. The confrontation that followed, known as the Cuban missile crisis, brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. The Americans and the British worried that Soviet domination in eastern Europe might be permanent. Another intense stage of the Cold War was in 1958–62. The conflic… A unified military organization among the Soviet-bloc countries, the Warsaw Pact, was formed in 1955; and West Germany was admitted into NATO that same year. Soviet leaders feared and distrusted the United States, which was the only country with the atomic bomb — and which had used it. These opposing systems of ideology created a rift between the two, once allied countries. But the tensions made both sides realize that there would be no easy solution to reestablishing a new Germany. The Cold War began after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the uneasy alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other started to fall apart. So when the Soviets became irritated at all the containment in 1948, they blockaded Berlin, hoping to force the Western countries out of the city completely. The two superpowers soon signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear weapons testing. Ranks as the new standard work on the Soviet Union's Cold War--for scholars and students alike. After the war, temporary governance of Germany had been divided among France, Britain, the United States, and Russia. The Cold War was a fifty year long conflict between the Soviet Union’s communism and the United States’ capitalism. Please select which sections you would like to print: While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. For fifty years the Soviet Union stood in the eyes of the West as a terrifying enigma bent on imperial and ideological expansion. In 1962 the Soviet Union began to secretly install missiles in Cuba to launch attacks on U.S. cities. Although World War II brought the two countries into alliance, based on the common aim of defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union's aggressive, antidemocratic policy toward Eastern Europe had created tensions even before the war ended. By … This hostility between the two superpowers was first given its name by George Orwell in an article published in 1945. The fall of the Soviet Union was a decades-in-the-making outcome of Cold War politics, but it happened quite suddenly in the late 80s and early 90s, primarily at the level of … Cold War involved countries competing for the accumulation of resources alongside building arms and military alliances (Mason, 2019). The foundations of the Cold War were broader than just the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism. In March 1947, Truman asked Congress for $400 million to help the Greek and Turkish governments. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. The Cold War was an ideological War that happened between the Soviet Union and the United States, and it started after the Second World War. Great recounting of 5 key episodes of the Cold War, where the United States and the Soviet Union tried to come to terms and resolve their differences. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. The conflict showed that both superpowers were wary of using their nuclear weapons against each other for fear of mutual atomic annihilation. Other elements of the containment strategy included. 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