In the late 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, giving rise to 15 newly independent nations, including a Russia with an anticommunist leader. Gorbachev’s reforms meanwhile weakened his own communist party and allowed power to shift to the constituent governments of the Soviet bloc. Communist regimes began to collapse in eastern Europe, and democratic governments rose in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, followed by the reunification of West and East Germany under NATO auspices. The Cold War truly began to break down during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev, who changed the more totalitarian aspects of the Soviet government and tried to democratize its political system. Increasingly complex international relationships developed as a result, and smaller countries became more resistant to superpower cajoling. Meanwhile, Japan and certain Western countries were becoming more economically independent. The unity in the communist bloc was unraveling throughout the 1960s and ’70s as a split occurred between China and the Soviet Union. It was waged mainly on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and lasted until 1991. Nevertheless, there was very little use of weapons on battlefields during the Cold War. aid had brought certain Western countries under American influence and the Soviets had established openly communist regimes. The Americans and the British worried that Soviet domination in eastern Europe might be permanent. The Cold War was solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. The Soviet Union began to establish left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe, determined to safeguard against a possible renewed threat from Germany. The Cold War began after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the uneasy alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other started to fall apart. Orwell understood it as a nuclear stalemate between “super-states”: each possessed weapons of mass destruction and was capable of annihilating the other. This hostility between the two superpowers was first given its name by George Orwell in an article published in 1945.

The Cold War was an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II.

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