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The Characteristics Of The Cold War

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The Cold War is the designation for a period of time in which political and military tension exist between the West, led by the United States and its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies, and the Communist World, led by the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact. The term “cold” was used to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the war because neither side were involved in a large-scale fight directly, though, there are regional wars who fought for their beliefs on their behalf e.g. South Vietnam versus North Vietnam which was supported by the United States for the former and by the Soviet Union for the latter. The term “cold war” itself was first used by an English writer, George Orwell, in his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb”, published by the British newspaper Tribune on 19 October 1945, “We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity….— that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” (Orwell, …show more content…

Larkin (1965), in his exam revision book European History for Certificate Classes, posited that the ‘Cold War’ was a mixture of religious crusade in favor of one ideology or the other, and of the most ruthless power politics, striking out for advantage or expansion not only in Europe but all over the world. How historians analyze the Cold War has been a major concern, such as the problems when and where the Cold War began; whether it was inevitable; and why states and individual in an international system acted in a particular

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