Cold War

The Cold War was the forty-year confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and between the capitalist and communist worlds they led, that followed their joint victory in 1945. It was 'cold' because the two never fought each other directly: both had nuclear weapons after 1949, and a war between them would have destroyed both. Instead they competed everywhere else, in alliances, arms, spies, propaganda, science and space, and fought through others in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America.

It began as the wartime alliance broke over Europe. Stalin installed communist governments in the countries his army occupied; Churchill called the line across the continent an iron curtain. In March 1947 President Truman promised to support any country resisting communism, and in June the Marshall Plan offered American money to rebuild Western Europe. When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in 1948 the Western allies supplied it by air for eleven months. NATO was founded in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb that August, China went communist in October, and in June 1950 North Korea invaded the South: three years of war and some three million dead, ending where it began.

The 1950s and 1960s were the dangerous years. The two sides built thousands of hydrogen bombs and the missiles to deliver them; the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and the first man into space in 1961, and the Americans answered with the Moon. East Germany walled off West Berlin in August 1961, and in October American and Soviet tanks faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie. In October 1962 the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba brought the world closer to nuclear war than it has ever been; Khrushchev withdrew them after thirteen days. The United States then sank itself into Vietnam, and the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. A period of détente in the 1970s brought arms-control treaties and Nixon in Beijing, and ended when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.

Reagan rearmed and called the Soviet Union an evil empire; then Mikhail Gorbachev, in power from 1985, set out to reform it and to end the arms race. The two men came close to abolishing nuclear weapons at Reykjavik in 1986 and signed the first treaty to scrap a whole class of them in 1987. Gorbachev let Eastern Europe go: in 1989 Poland voted out the communists, Hungary opened its border, and on November 9 the Berlin Wall fell. Germany reunited in 1990. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The Cold War shaped half a century: the division of Germany and Korea, the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the space race, the nuclear arsenals that still exist, NATO and the European Union, decolonisation fought over by both sides, and a culture of spies and bomb shelters. It ended without the war everyone had prepared for, leaving the United States as the only superpower and Russia with a grievance that has not gone away.