![]() ![]() There is a recurring battle among historians over who "started" the Cold War, with traditionalists blaming Stalin and revisionists blaming Truman. The end date, meanwhile, is usually said to be either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the dissolution of the Soviet empire (Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc). Or perhaps it began even earlier in 1943, with the US discovery of widespread Soviet industrial espionage and their subsequent retaliation. That said, it's also quite reasonable to place the start of the Cold War at the Yalta Conference during World War Two, when Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin diplomatically grappled with each other as to what a post- Nazi Europe would look like. The classical start date for the Cold War is 1946, after the publication of the "Long Telegram" by an American diplomat in Moscow, which convinced the US government that the Soviets were a hostile force that needed to be forcibly contained. ĭue to the nature of the conflict, it's difficult to really pin down a start or end date. Even minor things like the movement of a well-known ballet star from one country to the other became part of the superpower dick-measuring contest. One of the superpowers took sides in almost every conflict, usually provoking a response from the other. Most events of the period were related to the Cold War in some way. The main reason for this was that both "superpowers" possessed nuclear weapons, which, to most sane people, made the idea of a "hot" war unthinkable. It was called a "cold" war because the two sides never directly engaged in direct full-scale war with each other, instead using diplomacy, deterrence, money, ideology, subversion, propaganda, and proxies to try to best each other. The Cold War was a prolonged period of geopolitical conflict between the United States (and its allies) and the Soviet Union (and its allies). ![]()
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