Cold War

The Second World War ended with the Allied victory over Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers. But, as Tripathi points out, Europe was immediately divided between the US-led Western bloc and the Soviet bloc in Europe, triggering the Cold War (1945–1991). The race for global supremacy is the focus of this chapter, which examines how the world was divided into rival blocs, each led by a nuclear-armed superpower. It looks at how the nuclear race progressed from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of the war to the beginning of the 1990s, when the Soviet Union disintegrated. This chapter also looks at the emergence of a looser group of nonaligned nations that professed to be averse to formally joining any superpower-led bloc, but felt free to develop close economic and military ties with one superpower, or the other. It examines the conduct of the United States and the USSR in some of the most serious international crises, bringing the world close to nuclear obliteration. The author ends the chapter with a look at the circumstances in which the Soviet Union disintegrated.