IX Cold War

The world entered the Cold War period after the ending of the Second World War. The Cold War（1945—1991）was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II（1939—1945）, between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States. The main features of this period were international tension and conflict without bloody“hot war”between the two sides. Although the primary participants' military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments（部署）, a nuclear arms race, espionage（间谍活动）, propaganda, and technological competition, e.g. the space race.

The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc（集团）, the former Communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, including the member states of the Warsaw Pact（华沙条约组织1955—1991）Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, along with Yugoslavia（南斯拉夫）and Albania, which were not aligned with the Soviet Union after 1948 and 1960 respectively.

The US and some western European countries established containment（牵制政策）of communism as a defensive policy, establishing alliances（e.g. NATO, 1949）to that end. Several such countries also coordinated the rebuilding of Western Europe, especially western Germany, which the USSR opposed.

Elsewhere, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR fostered communist revolutions, opposed by several western countries and their regional allies. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, yet non-aligned country blocs also emerged.

The Cold War featured periods of relative calm and of international high tension— the Berlin Blockade（1948—1949）, the Korean War（1950—1953）, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War（1959—1975）, the Cuban Missile Crisis（1962）, the Soviet War in Afghanistan（1979—1989）, and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente（国际关系的缓和）to relieve political tensions and deter（阻止）direct military attack, which would likely guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.

The early 1980s witnessed a final period of friction between the United States and the USSR. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became the U.S. president and he set about strengthening American military capabilities.

The most visible symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was torn down.

In the mid-1980s Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR. He brought a revolution to Soviet foreign policy, seeking new and far-reaching agreements with the West. From 1985, Gorbachev and Reagan held a series of summit talks, and in 1987 the two leaders agreed to eliminate a whole class of their countries' nuclear missiles. The USSR agreed to reduce its forces in Eastern Europe, and in 1989 it pulled its troops out of Afghanistan. That year the Berlin wall that had divided East and West Germany since 1961 was torn down. In 1991 the USSR dissolved, and Russia and the other Soviet republics emerged as independent states. The Soviet power in Eastern Europe collapsed, which led to the end of the Cold War period.