Cold War

Period of international geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective blocs, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, from the aftermath of World War II to the Soviet dissolution in 1991. With no direct fighting between the superpowers, it was waged through proxy wars, a nuclear and conventional arms race, the Space Race, espionage, embargoes and crises such as the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. It ended as Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms contributed to the 1989 Eastern Bloc revolutions and the USSR's collapse in 1991.