25 Facts About Cold War

Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc.

Cold War'storians do not fully agree on its starting and ending points, but the period is generally considered to span from the announcement of the Truman Doctrine on 12 March 1947 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991.

Cold War set up an organization to promote sister revolutions worldwide, the Comintern.

Cold War argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, [was] trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries".

Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade, one of the first major crises of the Cold War, preventing food, materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin.

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Cold War claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city.

Cold War gave the United States, Great Britain, and France a six-month ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the sectors they still occupied in West Berlin, or he would transfer control of Western access rights to the East Germans.

Cold War sought, and Congress provided, a rapid build-up of the nuclear arsenal to restore the lost superiority over the Soviet Union—he claimed in 1960 that Eisenhower had lost it because of excessive concern with budget deficits.

Cold War authorized 23 new Polaris submarines, each of which carried 16 nuclear missiles.

Cold War called on cities to prepare fallout shelters for nuclear war.

Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post–World War II Germany.

Cold War ultimately responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade, and he presented an ultimatum to the Soviets.

Vietnam Cold War descended into a quagmire for the United States, leading to a decline in international prestige and economic stability, derailing arms agreements, and provoking domestic unrest.

Cold War then turned to the China and Safari Club—a group of pro-American intelligence agencies including those of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—for support and weapons.

At this time, the USSR achieved rough nuclear parity with the United States; meanwhile, the Vietnam Cold War both weakened America's influence in the Third World and cooled relations with Western Europe.

Term new Cold War refers to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Cold War described the Soviet incursion as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".

For example, the Persian Gulf Cold War demonstrated how the armor, fire control systems, and firing range of the Soviet Union's most common main battle tank, the T-72, were drastically inferior to the American M1 Abrams, yet the USSR fielded almost three times as many T-72s as the US deployed M1s.

Whilst in retrospective this phase of the Cold War was generally defined as a "war of words", the Soviet's "peace offensive" was largely rejected by the West.

In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil Cold War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

The post-Cold War world is considered to be unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower.

The Cold War marked the zenith of peacetime military–industrial complexes, especially in the United States, and large-scale military funding of science.

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'storians have 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.

Much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.

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