The Cold War
The Cold War was a decades-long period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union following World War II, characterized by proxy wars, nuclear arms buildup, and ideological rivalry rather than direct military conflict between the two superpowers.
The Cold War emerged from the breakdown of wartime cooperation between the US and USSR after 1945, as the world split into capitalist and communist blocs. It was marked by the nuclear arms race, the Space Race, and proxy conflicts including the Korean War and Vietnam War.
Key moments included the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which brought the world close to nuclear war, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, physically dividing communist East Germany from the West.
The Cold War effectively ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, reshaping the global balance of power into the post-Cold War era.