World History for Kerala PSC - LDC, LSGS, KAS #psc #pscclasses


As the World War II drew to its end, the harmony that had existed between the USSR and the USA and the British empire began to evaporate and the old suspicions came to fore again. Relations between Soviet Russia and the west soon became so difficult that although no actual armed conflict took place directly between the two opposing camps, the decade after 1945 saw the first phase of Cold War which continued, inspite of several ‘Thaws’ into the 1980s.
Cold war meant that instead of allowing their mutual hostility to manifest in armed conflict, the two sides attacked each other with propaganda and economic measures and with a general policy of non-cooperation. A state of military and political tension between the Western Bloc comprising of the USA, its NATO allies and some others and the powers in the Eastern Bloc comprising of the Soviet Union along with its allies from the Warsaw Pact post World War II is known as the Cold War.
The term “cold” signifies absence of fighting on a large-scale directly between the two opponents despite major regional wars, termed proxy wars, supported by both the sides. The USSR and the USA were left as two superpowers with political and economic differences as a result of the Cold War that split the temporary wartime alliance against the Nazi Germany.