The Cold War was an open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War 2 between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was also waged on political grounds. The term was first used by the English writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between two or three large superstates. Each possessed a weapon by which millions of people could be wiped out in a few seconds.  The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control. During the war, the American and British feared communism would spread to Western Europe and ultimately worldwide. In 1949, the US, Canada and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The alliance between countries of the Western Bloc was a political show of force against the USSR and its allies. In response to NATO, the Soviet Union in 1955 consolidated power among Eastern Bloc countries under to form a rival alliance called the Warsaw Pact. This marked the beginning of The Cold War. The Cold War power struggle, waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs, would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Soviet Troops with cannons during the Cold War in the USSR.