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Definition: Cold War from Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable

A state of tension, distrust and mutual hostility between states or groups of countries, without recourse to actual warfare. The state existed between the Soviet bloc countries and the Western world from the end of the Second World War until 1990. The term was first used in a speech made on 16 April 1947 by the US financier Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), when US ambassador to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, and is said to have been suggested to him by Herbert B. Swope, former editor of the New York World. See also NATO; Warsaw Pact.

Cold War

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
George Orwell first used the term cold war in a 1945 article entitled You and the Atom Bomb, which described the United States, Russia, and China as postwar superstates whose nuclear arsenals would involve them in a permanent state of cold war. Orwell borrowed this phrase from the French la guerre froide ( the cold war ), which he translated as a state of war that lacked the overt conditions of war. The term entered the American lexicon in 1947 following the publication of the political commentator Walter Lippmann's The Cold War. Lippmann had written the book in response to The Sources of Soviet Conduct, an essay that the diplomat George Kennan had published that year in the journal Foreign Affairs under the signature Mr. X. It was in this essay that Kennan recommended that the United States adopt a policy of containment to curb the threat of Russian expansionism. Lippmann invoked historical evidence to disagree with Kennan's contention that Russia posed a danger to the international…
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Full text Article Cold War

From Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict Full text Article Contents by Subject Area
Introduction The Origins and Causes of the Cold War From Antagonism to Détente Revolution in the Third World and the Second Cold War The Final Collapse Conclusion Further Reading Glossary Cold War denotes the struggle between the Un... …
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Full text Article Cold War

From Chambers Dictionary of World History
A state of tension or hostility between states that stops short of military action or a ‘hot’ war. The term is most frequently used to describe the relationship between the USSR and the major Western powers, especially the USA, following World War II . Tension was particularly high in the 1960s…
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From Encyclopedia of Intelligence & Counterintelligence
From an intelligence perspective, the Cold War can be said to have begun in November 1944, when British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill learned the British cryptology establishment made the first break into the secret communications of the Soviet NKVD intelligence service. The project, codenamed…
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Full text Article Cold War

From The Great American History Fact-Finder
A term coined to describe the hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 through 1989 — a hostility that never escalated into a shooting war. The cold war was rooted in the differences between the two nations' political and economic systems, because of both nations' status as…
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From Philip's Encyclopedia
The map shows the division of Europe in 1955,...
Political, ideological and economic confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies from the end of World War 2 until the late 1980s. Despite incidents such as the Berlin Airlift (1948-49) and the Cuban missile crisis (1962), open warfare never occurred between the…
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Full text Article cold war

From Encyclopedia of American Literature Full text Article Volume 4
The term cold war refers to the rivalry and state of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union that arose at the end of World War II. The cold war began with conflicts over postwar plans for Central and Eastern Europe, most of which the Soviet Union occupied as a result of defeating…
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From The Oxford Companion to International Relations
The term “Cold War” is used to describe the protracted conflict between the Soviet and Western worlds that, while falling short of “hot” war, nonetheless involved a comprehensive military, political, and ideological rivalry from the end of World War II to the early 1990s. It entered modern political…
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Full text Article Cold War

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
U.S. President Ronald Reagan speaking in front of...
George Orwell first used the term cold war in a 1945 article entitled You and the Atom Bomb, which described the United States, Russia, and China as postwar superstates whose nuclear arsenals would involve them in a permanent state of cold war.... …
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Full text Article cold war

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
term used to describe the shifting struggle for power and prestige between the Western powers and the Communist bloc from the end of World War II until 1989. Of worldwide proportions, the conflict was tacit in the ideological differences between communism and capitalist democracy . Mutual suspicion…
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From International Encyclopedia of Human Geography
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. In his close advisory roles to President Harry Truman, Bernard Baruch first named the tangle of mutually aggressive maneuvers in Europe and East Asia between the Soviet Union and the Western Allied Powers of the United States, Great Britain, and France a…
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