Each was convinced that the superiority of its social, political and economic systems would ultimately bring victory in the competition, through peaceful means. They worked hard to find peaceful resolutions to the multiple confrontations and crises they faced between the end of World War II in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.Įach superpower also believed that it was engaged in a long-term struggle. To avoid such a cataclysmic outcome, policymakers in Moscow and Washington were highly sensitive to the risks of any conflict. Most importantly, the advent of nuclear weapons meant that any conflict between the superpowers risked a nuclear exchange that could have claimed tens of millions of lives and left a swath of destruction in both the Soviet and American homelands. The Cold War stayed cold for a variety of reasons. How could a war be cold? Essentially, by being fought not in the traditional manner of clashing armies, but by all other means short of actual combat. But by describing this war as “cold,” it indicates the struggle did not involve weapons and did not result in rival armies seeking to destroy each other. By using the word “war,” it captured the seemingly life-or-death struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and between capitalism and communism. The very term “Cold War” is contradictory and confusing. My student could be forgiven for her confusion. That brought the world to the brink of what would have been a catastrophic conflict.īut through skill, prudence or luck – or all three – American and Soviet leaders managed to avoid direct combat with each other from 1945 to 1989, the basic period of the Cold War. Once, it led to the threat of nuclear war breaking out because Russia wanted to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, very close to the U.S. The Cold War relationship between the two rival nations was often tense. Washington and Moscow competed in numerous ways: over money and natural resources like oil, over allies, over weapons technology, over influence and prestige, over space exploration, over ideas. But back then, both of these two so-called superpowers wanted to be the most powerful nation in the world, building themselves up while simultaneously trying to reduce the power and influence of the other.
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