The Cold War was an ideological and geopolitical conflict between the US-led Western capitalist countries and the communist nations led by the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1989. After World War II, the United States and Russia had emerged as the world's Super Powers, as they were known back then. This was due to their industrial and military might, which were characterized by their huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, their ballistic submarines, and long range strategic bombers. The impressive military force they exhibited exerted a deterring effect on the antagonistic side. Aside from the European countries, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and Australia also took part in this global confrontation on the American side as they were militarily allied.
In 1949, the USA, Canada, and the European capitalist countries got organized around a military coalition called NATO, which is the acronym for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, in 1955, the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries formed the Warsaw Pact, which was a powerful military alliance of communist nations to protect themselves from any attack from NATO's countries. Although there was no direct military encounters between these two opposing military blocs during this period, there were many real wars which took place in Third World countries, such as Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, etc, which were the ideological arena of the Super Powers confrontation. Proxy wars were very common in those days.
Summary
Right after World War II, the Allied occupation of Germany showed the stark difference between the two political and economic systems, which became antagonistic, lying on the ideological antipodes. The first political tension appeared with the disagreement over the division of Berlin and the Soviet-backed communist guerrilla armies offensive in Greece, whose government was supported by the United States and the United Kingdom. During a speech he delivered at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill said that an 'iron curtain had been dropped by the Soviet across Europe from north to south'.
Below, political map of Europe during the Cold War. The dark red is the Soviet Union, while their Eastern European satellite countries are in light red, constituting the Warsaw Pact. The deep blue marks the NATO's nations.
This deep ideological, political, and economic fissure of the world could clearly be seen in Germany, which got divided into West Germany, with a capitalist free market system, and East Germany, where no free economic enterprise was allowed. The Western portion of this country had been occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France, while the eastern part, run by communist government, had been taken over by the Soviet Union at the end of WW2. It is precisely here, in the city of Berlin, where the first political incident of the Cold War took place in 1948, when Stalin decided to put West Berlin under a strict blockade, not allowing trains, trucks, and buses to get in and out of the western portion of the city. In order to supply the Berliners with food and coals, the American and British governments decided to organize what is known in history as the Berlin airlift, during which a large amount of cargo planes were used to avoid a famine.
Although the first indirect armed conflict of the Cold War was the Malayan Emergency, in which the Malayan National Liberation Army (a communist guerrilla group) fought against the British Commonwealth forces, the first large scale war of this period was the Korean War. It broke out in 1950 when North Korea, which had a communist government, invaded South Korea in a fast and surprise offensive. The USA, under Truman, quickly organized a military coalition of countries, with the support of the United Nations. This war ended in stalemate in 1953, when a truce was signed, with all parts agreeing that the division of Korea be set at the 38th parallel.
While the American, British, and Australian forces fought in Korea, the French fought in the French-Indochina War against the Vietminh, a communist army led by Ho Chi Minh; at the end, in 1954, the French were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, agreeing to withdraw their forces and to recognize the 17th parallel as the political division between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, whose government, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, would be strongly backed by the United States of America.
On May 1, 1960, when the Soviet Union celebrated the communist labor day, a US Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down by Russian SAM missiles. Since the American spy aircraft was flying over Soviet territory, it caused a major international crisis known in history as the U-2 incident. It was a big scandal for the Eisenhower Administration, because they first denied that fact that the U-2 was flying deep over Soviet territory. However, the pilot had survived, as he had dropped by parachute and was caught and taken prisoner and he was shown to the whole world by the Soviet television.
The political, financial, and military support of South Vietnam, which began at the end of the Dwight Eisenhower Administration, would cost the American government dearly as they were not aware that, little by little, they were being dragged into a nest of hornets. Fearing a 'domino effect' in Southeast Asia, John F. Kennedy increased the US aid, sending to South Vietnam even more military advisers and the first units of Special Forces (Green Berets) but he refused to send combat troops. After his assassination in 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress authorization to send the first US soldiers to fight directly against the communist guerrilla, the Vietcong, and the North Vietnamese forces. To put political pressure on the US Senate, he secretly orchestrated what is known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, through which the the USA entered the Vietnam War, sending combat troops to Southeast Asia.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union also got bogged down in their own protracted armed conflict, which was the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989), which also lasted ten years. It broke out when Leonid Brezhnev sent the Red Army over to Afghanistan to back and sustain in power the Afghanistan communist party, putting in office a new President, Babrak Karmal, who was under threat by a massive rural and religious rebellion organized by the CIA. During this long war, the US government armed and organized the Mujahideen guerrilla, which was composed of extremist Islamic groups, who only abided by their religious doctrines. During the years the Afghan communist party was in Office, women were free and able to attend primary school and higher education such as the university as they wore western-styled clothes. When the US-backed Talibans took power, women lost all their rights.
Despite the savage violence of its military might, which the United States massively delivered on the Vietnamese population, it was another world security crisis of the Cold War that had really put mankind on the brink of destruction; it was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Because the United States of America had installed Pershing I medium range nuclear missiles in Turkey, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, had just ordered the installation of R-12 intermediate range nuclear missiles in Cuba. They were in the process of assembling and setting them up when a U-2 reconnaissance plane discovered them. Then John F. Kennedy ordered the immediate naval blockade of Cuba, forcing several Soviet freight ships to turn back to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile Russian warships and submarines were dangerously approaching the island when the American President and Nikita Khrushchev reached an agreement, through which the high military tension slackened and eased.
Below, B-52 bombers during a massive bombing raid over North Vietnam in Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), during the Vietnam War.
