The Cold War

The “Cold War” was the political, economic, ideological and military confrontation, from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, between the USA with its allies and the USSR with its allies, which never turned into a direct large-scale war. It began with the division of Europe, the growth of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and the American nuclear monopoly; in March 1946 Churchill used the phrase “Iron Curtain” at Fulton, in 1947 the USA announced the Truman Doctrine and in June proposed the Marshall Plan, which the states of Eastern Europe (under Soviet pressure) declined. The Berlin Blockade took place in 1948–1949, NATO was formed in April 1949, Comecon (CMEA) in January 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955; in 1949 the USSR tested a nuclear weapon. The confrontation appeared in the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Wall (1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Vietnam War. In the 1970s came a period of détente: the SALT I treaty of 1972 and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975; the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 sharpened tension again. From 1985 the meetings of Gorbachev and Reagan, the December 1987 treaty on intermediate- and shorter-range missiles, the changes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 led to the end of the Cold War.