In 1946 Sir Winston Churchill gave an address on foreign affairs at Westminster college in Fulton, Mo. In it he uttered this ominous sentence: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent [of Europe]." These words marked the beginning of the Cold War. The term was first used by American financier Bernard Baruch in a congressional debate in 1947, and it may be defined as a condition of competition, tension, and conflict short of actual war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The starting and rapid political changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989 brought the cold war to an end.
Churchill's words referred to the fact that the Soviet Union, from 1945 to 1948, strengthened its hold on the countries of Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. But the Cold war was marked by other features determined by the policies of the two superpowers-possession of nuclear weapons; the attempt to establish spheres of interest and alliances with other nations; the division of Europe into two military alliances, the north Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact; attempts to start or prevent revolution in smaller nations; and several less than total confrontations between the superpowers such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, The most potent visible symbol of the Iron Curtain and the Cold war was the Berlin war, a barricade begun in 1961 to discourage defections from the East to West Germany.
The American response to the perceived Soviet threat of world domination has varied since 1946. In the beginning United States policy was one "containment," first stated by diplomat George F. Kennan in a 1947 article in foreign affairs entitled "The sources of Soviet conduct." Under President John F. Kennedy, Amercain policy began to shift to negotitaions on arms control and reduction of nuclear stockpiles. Great increases in military spending by the United States during the administration of Ronald Reagan worked to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet economy in deep trouble, it was no longer possible to keep up with American defense expenditures.
The soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, inaugurated a reversal of Cold War policies, beginning in 1985. With the cooperation of President Reagan, arms reduction agreements were signed, and both sides later pledged troop withdrawals. The soviets also ended their ten year war in Afghanistan. The new Soviet democratization spilled over into the rest of Eastern Europe in a dramatic way. By the end of 1989, Communist domination had ended or was seriously eroded in the former Eastern bloc nations. For all practical purposes, the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist. On Nov. 9,1989 East German authorities allowed the opening of the Berlin Wall. The subsequent destruction of large sections of the wall signaled the end of the Cold war.
The Soviet Union was a charter member of the United Nations and one of the " big five" on the Security Council. In the council Soviet represenatives used their veto power to halt disarmament plans and to prevent action against Soviet aggression.
In 1948 Stalin tried to drive the Western power out of Berlin by blockading the city and starving the people. Britain and the United States broke the blockade, bringing in food by air.
On April 4,1949, the United States, Canada, and most of the countries of western Europe signed a pact creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which provided that an armed attack against any one of them should be considered an attack against them all. When West Germany was admitted into NATO in 1955 the soviet Union reacted by forming the Warsaw Pact defense alliance with countries of eastern Europe.