The Cold War

For forty-four years, two superpowers locked in an ideological struggle that never became a direct hot war but never ceased to be a war. The United States and the Soviet Union competed for global dominance through nuclear brinkmanship, proxy conflicts on every continent, covert operations, propaganda, espionage, and the space race. Hundreds of millions lived under the shadow of mutual assured destruction. From the Berlin Blockade to the dissolution of the USSR, the Cold War was the defining geopolitical fact of the second half of the twentieth century.