cold war

Topics: Cold War, World War II, United States Pages: 5 (1272 words) Published: April 29, 2014
﻿Wang yifeng
Gened 111-16

The cold war

The Cold War was out broke between the 1940s to the 1990s. It was the conflict between the United States and the USSR together with their respective allies. The powers at war engaged in boosting their respective defense systems that led to massive spending of their national resources.( Ronald 157) The Cold War was surely expressed through in many areas, according to Ronald Kidd(2009), author of The year of the bomb, “ propaganda, military coalitions, weapons development, espionage, industrial advances as well as technological development. Such activities successfully heightened further competition and tension between the warring parties.” At the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, several counties including the Soviet Union suffered serious economic stagnation as a direct result of investment in the cold war. The influences of the war are profound and lasting, and these caused the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the US as one and only superpower. This long drawn out seesaw battle exerted serious impact on the world. The Cold War generally means the great difference between the Western factions (led by the United States) and the Eastern factions (led by the Soviet Union). It started ever since the Second World War was over and Truman entered into the White House. From the reason analysis, the reasons caused to the cold war can be divided the short-term and long-term. According to Katherine A S Sibley (1998), author of The Cold War. “The short-term causes of the Cold War basically relate to the ways in which the Soviet Union and the United States wished to shape the post-war world. Although the Yalta and the Potsdam Conferences had given the Americans, the British, and the Soviets different spheres of interests or influence it soon became apparent that only the Soviet Union and the United States could be considered to be global superpowers.” And the long-term reasons of the Cold War were direct due to the ideological differences between two camps. The Soviet Union and the United States had been antithetical ideas since the October Revolution. The Soviet Union was the paramount communist state while the United States stood as the paramount capitalist liberal democracy (Katherine 132) The United States tried to restrain the growth of the Soviet Union in each area. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the united States were in scare because of the Soviet Union deployed nuclear warheads in the Cuban Islands. The United States responded by deploying a large amount of Task Forces around Cuba and threatening its nuclear warfare. The United States also par dropped supplies to the people in Eastern Germany and developed a lot in their spaceflights technology to respond the Soviet Union's first man in space during the Cold War; the Americans landed two astronauts on the moon during the Cold War. (John 45) At the same time, the cold war caused serious influence of the world. As the John Lewis Gaddis noted, author of The Cold War: a new history, “It led to numerous proxy wars, and new developments in both nuclear and conventional arms. Hence, because of the Cold War, numerous countries in the world today possess nuclear weapons that pose a great threat to world existence.” The Cold War also led to great effects in neighboring countries. Such international crises as the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Berlin crisis and so on. Quite a lot of countries experienced massive losses in wealth and life in these wars. Yet another negative influence of the war as the describe in Ronald’s book, the year of the bomb, “November 1983, a ten-day NATO command exercise that spanned a major part of Western Europe simulated a time of conflict escalation, with heightened nuclear alerts, which finally culminated in a well-coordinated nuclear release.” The Soviet Union dissolved after 1991, thus ending...
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