Cold War

Andres Lacayo

Cold War Essay

The Cold War was the extended tension between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. It started in the mid 40's after WWII had left Europe in a disaster, and Russia and the USA in superpower positions. The Cold War was a clash of these super giants in political, ideological, military, and economic values and ideas. Though military build up was great on both sides neither one ever directly fought each other.

There are many key events that happened throughout the entire duration of the Cold War. The fist main events that led up to the tension; were the foreign aid policies. These policies were able to divide up Europe between the superpowers. After Europe was divided up, treaty organizations and alliances started forming up again. One of these alliances was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as the Warsaw pact.

Though the two superpowers never engaged each other militarily, they were periodically caught up in major political crises that had the potential to become warfare. One example was the Soviet blockade on Western Berlin. The Russians threatened, and did, block off supply routes to Western Berlin. The people in the city were staving and dying from the lack of supplies. Because of this the US had to make periodic supply drops into the city. Some other examples are the Cuban missile crises, where the Russian funded Cuban military had secretly made or smuggled nuclear missiles onto the island and pointed them at the USA.

Although Russia didn’t get involved in any sort of combat the United States did. First they battled the Koreans in a dispute to take over certain spy satellites, which the Americans thought were planning attacks. The second time it was in Vietnam. North Vietnam wanted to conquer the south so they sent massive manpower and lost a lot of men, and furthermore they weren’t even successfully since they didn’t stop the North from taking over the south. But meanwhile things got very hectic since the Russians took possession of a large amount of nuclear missiles.

During almost the entire time that Russia and the USA had been fighting for power they