Orwell named a “cold war” before the blocs fully hardened
The Cold War pitted the United States and its capitalist Western Bloc against the Soviet Union and communist Eastern Bloc after World War II until Soviet dissolution. George Orwell used the phrase in October 1945, fearing polarized nuclear peacetime slavery rather than open battlefield decision.
The name reflects what never happened: the United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other directly. Instead, from the end of the Second World War until the Soviet collapse in 1991, the capitalist Western Bloc and the communist Eastern Bloc competed through proxy wars, an arms race in conventional and nuclear weapons, the Space Race, espionage, propaganda, embargoes and even sport. George Orwell used the phrase in his essay You and the Atomic Bomb, published on 19 October 1945, while pondering James Burnham's forecast of a world split into rival power blocs.
The wartime allies drifted apart fast. By 1949 Moscow had installed satellite governments across occupied Eastern Europe and in North Korea, dropping an Iron Curtain through Europe and Germany. The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and allied with the newly founded People's Republic of China. Washington answered with the Truman Doctrine of containment in 1947, the Marshall Plan in 1948 and NATO in 1949; the Warsaw Pact followed in 1955. Early crises included the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49 and the fighting in Korea between 1950 and 1953, which closed without a victor.
As colonies won independence, many became battlegrounds, with both powers offering aid to court non-aligned states and backing friendly regimes, uprisings and dictatorships. Cuba's 1959 revolution put a communist government in the Western Hemisphere, and the 1962 missile crisis, sparked by American missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles in Cuba, is widely seen as the closest brush with nuclear war. The Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975 ended in North Vietnamese victory. Moscow crushed Hungary's revolution in 1956 and led the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The communist camp itself fractured: the Sino-Soviet split was complete by 1961 and brought border fighting in 1969. In 1972 the United States opened contacts with China and signed arms-limitation treaties with Moscow in the period called detente. Tension rose again in 1979 with revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev, leader from 1985, widened political freedoms, which helped trigger the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the end of the USSR in 1991.
Source: Cold War
