lucreza:

history meme | one war ∙ the cold war (1947-1991)

The Cold War, a 45-year conflict, was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO among its allies, and powers in the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union along with the Warsaw Pact. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The Cold War was so named because the two major powers—each possessing nuclear weapons and thereby threatened with mutual assured destruction—never met in direct military combat. Instead, in their struggle for global influence they engaged in ongoing psychological warfare and in regular indirect confrontations through proxy wars. Cycles of relative calm would be followed by high tension, which could have led to world war. In 1989, pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe and, within weeks, all the satellite states broke free from Moscow in a peaceful wave of revolutions. The end of the Cold War culminated in the fall of communism and dissolution of the USSR in 1991. [x]