reevaluation of the intelligence mission throughout the Intelligence Community as a new era began with the fall of the Communist Party in many East European countries, the reunification of Germany, and ongoing economic reforms in the region. Emphasis was placed on improved management of DoD-wide intelligence production, but reduced resources threatened to have a negative impact on Agency objectives and manpower levels. Organizationally, the general emphasized the functional manager system as a programming mechanism for addressing the issues of the Unified & Specified Commands.
Deathlands
On the morning of January 20, 2001 the climax of the Cold War set the post-apocalyptic stage for the series. The end game began with a pre-emptive strike on Washington. Underground nuclear bombs were detonated from within the basement of the Soviet embassy, by an elite group of Spetsnaz operatives, destroying the central command structure and political system of the United States. For an indefinite period of time a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union devastated both countries and subsequently the entire planet (but little details are known outside both countries). All manner of genetic contagions were released infecting the survivors of the firestorm with horrible illnesses. The remaining survivors lived harshly during a time of prolonged nuclear winter known as 'Skydark'. The geography, climate, and ecosystems of the world had changed dramatically. What was left of the United States came to be known as the Deathlands.
Cold War (1985–1991)
In an attempt to halt the rapid changes to the system, a group of Soviet hard-liners represented by Vice-President Gennady Yanayev launched a coup overthrowing Gorbachev in August 1991. Russian President Boris Yeltsin rallied the people and much of the army against the coup and the effort collapsed. Although restored to power, Gorbachev's authority had been irreparably undermined. In September, the Baltic states were granted independence. On December 1, Ukraine withdrew from the USSR. On December 26, 1991 the USSR officially dissolved, breaking up into fifteen separate nations.
Technology during World War II
When World War II ended in 1945, the small arms that were used in the conflict still saw action in the hands of the armed forces of various nations and guerrilla movements during and after the Cold War era. Nations like the Soviet Union and the United States provided many surplus, World War II-era small arms to a number of nations and political movements during the Cold War era as a pretext to providing more modern infantry weapons.
1980s
The final decade of the Cold War opened with the US-Soviet confrontation continuing largely without any interruption. Superpower tensions escalated rapidly as President Reagan scrapped the policy of détente and adopted a new, much more aggressive stance on the Soviet Union. The world came perilously close to nuclear war for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis 20 years earlier, but the second half of the decade saw a dramatic easing of superpower tensions and ultimately the total collapse of Soviet communism.
Nuclear warfare
Although the dissolution of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War and greatly reduced tensions between the United States and the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union's formal successor state, both countries remained in a "nuclear stand-off" due to the continuing presence of a very large number of deliverable nuclear warheads on both sides. Additionally, the end of the Cold War led the United States to become increasingly concerned with the development of nuclear technology by other nations outside of the former Soviet Union. In 1995, a branch of the U.S. Strategic Command produced an outline of forward-thinking strategies in the document "Essentials of Post–Cold War Deterrence".
United States
During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery. By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, and its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and confirmed the country's status as a global military power. The United States emerged from as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Moon landing. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.
Anti-communism
After World War II, fascism ceased to be a major political movement due to the defeat of the Axis powers. The victorious Allies were an international coalition led primarily by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, but after the war this alliance quickly broke down into two opposing camps: a Communist one led by the Soviet Union and a capitalist one led by the United States. The rivalry between the two sides came to be known as the Cold War and during this period the United States government played a leading role in supporting global anti-communism as part of its containment policy. There were numerous military conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists in various parts of the world, including the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet–Afghan War. NATO was founded as an anti-communist military alliance in 1949 and continued throughout the Cold War.
With the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's Communist governments were overthrown and the Cold War ended. Nevertheless, anti-communism remains an important intellectual element of many contemporary political movements and organized anti-communism is a factor in the domestic opposition found to varying degrees within the People's Republic of China and other countries governed by Communist parties.
Henry A. Wallace
World War II came to an end in September 1945 with the Surrender of Japan, and relations with the Soviet Union became a central matter of foreign policy. Various issues, including the fate of post-war governments in Europe and Asia and the administration of the United Nations, had already begun to strain the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States. Critics of the Soviet Union objected to the oppressive satellite states that the Soviet Union established in Eastern Europe and Soviet involvement in the Greek Civil War and the Chinese Civil War. In February 1946, George F. Kennan laid out the doctrine of containment, which called for the United States to resist the spread of Communism. Wallace feared that confrontational policies towards the Soviet Union would eventually lead to war, and he urged Truman to "allay any reasonable Russian grounds for fear, suspicion, and distrust." Historian Tony Judt, notes that Wallace's "distaste for American involvement with Britain and Europe was widely shared across the political spectrum."
Détente
In the context of the Cold War, the lessening of tensions between the East and West, along with domestic reform in the Soviet Union, worked together to achieve the end of communism in Eastern Europe and eventually the Soviet Union altogether.
Korean conflict
As the Cold War ended, North Korea lost the support of the Soviet Union and plunged into an economic crisis. With the death of Leader Kim Il-sung in 1994, there were expectations that the North Korean government could collapse and the peninsula would be reunified.
Cold War (1985–1991)
After the end of the Revolutions of 1989, Gorbachev and President Bush Sr. met on the neutral island of Malta to discuss the events of the year, the withdrawal of the Soviet military from Eastern Europe, and the future course of their relationship. After their discussions, the two leaders publicly announced they would work together for German reunification, the normalization of relations, the resolution of Third World conflicts, and the promotion of peace and democracy (referred to by President Bush as a "New World Order".)
Cold War
The Cold War endures as a popular topic reflected extensively in entertainment media, and continuing to the present with numerous post-1991 Cold War-themed feature films, novels, television, and other media. In 2013, a KGB-sleeper-agents-living-next-door action drama series, "The Americans", set in the early 1980s, was ranked #6 on the Metacritic annual Best New TV Shows list; its six-season run concluded in May 2018. At the same time, movies like "Crimson Tide" (1995) are shown in their entirety to educate college students about the Cold War.
Post-politics
The disintegration of the Eastern communist bloc following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 announced the end of the Cold War era, and with it the great ideological stand-off between East and West, between the communist and capitalist worlds. In eyes of Western society Capitalism emerged the victor with liberal democracy as its corresponding political doctrine. With the fall of state-communism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as the final blow to an already crisis-ridden system, the USSR as a key political player on side of communism abandoned its social democratic, Keynesian form; and neoliberalism entered a new global phase. In the USSR the main driver for this change was idea of "convergention" between socialism and communism formulated by Andrej Sakharov in his Nobel price speech. With Francis Fukuyama's End of History as its founding statement, this was the birth of the post-political, post-ideological "Zeitgeist".
Cold War (1985–1991)
Several conflicts in third world nations (i.e. Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua) related to the Cold War would come to an end during this era of cooperation, with both the Soviet Union and the United States working together to pressure their respective proxies to make peace with one another. Overall, this detente which accompanied the final twilight of the Cold War would help bring about a relatively more peaceful world.
The End of History and the Last Man
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Arab Cold War
By the 1970s, with Nasser dead, the Soviet Union unable to keep up with the U.S. in supporting its Arab allies, the continued failure to defeat Israel, and the rise of Iran as a regional power hostile to many Arab interests, the Arab Cold War is considered to have ended.
Origins of the Cold War
At the end of the war in Europe, in May 1945, the Soviets insisted on occupying the Danish island of Bornholm, due to its strategic position at the entrance to the Baltic. When the local German commander insisted on surrendering to the Western Allies, as did German forces in the rest of Denmark, the Soviets bombed the island, causing heavy casualties and damage among a civilian population which was only lightly touched throughout the war, and then invaded the island and occupied it until mid-1946 - all of which can be considered as initial moves in the Cold War.
History of the world
When World War II ended in 1945, the United Nations was founded in the hope of preventing future wars, as the League of Nations had been formed following World War I. The war had left two countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, with principal power to influence international affairs. Each was suspicious of the other and feared a global spread of the other's, respectively capitalist and communist, political-economic model. This led to the Cold War, a forty-five-year stand-off and arms race between the United States and its allies, on one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. With the development of nuclear weapons during World War II, and with their subsequent proliferation, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers, as demonstrated by many incidents, most prominently the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Such war being viewed as impractical, the superpowers instead waged proxy wars in non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.
Spy fiction
The end of the Cold War in 1991 mooted the USSR, Russia and other Iron Curtain countries as credible enemies of democracy, and the US Congress even considered disestablishing the CIA. Espionage novelists found themselves at a temporary loss for obvious nemeses. "The New York Times" ceased publishing a spy novel review column. Nevertheless, counting on the aficionado, publishers continued to issue spy novels by writers popular during the Cold War era, among them "Harlot's Ghost" (1991) by Norman Mailer.
Foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration
In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at a summit meeting in Malta. The Soviet alliance system was by then on the brink of collapse, and the Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact were losing power. On March 11, 1990 Lithuania, led by newly elected Vytautas Landsbergis, declared independence from the Soviet Union. The gate to the Berlin Wall was opened and Gorbachev approved. Gorbachev proposed to President George H.W. Bush massive troop reductions in Eastern Europe. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power. Soviet hardliners rebelled and staged a coup against Gorbachev, but it failed. Boris Yeltsin rallied Russians in the street while Gorbachev was held hostage. By December 1991, the union-state had dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states. Boris Yeltsin became leader of the new Russia.
In her eulogy to Ronald Reagan at his funeral, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom Reagan worked very closely with during his tenure in office, said, "Others hoped, at best, for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union; he won the Cold War — not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends... Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow's 'evil empire.' But he realized that a man of goodwill might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors. So the President resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of these pressures and its own failures. And when a man of goodwill did emerge from the ruins, President Reagan stepped forward to shake his hand and to offer sincere cooperation."
For his role, Gorbachev received the first Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize.
Soviet Middle Eastern foreign policy during the Cold War
Shuttle diplomacy was instrumental in brokering a Middle Eastern peace. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spent considerable time at Middle Eastern peace talks as a neutral party. He explained the reasons behind the need to pull out of Vietnam, which complicated the Middle Eastern talks and the nascent nuclear-nonproliferation-treaty talks. President Richard Nixon used the Sino-Soviet split to begin ending the Cold War by breaking down political and economic barriers between the U.S. and China, further isolated the Soviets. Kissinger spoke about his roles in brokering peace between the Arabs and Israelis and ending the nuclear-arms race. Nixon also became a key player in Middle East peace talks, ignoring Dwight D. Eisenhower's non-interventionism and hoping that his reputation for ending the Vietnam War, brokering the first nuclear-arms treaty and opening China to American trade would overshadow the Watergate scandal.
Presidency of Jimmy Carter
Carter took office during the Cold War, a sustained period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, relations between the two superpowers had improved through a policy known as detente. In a reflection of the waning importance of the Cold War, some of Carter's contemporaries labeled him as the first post-Cold War president, but relations with the Soviet Union would continue to be an important factor in American foreign policy in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Many of the leading officials in the Carter administration, including Carter himself, were members of the Trilateral Commission, which de-emphasized the Cold War. The Trilateral Commission instead advocated a foreign policy focused on aid to Third World countries and improved relations with Western Europe and Japan. The central tension of the Carter administration's foreign policy was reflected in the division between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who sought improved relations with the Soviet Union and the Third World, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who favored confrontation with the Soviet Union on a range of issues.
Cold War (1947–1953)
Some conflicts between the West and the USSR appeared earlier. In 1945–46 the US and UK strongly protested Soviet political takeover efforts in Eastern Europe and Iran, while the hunt for Soviet spies made the tensions more visible. However historians emphasize the decisive break between the US–UK and the USSR came in 1947–48 over such issues as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Blockade, followed by the formation of NATO in 1949.The Cold War took place worldwide, but it had a partially different timing outside Europe.
Recurring segments on The Colbert Report
Cold War Update is a segment where Colbert dismisses "rumors" that the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The segment covers news from former Soviet Bloc countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, Russia, China, and Yugoslavia.
Cold War
Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence" and established the groundbreaking new policy of "détente" (or cooperation) between the two superpowers. Meanwhile, Brezhnev attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties, including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, "détente" would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually.
Europe
The two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, became locked in a fifty-year-long Cold War, centred on nuclear proliferation. At the same time decolonisation, which had already started after World War I, gradually resulted in the independence of most of the European colonies in Asia and Africa. In the 1980s the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Solidarity movement in Poland accelerated the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War. Germany was reunited, after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the maps of Central and Eastern Europe were redrawn once more.
The Ultimate Solution
At the end of Norden's book, as with Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" (1962), the "Cold War" between the Nazis and the Japanese seems ready to turn into World War III. In the power struggle over the legacy of the completely senile Hitler, a putsch overturns the (relatively) moderate faction of Albert Speer, known as "Axists" because they want to maintain the Axis agreements with Japan. Power is then seized by Reinhard Heydrich and the most fanatical "Contraxists", who are determined to destroy "the degenerate Yellow Race" even at the price of an all-out nuclear war in which Germany itself would be annihilated; this war is apparently incipient by the end of the text as the narrator mentions the NYPD coordinating an evacuation to the Catskills. Thus, having presented the reader with this world, and letting the few characters who tried to present even a token and ineffectual resistance all be killed off, Norden ends the book with the entire world about to end.
Soviet Union
Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the Soviet Union abandoned its nine-year war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the late 1980s, , which paved the way for Revolutions of 1989. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East Germany and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.
History of Europe
The ending of the Cold War came in a rush of events in 1979 to 1991, chiefly in Eastern Europe, that brought the end of the Soviet control over its East European satellites and its world network of communist parties (1989) and ending with the final splitting up of the Soviet Union in 1991 into 15 non-communist states. Italian historian Federico Romero reports that observers at the time emphasized that,:
Cold War (1962–1979)
While the early years of the war had significant U.S. casualties, the administration assured the public that the war was winnable and would in the near future result in a U.S. victory. The U.S. public's faith in "the light at the end of the tunnel" was shattered on January 30, 1968, when the NLF mounted the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. Although neither of these offensives accomplished any military objectives, the surprising capacity of an enemy to even launch such an offensive convinced many in the U.S. that victory was impossible.
Presidency of George H. W. Bush
The Soviet Union and the United States had generally been considered the two superpowers of the Cold War era; with the collapse of the Soviet Union, some began to label the United States as a "hyperpower". Political scientist Francis Fukuyama speculated that humanity had reached the "end of history" in that liberal, capitalist democracy had permanently triumphed over Communism and fascism. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments led to conflicts in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. The Yugoslav Wars broke out in 1991 as several constituent republics of Yugoslavia sought independence, and the Bush administration supported relief efforts and European-led attempts to broker peace.
Cold War
In addition to the loss of life by uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia. Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises have declined sharply in the post-Cold War years. Left over from the Cold War are numbers stations, which are shortwave radio stations thought to be used to broadcast covert messages, some of which can still be heard today.
Winter War
The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union (USSR) and Finland. It began with a Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II, and ended three and a half months later with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organisation.
Soviet Union–United States relations
The end of World War II saw the resurgence of previous divisions between the two nations. The expansion of Soviet influence into Eastern Europe following Germany's defeat worried the liberal democracies of the West, particularly the United States, which had established virtual economic and political primacy in Western Europe. The two nations promoted two opposing economic and political ideologies and the two nations competed for international influence along these lines. This protracted a geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle—lasting from the announcement of the Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991—is known as the Cold War, a period of nearly 45 years.
Origins of the Cold War
After the war ended, Malaya was plunged into a state of emergency as British and Commonwealth forces fought a protracted counter-insurgency war against their former communist-led MPAJA ally, who had fought the Japanese and now demanded independence from Britain. In British Hong Kong, which had surrendered to Japan in December 1941, civil unrest occurred after Britain rapidly re-established rule at the end of the war.
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum
Four Decades that Changed the World (January 22 – June 13, 2010)
World War II was the most devastating conflict in history with much of Europe and Asia left in ruins at war's end. Yet, there was no peace. The superpowers of the United States and Soviet Union and their ideologies of democracy versus tyranny competed for prominence on the world stage in a cold war. For over 40 years these nuclear superpowers maintained a standoff and avoided a hot war that could have potentially destroyed the planet. America and the Cold War explored this powerful subject through such iconic artifacts as: an original 34' Nike Ajax missile, arming plug used to activate the bomb used on Hiroshima, Thunderbolt Air Raid siren, SALT I Treaty, scale model of Apollo-Soyuz, candy parachute from the Berlin Airlift, Stasi surveillance equipment, and a desk plaque awarded to the crew members of the Soviet SA-2 missile battalion that shot down Francis Gary Powers U-2 spy plane in 1960.
Smart power
1991: The end of the Cold War was marked by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which fell as a result of a combination of hard and soft power. Throughout the Cold War, hard power was used to deter Soviet aggression and soft power was used to erode faith in Communism. Joseph Nye said: "When the Berlin Wall finally collapsed, it was destroyed not by artillery barrage but by hammers and bulldozers wielded by those who had lost faith in communism."
Mutual assured destruction
The primary application of this doctrine started during the Cold War (1940s to 1991), in which MAD was seen as helping to prevent any direct full-scale conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union while they engaged in smaller proxy wars around the world. It was also responsible for the arms race, as both nations struggled to keep nuclear parity, or at least retain second-strike capability. Although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the MAD doctrine continues to be applied.
History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953)
World War II, known as "the Great Patriotic War" in the Soviet Union, devastated much of the USSR, with about one out of every three World War II deaths representing a citizen of the Soviet Union. After World War II, the Soviet Union's armies occupied Eastern Europe, where they established or supported puppet Communist regimes. By 1949, the Cold War had started between the Western Bloc and the Eastern (Soviet) Bloc, with the Warsaw Pact (created 1955) pitched against NATO (created 1949) in Europe. After 1945, Stalin did not directly engage in any wars. He continued his totalitarian rule until his death in 1953.
Canada in the Cold War
The Cold War in Canada came to an end during the period 1990–1995 as the traditional mission to contain Soviet expansion faded into the new realities of warfare. The Cold War required permanent foreign deployments to Western Europe, something which was no longer necessary, and as such bases closed down. Less equipment was needed, and so much was sold off, soon to be replaced by newer equipment designed for future conflicts. At home, bases were closed and operations consolidated and streamlined for maximum efficiency, as by the early 1990s many Canadians were openly questioning the necessity of large defence budgets.
Origins of the Cold War
The Origins of the Cold War involved the breakdown of relations between the Soviet Union versus the United States, Great Britain and their allies in the years 1945–1949. From the American-British perspective, first came diplomatic confrontations stretching back decades, followed by the issue of political boundaries in Central Europe and political non-democratic control of the East by the Soviet Army. Then came economic issues (especially the Marshall Plan) and then the first major military confrontation, with a threat of a hot war, in the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949. By 1949, the lines were sharply drawn and the Cold War was largely in place in Europe. Outside Europe, the starting points vary in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
Cities in Flight
In the period in between the first and second parts, the Cold War ended with the peaceful merging of the East and West blocks into a single, planet-wide Soviet-ruled dictatorship, which hardly made any perceptible change, as the West's political system had already become virtually identical with the Soviet one. However, this dictatorial power was broken by the spindizzy drive which works for very large objects, so that dissidents and malcontents have an easy way of escaping and going off into space. First factories, then eventually whole cities migrate from the economically depressed Earth in search of work; these space-wandering cities are called Okies.
Post–Cold War era
The end of the Cold War allowed many technologies that were formerly off limits to the public to be declassified. The most important of these was the Internet, which was created as ARPANET by the Pentagon as a system to keep in touch following an impending nuclear war. The last restrictions on commercial enterprise online were lifted in 1995.
History of the United States
The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as rival superpowers in the aftermath of World War II. During the Cold War, the two countries confronted each other indirectly in the arms race, the Space Race, proxy wars, and propaganda campaigns. The purpose of this was to stop the spread of communism. In the 1960s, in large part due to the strength of the Civil Rights Movement, another wave of social reforms was enacted by enforcing the constitutional rights of voting and freedom of movement to African-Americans and other racial minorities. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union was officially dissolved in 1991, leaving the United States as the world's only superpower.
Cold War
Even though the Chinese and North Koreans were exhausted by the war and were prepared to end it by late 1952, Stalin insisted that they continue fighting, and the Armistice was approved only in July 1953, after Stalin's death. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung created a highly centralized, totalitarian dictatorship—which continues to date—according himself unlimited power and generating a formidable cult of personality. In the South, the American-backed strongman Syngman Rhee ran a significantly less brutal but deeply corrupt and authoritarian regime. After Rhee was overthrown in 1960, South Korea fell within a year under a period of military rule that lasted until the re-establishment of a multi-party system in the late 1980s.
Cold War (1962–1979)
The Cold War (1962–1979) refers to the phase within the Cold War that spanned the period between the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in late October 1962, through the détente period beginning in 1969, to the end of détente in the late 1970s.
Proclamation 2714
Presidential Proclamation 2714 (61 Stat. 1048) was signed by President Harry S. Truman on December 31, 1946, to officially declare the cessation of all hostilities in World War II. Even though the actual combat of the war ended May 8, 1945, in Europe and September 2, 1945, in the Pacific, the state of war was not lifted off of Japan and Germany in order to give a reason for the necessity of occupation troops in these countries. Once the War Crimes Trials were over, the hostilities were seen as over. The signing of Proclamation 2714 is the reason why the U.S. recognizes its World War II veterans as anyone who has served between the dates of December 7, 1941, and "December 31, 1946".
Cold War espionage
The Cold War was a state of political and military tension after World War II led by the United States (and the Western Bloc) and the Soviet Union (and the Eastern Bloc). Although the two powers never engaged in a full out war, both countries were constantly preparing for an all-out nuclear war. Cold War espionage was focused on gaining an advantage in information about the enemies' capabilities, especially related to atomic weaponry.
Philippine Air Force
The Cold War Era has reached its endpoint as tensions between the two ideological rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, have simmered down as a result of the dissolution of the latter and the massive change of political system among its allies.
United States European Command
In 1989, the Soviet Union and other Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe collapsed and the Cold War came to an end. The citizens from both East and West Berlin began tearing down the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. As a sign of reduced tensions, in 1991 EUCOM took its airborne command post off alert. Meanwhile, in 1991, EUCOM and its components provided forces -primarily VII Corps- to CENTCOM for Operation Desert Storm.
Cold War (1979–1985)
The strategies were continued until the Revolutions of 1989. People in the Eastern European satellite states revolted against their dictatorships and became parliamentary democracies. Russian people ended their communist system in 1991. Without support from Moscow, many subsidized communist movements in the Asia, Africa, and Latin America virtually collapsed.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
When the Cold War ended (in 1991), IIASA’s sponsoring countries could have said “mission accomplished” and disbanded the Institute. IIASA had certainly helped foster mutual understanding among scientists from East and West. But it had also done more than this. IIASA had shown the scientific benefits of bringing together different nationalities and disciplines to work toward common goals. Indeed, this approach has been widely imitated, for example, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.
Cold War
By the 1970s, both sides had become interested in making allowances in order to create a more stable and predictable international system, ushering in a period of détente that saw Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the US opening relations with the People's Republic of China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of KAL Flight 007 and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises, both in 1983. The United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. On 12 June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park, New York to call for an end to the Cold War arms race and nuclear weapons in particular. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of "perestroika" ("reorganization", 1987) and "glasnost" ("openness", c. 1985) and ended Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Gorbachev meanwhile refused to use Soviet troops to bolster the faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had occurred in the past. The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully (with the exception of the Romanian Revolution) overthrew all of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 and the collapse of communist regimes in other countries such as Mongolia, Cambodia, and South Yemen. The United States remained as the world's only superpower.
Post–Cold War era
The post–Cold War era is the period in world history from the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 9:00 am, December 26, 1991 to the present. The term was criticized for its ambiguity: "Even though it has been ten years since the Berlin Wall came down," wrote Paul Wolfowitz in 2000, "we still have no better name for the period in which we live than the "post-Cold War era"." The name means that this new era “does not yet have a name.” It was suggested that "Pax Americana" or "clash of civilisations" would more reflect the reality of the era but the former term would be "offending for many." The same dilemma expressed Condoleezza Rice: “That we do not know how to think about what follows the US-Soviet confrontation is clear from the continued references to the "post-Cold War period.'" "We knew better where we had been than where we were going.”
Cold War
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states (the Eastern Bloc), and the United States with its allies (the Western Bloc) after World War II. A common historiography of the conflict begins with 1946, the year U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow cemented a U.S. foreign policy of containment of Soviet expansionism threatening strategically vital regions, and ending between the Revolutions of 1989 and the 1991 collapse of the USSR, which ended communism in Eastern Europe. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, but they each supported major regional wars known as proxy wars.