Cold War Articles
From the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, the Cold War was a duel for power between Western democracies and Communism – between liberal capitalism and state socialism – between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and China.
British scholar Lawrence D. Freedman defines “cold war” as “a state of affairs in which relations between two antagonists are governed by the possibility of a hot war that both wish to avoid.” A hot war, during most of the Cold War, meant an exchange of nuclear weapons.
The term “cold war” was first used in 1945 and ’47 by George Orwell and Bernard Baruch respectively. In the late ’40s, Walter Lippmann capitalized the concept: “Cold War.”
Historian John Lukacs defines the Cold War as “….the actuality of a political and….the potentiality of a military confrontation of these two giant states (the U.S. and the Soviet Union)….” BBC journalist Matthew Price notes, “The actual wars of the Cold War were fought in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, as the United States and the USSR shot at each other by proxy.”