The Cold War: What It Was, Why It Started and How It Ended

Two winners, one continent to divide

In 1945 the Second World War ended with two countries far stronger than everyone else: the United States and the Soviet Union. They had fought on the same side, but they wanted different things for the Europe now in their hands. The Americans backed market economies and elected governments; the Soviets, who had paid the war’s highest human price, wanted a belt of friendly states along their western border, and got it through communist governments installed across the Eastern European territories occupied by the Red Army.

On 5 March 1946 Winston Churchill, no longer prime minister and in the United States in a private capacity, gave an address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He said that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent”, and listed the capitals that lay behind that line: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia. In those cities, he added, communist parties had been raised to power far beyond their numbers. The image stuck, and it stayed the standard description of a divided Europe for the next forty years.

The name for the period arrived shortly after. The first to use “cold war” was the financier Bernard Baruch, a former adviser to Roosevelt; the journalist Walter Lippmann made it popular, giving that title to a 1947 collection of his articles. The name describes a hostility that could no longer be settled by a head-on war: nuclear weapons had closed that road to both sides.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a diplomat named George Kennan was drafting the strategy the United States would follow. He set it out in 1947 in an article signed with the letter X in Foreign Affairs: the main element of American policy toward the Soviet Union must be a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”. Kennan had in mind a containment that was mostly political and economic. By 1950 Paul Nitze’s military reading, written into the NSC-68 document, had won the argument.

1947-1948: money as foreign policy

Containment turned concrete in two closely spaced moves.

On 12 March 1947 Truman went before Congress and asked for $400 million in aid for Greece and Turkey, two countries under pressure. In the speech he declared it would be the policy of the United States to support free peoples resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures. It broke with the American tradition of avoiding extensive peacetime commitments beyond the Western Hemisphere, and it became known as the Truman Doctrine.

On 5 June 1947, at Harvard, Secretary of State George Marshall announced a programme of aid for European reconstruction. Congress approved it with the Economic Cooperation Act of March 1948: over $12 billion for Western Europe. The Soviet Union refused to take part and kept the countries it controlled out of it, fearing that the aid would become a doorway for American economic influence in Eastern Europe.

Practical example: economic aid is never only economic aid. A wrecked country that receives machinery, raw materials and credit restarts sooner, and when it restarts it tends to resemble whoever financed it: the same supplier firms, the same trade links, the same interests. That is one of the reasons Moscow said no — along with its unwillingness to open its bloc to Western eyes. The Marshall Plan worked as reconstruction and, at the same time, helped fix Europe’s political boundary.

Anyone who has read how GDP works will recognise the logic: rebuilding productive capacity shifts a continent’s economic weight for years.

Berlin, where the two worlds touched

Germany had been split into four occupation zones, and so had Berlin — which happened to sit inside the Soviet zone. The capital therefore became the place where the two sides looked at each other from close range, every day.

On 24 June 1948 the Soviets closed land access to the western sectors of the city. Berlin then held two and a half million people spread across the four occupation zones, and those in the western sectors were cut off from supplies. The Allied response was not military: it was an airlift carrying food and coal from the sky, day and night. At the peak a plane landed at Tempelhof every 45 seconds. In September 1948 three hundred thousand West Berliners gathered at the ruins of the Reichstag to demand that the city not be abandoned.

Moscow lifted the blockade on 11 May 1949, without a shot being fired. Two weeks later the state of West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany, was established; the German Democratic Republic followed on the other side soon after.

The German problem did not close there. Anyone wanting to leave East Germany could do so through Berlin, and many did: by August 1961 the Democratic Republic had lost a sixth of its population, at least four million people. On 13 August 1961 the government began sealing the border around West Berlin, first with barbed wire and in the following days with the wall itself: 155 kilometres of barrier around a city. It stood until 9 November 1989. Across those twenty-eight years at least 140 people died because of the border regime; 91 of them were shot by guards.

Two alliances, two blocs

On 4 April 1949 twelve countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty: the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom. The heart of the text is Article 5: an armed attack against one or more of them shall be considered an attack against them all, and each ally will take the action it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.

In May 1955 West Germany joined NATO. Moscow read the move as a German army reappearing inside the Western alliance and answered within days: the Warsaw Pact was signed on 14 May 1955.

	NATO	Warsaw Pact
Founded	4 April 1949	14 May 1955
Members at founding	12, including the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy	8: USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania
Stated principle	Collective defence (Article 5)	Collective defence, in answer to NATO
Additional function	Tying the US and Western Europe together militarily	Keeping Soviet political and military control over Eastern Europe
Fate	Still exists	Dissolved between March and July 1991

With the alliances came the nuclear arms race, and a paradox with it: the more both sides armed, the less they could use those weapons. Striking first meant absorbing a reprisal that would destroy the attacker too. That is one of the underlying reasons the war stayed cold at the centre and flared at the edges — in Korea from 1950 to 1953, which began as a war of reunification between the country’s two halves, and in Vietnam, where the conflict ended in 1975. At the edges, the rivalry between the blocs was entangled with nationalisms, civil wars and decolonisation: rarely does a single cause explain everything.

The world, for that matter, was never just the two blocs. From the mid-1950s the countries emerging from decolonisation — the Third World — looked for a road of their own: development on their own terms and a refusal to line up with either bloc, non-alignment. And communist China became an actor in its own right: Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing paved the way to diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Thirteen days in October

On 14 October 1962 an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft photographed Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba, an island just off the American coast. This is the moment the Cold War came closest to turning hot.

On 22 October President Kennedy announced a naval “quarantine” of the island: the word was chosen deliberately, because a “blockade” would have carried the technical meaning of an act of war. On the 26th a message from Khrushchev arrived proposing a way out; on the 27th a second one arrived with different terms, and that same day a U-2 was shot down over Cuba. On 28 October Khrushchev publicly announced that the missiles would be withdrawn.

Practical example: the deal that closed the crisis had two layers. The public one: the Soviets remove the missiles, the Americans pledge not to invade Cuba. The private one: the United States withdraws its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, which happened in April 1963 with no announcement. At the time it was mostly told as an American win; in substance it was an exchange.

The naval quarantine was lifted on 20 November 1962, once the Soviet Il-28 bombers had also been removed. Two lasting consequences followed: a direct line of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, which let the two capitals reach each other in hours rather than days, and the negotiations that led in 1963 to the nuclear test ban treaty.

How the line dissolved

Tension between the two superpowers eased during the 1980s. On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall was opened, and for the first time in twenty-eight years people could cross from one side of the city to the other without risking their lives.

The end of the Soviet Union came two years later, in a quick sequence. In August 1991 a group of hard-line communists opposed to reform attempted a coup against Gorbachev: it failed, but it damaged his authority beyond repair. Within days Ukraine and Belarus declared independence. In early December the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at Brest and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. On 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced by the Russian tricolour. Around the same time President Bush recognised the twelve independent republics and opened diplomatic relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan; relations with Uzbekistan, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan followed in February 1992, and with Georgia only that May, because a civil war was under way there.

The Warsaw Pact had already dissolved between March and July 1991, worn down through the 1980s by economic trouble and by political change among its members.

Forty-five years of confrontation never produced the battle everyone feared, but they reorganised the alliances, arsenals, borders and economies of half the planet. The line Churchill described in 1946 ended where it had been most visible, in the middle of Berlin.

To see where the situation of 1945 came from, follow the path through the First World War and the Second; for the economic side of the contest, the entries on inflation and recession explain the tools used to measure an economy’s health, which in those years were also a propaganda argument.