Cold War: What Really Happened
The Cold War was mostly an ideological dysfunction between the US and the USSR that leaded several of hostiles events that happened from 1947 (end of World War II) to the dissolution of the URSS in 1991. Many historians said that this war started in Germany and Eastern Europe (by dividing Germany in two; the socialist and the capitalist Germany).
The United States were in the process of still recovering from the great depression (economic crisis during 1929). This helped the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to gain more power (mostly in the eastern part of the globe) and stared to develop a more convincing speech about socialism and how this system was not only better than capitalism but also that was the only thing that would heal countries.
The socialist speech was not well received in the United States first because Roosevelt developed the new deal that appeared to be a good a system to help grow countries and second (that I would point as the most important reason), the communist speech was gaining a lot of power and was spreading very fast around the world. From here, we can really see that the most important thing from both of the blocs was to prove they were right and this need to be right lead up to many disastrous moments of modern history.
I would say that the problematic or the most precarious part of the war started with the arms race between countries, we know that such thing as the arms race started during the First World War but around the 50’s there were not only “normal” weapons like; rifles, flamethrowers, tanks, mortars or machine guns. The two countries stared to develop nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire planet, again only to prove who was the most powerful country (or bloc). Also, the United States and the USSR insisted to televise the nuclear tests that would be often made in uninhabited islands.
Following these events became the creation or the establishment of NATO (Marshall Plan, provision of free financial aid for the reconstruction of war-torn Western Europe) and the Warsaw Pact (Zhdanov Doctrine, claimed that the United States was seeking global domination through American imperialism, as well as the collapse of democracy) that were how blocs were military divided. However, from there everything went worst, starting with the Vietnam and Korea war, Vietnam war as I can see has been one of the most unfair and awful situations that has happened. not only because the URSS and the United States decided that Vietnam was a place both of them could claim as a prize (mostly because the great geographic localization (on the east side of the Indochina Peninsula and very close to China and Thailand) but also for all the horrendous human right crimes against every citizen of the country. One of them that I personally would called, as the worst was the Vietnamese children soldiers, which were a bunch of little kids, forced to use weapons against their own people and many times used to kill entire families even relatives. The Vietnam War left more than 250000 casualties at the end.
The Cold War started to finish in 1985, when the Soviet Union was in very disastrous economic problems (that could not be solved that easily) and could not afford the war any more. By 1988, the USSR abandoned war in Afghanistan. The scrim happened on November 9 of 1989 in berlin when spokesman and former general secretary for East Berlin's Communist Party (berlin was divided in two, the communist and the socialist) Mikhail Gorbachev advocated freedom in Germany and said that all families should be together. Making the citizens of berlin destroyed the berlin wall. This was the principal event that finished the Cold war and in some sort of way gave victory to the United States of America.
Is easy to realized that the cold war left plenty of consequences such as many of internal problems inside many of countries, a lot of casualties, the destruction of nature, a big increase in pollution and radiation (mostly from the nuclear tests) and the real beginning of capitalism.
