Exactly what was the Cold War about ?

Question

we never really get much from teachers about it .... and i was just wondering ?

Answer 1

A nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR.  The USA won and Rocky Balboa beat Drago.

Answer 2

it was all about turf

Answer 3

After the hot war of WWII, the Soviet Union and the USA became enemies on the diplomatic front.

USA stood for freedom, capitalism, and the American way.  The Soviet Union stood for Obama's policies.

It was a cold war because we never actually fought each other with weapons. (much)

Answer 4

Basically a battle to see who had bigger balls, the US or the USSR.

Answer 5

It was about democracy and free market capitalism versus dictatorship and an econony based on ruinous principles.

This was manifested throughout the world as basically the countries of NATO and the USSR sought to gain adherents to their brand of thinking.  This was done through revolutions, coups, invasions, diplomacy etc...

Answer 6

spying dude it was because america and russia fell out after ww2

they still hate each other

Answer 7

At its base, it was a political, military and economic competition between the two most powerful countries to emerge from WWII and their allies.  It began, in some sense, while the war was still going on, with open suspicion and hostility from Stalin towards Roosevelt and Churchill.  As the war ended, Stalin occupied Eastern Europe and held mock elections which always gave power to a puppet government of the Soviet Union.  This, and the stated aims of Stalin to undermine and overthrow capitalism all across the world alarmed the Western Democracies, and led to the Truman Doctrine of Containment and the formation of NATO as a pact of defense against potential military invasion of the Western portion of Europe.  By 1949, with the Soviet Union's detonation of its first nuclear weapon, the arms race that so characterized most of the cold war was set, and the economic and political (propaganda and espionage, too) races were off and running.  

The Cold War polarized the majority of the world into two camps, and the alignment of any particular nation would determine the way in which nations aligned in the other camp would treat them.  

The Cold war did not become "hot," because the Soviets and the US never faced of directly in open combat.  Instead, each found ways and places to undermine the other, and there were quite a number of wars by proxy and wars which involved one or the other superpowers, but not both directly.  Korea and Vietnam were both of that later type, and the Arab - Israeli wars are an example of proxy types.  In Korea and Vietnam (and Afghanistan for the Soviets), the US was directly involved in combat, while the Soviets provided supplies, weapons and training, as well as gaining intelligence from observing the fighting.  We did the same thing to the Soviets in Afghanistan.  When the Soviets invaded in 1979, we saw an opportunity to gain intelligence about the Soviet way of making war and about their various weapons systems, and we supplied weapons and training to those who were fighting against the Soviets.

This polarization of the world often led both superpowers to support national leaders or groups which they would not have otherwise, like the Soviets supporting Angolans and the US supporting South Africa.  The US was often forced to back people who we have since had much reason to regret (like Saddam Hussein, for example, or Bin Laden, or Samoza).

This high-stakes competition between nuclear armed opponents brought the world to the edge of nuclear war on a number of occassions (Cuban Missile Crisis, for one), and caused both superpowers to spend sickening amounts of money on horrible weapons.  

How's that?