The Cold War (Russian: Холодная Война Kholodnaya Voina) was the protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between capitalism and communism, centering around the global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and their military alliance partners. It lasted from about 1947 to the period leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. Between 1985 and 1991 Cold War rivalries first eased and then ended.

The global contest was popularly termed The Cold War because direct hostilities never occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead, the "war" took the form of an arms race involving nuclear and conventional weapons, networks of military alliances, economic warfare and trade embargos, propaganda, xenophobia, espionage, and proxy wars, especially those involving superpower support for opposing sides within civil wars. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most important direct confrontation, together with a series of confrontations over the Berlin Blockade and the Berlin Wall. The major civil wars polarized along Cold War lines were the Greek Civil War, Korean War, Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War, along with more peripheral conflicts in Angola, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.

The greatest fear during the Cold War was the risk it would escalate into a full nuclear exchange with hundreds of millions killed. Both sides developed a deterrence policy that prevented problems from escalating beyond limited localities. Nuclear weapons were never employed as weapons during the Cold War.

The Cold War cycled through a series of high and low tension years (the latter called Détente). It ended in the period between 1989 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and later the Soviet Union. Historians continue to debate the causes in the 1940s, and the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.





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