The Cold War was supposedly ‘cold’ in the sense that superpowerantagonism did not lead to a ‘fighting war’. This, nevertheless,remained true only in terms of the absence of direct militaryconfrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union. In respectof covert operations, so-called proxy wars and conflicts that wereclearly linked to East–West conflict (Korean, Vietnam, theArab–Israeli wars and so on) the Cold War was ‘hot’.

At the end of World War II, English author and journalist George Orwell used cold war, as a general

term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published October 19, 1945, in the British

newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare,

Orwell wrote:

The notion of a ‘cold war’ suggests a condition of ‘neither war nor peace’. However,to describe US–Soviet relations during this period as a ‘war’ (albeit a ‘cold’ one) is tosuggest that levels of antagonism between the two powers were so deep and impassionedthat they would have led to direct military confrontation had circumstancesallowed. In practice, this only applied to the first, most hostile, phase of the socalledCold War, as tensions began to ease after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.The idea of an enduring ‘cold war’ may therefore have been shaped by ideologicalassumptions about the irreconcilability of capitalism and communism.

If the ‘short’ twentieth century was characterized by the ideological battlebetween capitalism and communism, 1945 marked a dramatic shift in the intensityand scope of this battle. This occurred through an important transformationin world order. Although badly shaken by WWI and having experiencedeconomic decline relative in particular to the USA, Europe and European powershad been the major forces shaping world politics in the pre-1939 world. Thepost-1945 world, however, was characterized by the emergence of the USA andthe USSR as ‘superpowers’, predominant actors on the world stage, apparentlydwarfing the ‘great powers’ of old. The superpower era was characterized by theCold War, a period marked by tensions between an increasingly US-dominatedWest and a Soviet-dominated East. The multipolarity (see p. 230) of the pre-WWII period thus gave way to Cold War bipolarity (see p. 216).

The first phase of the Cold War was fought in Europe. The division of Europethat had resulted from the defeat of Germany (the Soviet Red Army having

advanced from the east and the USA, the UK and their allies having pushedforward from the west) quickly became permanent. As Winston Churchill put itin his famous speech in Fulton,Missouri in 1946, an ‘iron curtain’ had descendedbetween East and West, from Lübeck in Northern Germany to Trieste in theAdriatic. Some trace back the start of the Cold War to the Potsdam Conference of1945, which witnessed disagreements over the division of Germany and Berlininto four zones, while others associate it with the establishment of the so-called‘Truman Doctrine’ in 1947, whereby the USA committed itself to supporting ‘freepeople’, later instigating the Marshall Plan, which provided economic support forthe rebuilding of war-torn Europe in the hope that it would be able to resist theappeal of communism. The process of division was completed in 1949 with thecreation of the ‘two Germanys’ and the establishment of rival military alliances,consisting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and, in 1955, theWarsaw Pact. Thereafter, the Cold War became global. The Korean War (1950–53)

There is a little controversy over the broad circumstances that led to the ColdWar: in line with the assumptions of realist theorists, superpower states providedan irresistible opportunity for aggrandizement and expansion which maderivalry between the world’s two superpowers virtually inevitable. In the case ofthe USA and the Soviet Union, this rivalry was exacerbated by their common

geopolitical interests in Europe and by a mutual deep ideological distrust.

Nevertheless, significant debates emerged about responsibility for the outbreak

of the Cold War, and these were closely linked to the rivalries and ideological

perceptions that helped to fuel the Cold War itself

Was the Cold War inevitable?

pag 40 din PDF

http://www.waynemclean.com/docs/HIR202-2013/Gaddis%20-%20The%20Long%20Peace%202.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Gaddis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#cite_note-1