The Cold War becomes a Reality, 1946–1952

Abstract

The post-Moscow Conference thaw was short-lived. During 1946 there was a definite hardening of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. By the following year a ‘Cold War’ had broken out which was to become the characteristic feature of East-West relations for the next two decades. The ‘Cold War’ was a state of continuing hostility and tension between the two world power blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. Before the advent of nuclear weapons the outcome of the bitter disputes between East and West, which spread from Europe to the Middle and Far East, would have been a major war. The possession of nuclear weapons of ever increasing and formidable power, and the appalling consequences of their use, did impose some restraint on the leaders of each side in their dealings with the other but, during the many confrontations between the two sides after 1946, the slightest miscalculation or overreaction might well have led to catastrophe. The enormous power of the hydrogen bomb, which both sides developed in the early 1950s, imposed even greater caution on them, but even before 1949, when the United States alone possessed the atomic bomb, Truman was as reluctant to contemplate its use as Stalin was to provoke it.