The Cold War Begins

1947–1991 CE — Global, United States / Soviet Union

Today: Worldwide (the dividing line ran through Berlin)

The two powers left standing in 1945 had almost nothing in common but the enemy they had just beaten. The Soviet Union installed communist governments across the Eastern Europe its army occupied; the United States answered with the Truman Doctrine, pledging to contain communism, and the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Western Europe with American money. Germany was split, and Berlin — stranded inside the Soviet zone — was split again, until a wall went up through it in 1961. Because both sides soon held nuclear weapons, they never fought each other directly: instead they fought through proxies in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Africa, and Latin America, backing whichever side opposed the other, often at terrible cost to the countries involved. It was a forty-four-year standoff in which the two strongest states on earth were, for the first time in history, unable to use their full strength against each other.

Worth knowing: Both superpowers built enough warheads to end civilization several times over, and the doctrine keeping the peace was named, with unusual honesty, Mutual Assured Destruction — acronym MAD.

Pattern: Military-technological disruption — A weapon or tactic upends the prevailing balance of power and renders an old defensive or offensive order obsolete.

Entry 221 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.