Cold War: A Visual History

The Cold War was the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective blocs, from the end of World War II to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. It was fought with nuclear brinkmanship, espionage, propaganda, the space race and above all proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, and Germany and Berlin were physically split. The two sides came closest to direct war in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Cold War ended not with a battle but with the peaceful revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Cold War. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Estimated deaths in major Cold War proxy conflicts

Rough mid-range estimates; the Korean and Vietnamese figures in particular are heavily debated.

Timeline of the Cold War

1. 1947
   Truman Doctrine and Marshall PlanContainment becomes US policy.
2. 1948-1949
   Berlin AirliftThe West supplies blockaded Berlin by air.
3. 1949
   NATO; Soviet bomb; Communist ChinaThe world hardens into blocs.
4. 1950-1953
   Korean WarThe first hot war of the Cold War.
5. 1956
   Hungarian uprisingCrushed by Soviet tanks.
6. 1957
   SputnikThe space race begins.
7. 1961
   Berlin Wall builtThe division of Europe made concrete.
8. 1962
   Cuban Missile CrisisThirteen days on the brink.
9. 1965
   US troops to VietnamEscalation under Johnson.
10. 1972
    Nixon in China; SALT IDetente.
11. 1979
    Soviet invasion of AfghanistanDetente ends.
12. 1985
    Gorbachev takes powerGlasnost and perestroika.
13. 1989
    Berlin Wall fallsRevolutions across Eastern Europe.
14. 1991
    USSR dissolved26 December.

Origins, 1945-1949

The alliance that beat Hitler dissolved almost as soon as he was dead. Stalin installed communist governments across the Eastern Europe his army occupied; the West saw expansion, Moscow saw security. Churchill spoke of an 'iron curtain' in 1946, and in 1947 the Truman Doctrine promised American support to nations resisting communism while the Marshall Plan poured money into rebuilding Western Europe.

The first crisis came in Berlin. When the Soviets blockaded the western sectors in June 1948, the Allies flew in supplies for eleven months. NATO was founded in April 1949; the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August; and Mao's communists won the Chinese Civil War in October. The lines were drawn.

Hot wars and the nuclear shadow, 1950-1962

North Korea's invasion of the South in June 1950 turned the Cold War hot. A UN force led by the United States pushed the North back to the Chinese border, China intervened, and three years of fighting ended in stalemate along roughly the original line. Both superpowers built hydrogen bombs and, after Sputnik in 1957, intercontinental missiles.

Khrushchev crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and East Germany built the Berlin Wall in August 1961. In October 1962 American reconnaissance found Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba; thirteen days of confrontation ended when Khrushchev withdrew them in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret promise to remove missiles from Turkey.

Vietnam, detente and the Third World

The United States sent combat troops to Vietnam in 1965 and withdrew in 1973 having lost 58,000 men and the political will to continue; Saigon fell in 1975. Meanwhile Nixon opened relations with China in 1972 and signed arms control agreements with Moscow, the period of detente. Superpower competition shifted to Africa and Latin America: Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Chile.

Detente collapsed when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, called the USSR an 'evil empire', launched a huge military build-up and backed anti-communist insurgents worldwide. NATO's deployment of new missiles in Europe and the 1983 Able Archer exercise brought a period of acute tension.

The end, 1985-1991

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 determined to reform a stagnant Soviet system and cut the cost of the arms race. He and Reagan built a working relationship, agreed to eliminate intermediate-range missiles in 1987, and Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989. Crucially, Gorbachev told Eastern Europe's rulers that Moscow would no longer prop them up by force.

In 1989 Poland held free elections, Hungary opened its border, the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November and communist governments collapsed across the bloc, mostly peacefully. Germany reunified in 1990. A failed coup in Moscow in August 1991 finished the Soviet Communist Party, and the USSR dissolved on 26 December 1991. The Cold War was over, and the United States stood as the sole superpower.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Soviet Union (USSR) (1922 to 1991)
• United States (1776 to present)
• Belgian colonial empire (1885 to 1962)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Dutch Empire (1602 to 1975)
• Second French colonial empire (1830 to 1980)

Wars of the same era and region

• Korean War (1950 to 1953)
• Vietnam War (1955 to 1975)
• Soviet-Afghan War (1979 to 1989)
• Angolan Civil War (1975 to 2002)
• World War II (1939 to 1945)
• Chinese Civil War (1927 to 1949)
• First Indochina War (1946 to 1954)
• Guatemalan Civil War (1960 to 1996)
• Ethiopian Civil War and Eritrean War of Independence (1961 to 1991)

10 surprising things about the Cold War

1. The term 'cold war' was popularised by George Orwell in a 1945 essay, before the conflict had properly begun.
2. The Berlin Airlift delivered coal as well as food, and at its height a plane landed in West Berlin roughly every 45 seconds.
3. The CIA and KGB both experimented with psychics; the US 'Stargate' remote viewing programme ran into the 1990s.
4. During the Cuban Missile Crisis a Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to agree to launching a nuclear torpedo, quite possibly averting nuclear war.
5. The 'hotline' between Washington and Moscow set up in 1963 was a teleprinter, not a red telephone.
6. The United States seriously studied detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon in 1958 as a show of strength.
7. A Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, decided in 1983 that a satellite warning of five incoming US missiles was a false alarm. It was.
8. Both sides tunnelled under Berlin: the CIA and MI6 tapped Soviet phone lines through a tunnel the KGB knew about from the start thanks to a mole.
9. The two superpowers competed at chess, ballet, and the Olympics; the US boycotted Moscow 1980 and the USSR boycotted Los Angeles 1984.
10. The Cold War ended so peacefully that the last Soviet leader received a Nobel Peace Prize and, later, appeared in a Pizza Hut advert.

Sources

• Cold War Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Cold War Wikipedia
• Milestones in the History of US Foreign Relations, 1945-1992 US Department of State, Office of the Historian
• Cold War International History Project Wilson Center
• John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005) Penguin
• Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (2017) Allen Lane

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