The cold war

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, after World War II. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but the period is generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict was based around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by the two powers, following their temporary alliance and victory against Nazi Germany in 1945.[1] The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) discouraged a pre-emptive attack by either side. Aside from the nuclear arsenal development and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed via indirect means such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

Cold War
(1947–1991)

Borders of NATO (blue) and Warsaw Pact (red) states during the Cold War-era in the Northern Hemisphere.

Mushroom cloud of the Ivy Mike nuclear test, 1952; one of more than a thousand such tests conducted by the US between 1945 and 1992

With her brother on her back, a Korean girl trudges by a stalled American M46 Patton tank, at Haengju, South Korea, 1951

East German construction workers building the Berlin Wall, 1961

A U.S. Navy aircraft shadowing a Soviet freighter during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

American astronaut Thomas P. Stafford (right) and Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (left) shake hands in outer space, 1975

Soviet frigate Bezzavetny bumping USS Yorktown, 1988

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

Tanks at Red Square during
the August Coup, 1991

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