Cold means they never fought each other directly
AMERICA and the SOVIET Union never declared war and their armies never met on a battlefield. That is what the word cold is doing. The rivalry ran for more than forty years through everything except direct combat: propaganda, ESPIONAGE, economic pressure, the space programme and an enormous ARMS RACE.
The fighting happened elsewhere, through allies and proxies. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola and a long list of other conflicts were fought by local forces with superpower money, weapons and advisers behind them, and several million people died in wars that are filed under a peace. Calling the period cold is accurate from Washington and MOSCOW and much less accurate from anywhere those wars were actually fought.
The wall went up overnight
Between 1949 and 1961 around 2.7 million people left East Germany, most of them simply walking across the open BORDER in BERLIN, and disproportionately the young and skilled. On the night of 12 August 1961 East German troops rolled out barbed wire across the city, and a concrete WALL followed.
It ran 96 miles, split families on either side of a street, and lasted 28 years. At least 140 people were killed trying to cross. It came down on 9 November 1989 partly by accident: a spokesman misread a note at a press conference and said new travel rules applied immediately, crowds gathered at the checkpoints, and the guards — with no orders and no wish to shoot — opened the gates.
Thirteen days in October 1962
The closest the world has come to nuclear war began when an American spy plane photographed Soviet MISSILE sites under construction in CUBA, 90 miles from Florida. For thirteen days a naval blockade, an ultimatum and a good deal of improvised diplomacy held, and it ended with the missiles withdrawn — and, quietly, American missiles removed from Turkey in return.
The detail that has emerged since is more alarming than the public version was. On 27 October a Soviet SUBMARINE near the blockade line, out of radio contact and being signalled with depth charges, came close to launching a nuclear torpedo; it required the agreement of three officers, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, refused. The crisis produced the Moscow–Washington hotline, because both sides realised they had no reliable way to talk to each other quickly.
Living with the bomb
At its peak the world held around 70,000 NUCLEAR warheads. The doctrine holding it together had an honest acronym — mutual assured destruction — the argument being that neither side would strike first if retaliation was certain. American children practised sheltering under desks; British households received a government pamphlet on protecting themselves that was of very limited practical use.
The rest of the grid is the machinery of that standoff: the IRON CURTAIN dividing Europe, COMMUNISM as the dividing line, the KREMLIN, the two ALLIANCE blocs, the western one led by America and the Warsaw Pact in the east, the SPY networks on both sides, the ROCKET and SATELLITE programmes that put Sputnik up in 1957 and started the space race, the BOMB, the TENSION and the arms-control TREATY process that eventually wound it down. Our space race page covers the part of the rivalry that ended on the Moon.