Cold War
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The Cold War took place between 1947 and 1991. The Cold War was not like any other war, because the two main enemies' armies never actually fought against each other. The term "Cold" war is used to describe the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 45 year period after the end of World War II. It was feared that it might end in a nuclear war, but that never happened. The United States and Soviet Union each had many countries from around the world on their side. The United Kingdom, France, Australia, West Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands were countries on the American side. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Cuba and North Korea were on the Soviet side.
The Cold War was related to many local wars, such as the Korean War, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Vietnam War. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a part of the Cold War, and Middle East Crisis has also become much more complicated because of the Cold War. Western democracies and the Soviet Union discussed the progress of World War II, and the nature of the postwar settlement, at conferences in Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945), and Potsdam (July-August 1945). After the war, disputes between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, particularly over the Soviet takeover of East European states, led Winston Churchill to warn in 1946 that an "iron curtain" was coming down in the middle of Europe. For his part, Joseph Stalin deepened the mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union when he said in 1946 that World War II was an unavoidable consequence of "capitalist imperialism", and implied that such a war might reoccur.
The Cold War was a time of East-West competition, tension, and conflict that never turned into a full-scale war. The two sides usually didn't trust one another's plans and philosophies, and were divided up into large military and political alliances or "blocs". There were a few real wars, sometimes called "proxy wars", because they were fought by Soviet allies, rather than by the USSR itself -- along with competition for influence in the Third World, and a major superpower arms race.
During the cold war there was a fear on both sides that the other nation would fire nuclear weapons on each other. If this happened then a nuclear war would erupt with disasturous concequences.
After Stalin's death, East-West relations took turns shifting between times of relaxation and confrontation, including a time of greater cooperation, termed detente, during the 1970s. A final phase during the late 1980s happened under President Mikhail Gorbachev, who hoped for a partnership between the two states that could address many global problems. However, this never happened, because the peoples who lived in the Soviet Union decided to do away with Communism, since it had failed them miserably for 80 years and denied them basic freedoms. By 1990, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and broke apart into many countries, the Berlin Wall was torn down, the people of Eastern Europe were free and finally had multi-party democracies, and the Cold War was over.
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