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The Real Cold War: A High-Stakes Chess Match of Global Proportions

No missiles were launched and no guns were fired between the two superpowers, but The Cold War was a war nonetheless: a battle of indirect aggression, of politics, of economics and propaganda. The term "Cold War" was originally coined by presidential adviser Bernard Baruch during a 1947 congressional debate. That term would come to signify decades of tension and hostility between the United States and the United Soviet Socialist Republic.

The conflict would take many forms, from the chess game of ever-shifting global alliances to an escalating arms race that would spark worldwide fears of a nuclear holocaust. Often thought to refer solely to the strained relations between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the Cold War, in fact, involved the whole world. If the United States and the Soviet Union were the main players, then lesser countries were their pawns.

Fall of Hitler, rise of Russia

At the end of World War II in 1945, the clear-cut relationships between the Allies began to unravel. Their common enemy, Hitler, was done away with; ideologies and agendas set aside during the war were taken up again. The victors of WWII, surveying the altered landscape of global power relations, also began to eye one another warily.

By 1948, the Soviets had already established leftist governments in the liberated Eastern-bloc countries as a bulwark against any renewed German threat; America and Great Britain feared that Soviet influence, if not curbed, would spread to Western Europe. In 1947-48, the U.S. was building its own bulwark, sending aid to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan. With the Soviets having installed openly communist regimes in the East, the Cold War had begun.

The next five years would mark the height of the Cold War, with the Soviets and the U.S. dividing Europe with their military forces and ideologies. The subsequent years unfolded in an unnerving match of maneuver and counter-maneuver: After the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded Western-held sectors of West Berlin in 1948-49, the U.S. and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military presence that served to keep Soviet influence in check. But the Soviets were advancing in other quarters nonetheless, exploding their first atomic warhead in 1949, ending the U.S.'s primacy in weapons technology. Also, in 1949, the Soviet-backed North Korean government penetrated the border into South Korea, which was supported by the U.S. The ensuing Korean War would last until 1953.

Hot points

That same year, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died, easing the standoff somewhat. But two years later, relations were strained anew as the two superpowers' military organizations -- the West's NATO and the Soviet Union's newly formed Warsaw Pact -- scrambled in a sort of larger-than-life membership drive.

The race was for technology as well as allies: the U.S. and U.S.S.R. began developing intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1958, touching off another intense period. When the Soviets were discovered to be secretly installing missiles in Cuba -- well within range of U.S. cities -- the superpowers were poised at the brink of war. Fortunately, this episode, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, was defused when an agreement was reached to withdraw the weapons.

The outcome was strangely hopeful: it showed that even top defense leaders of both superpowers feared the awesome destructive power of these new weapons. With the signing