11 Chilling Facts About the Cold War

“An iron curtain has descended across the continent,” Winston Churchill said in a famous 1946 speech, defining the conflict that would consume Europe—and the world—for the remainder of the 20th century. The Soviet Union’s Red Army had helped defeat Nazi Germany and, in doing so, laid claim to the Eastern European countries they liberated on their way to Berlin. The USSR intended to turn them into communist satellites pitted against the free market West and its capitalist overlord, the United States.

Unlike the Second World War, this new conflict would not involve a direct confrontation between its main belligerents. The U.S. and USSR were armed with nuclear weapons that—due to the principle of mutually assured destruction—would inevitably extinguish the human race if they were put to use. Instead, they resolved to fight one another by proxy, employing spies, prosecuting internal sedition, making allies abroad, and fueling political unrest across the globe, from Chile to Vietnam. 

Due to both its length and logistical complexity, the motivations, developments, and consequences of the Cold War remain foggy. How did the U.S. and USSR turn from indispensable allies to mortal enemies? Just how close did Earth come to nuclear armageddon? And why did the USSR ultimately lose the battle? The following facts should fill in some of the gaps.

1. Churchill didn’t invent the term Iron Curtain.
2. Espionage by members of the Manhattan Project helped the USSR build its first atomic bomb.
3. The Warsaw Pact was a reaction to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO.
4. The USSR’s less-sophisticated tech helped it get ahead in the Space Race.
5. The Berlin Wall was East Germany’s idea.
6. The Cuban Missile Crisis came close to unleashing nuclear war.
7. Twenty years later, another miscommunication almost launched nuclear weapons.
8. A documentary inspired Reagan to push harder for nuclear disarmament.
9. Gorbachev introduced reforms that led to the Soviet Union’s demise.
10. East Germany accidentally opened the Berlin Wall.
11. The legacy of the Cold War continues to shape contemporary politics.

Churchill didn’t invent the term Iron Curtain.

While Churchill popularized the famous phrase, he did not actually invent it. According to the International Churchill Society, it first appeared in Apocalypse of Our Time, a 1918 treatise by the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, and was repeated in activist Ethel Snowden’s Through Bolshevik Russia in 1920. These earlier uses show that Churchill was far from the first Westerner to become aware of the USSR’s imperialist tensions. In fact, when Adolf Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (a secret non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR) and sent his armies to Moscow in 1941, several of Churchill’s military advisors warned against allying Britain with the Soviets. If Britain allowed the Red Army to come into Europe via the Eastern Front, their reasoning went, how will it get them out? 

Ultimately, Britain did ally with the USSR: The threat of a Nazi victory in World War II outweighed the costs of preventing that victory from happening. In that way, the Iron Curtain dropped before the Second World War ended. 

Espionage by members of the Manhattan Project helped the USSR build its first atomic bomb.

Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer showed that many of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, including Oppenheimer himself (to a point), were members of socialist and communist parties. The U.S. government believed those allegiances placed the project at risk of espionage. Spying did occur: Physicists Theodore Hall and Klaus Fuchs leaked intelligence to the USSR that hastened the development of the Kremlin’s first atomic bomb, code-named “First Lightning,” by 12 to 18 months. 

The Warsaw Pact was a reaction to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO.

After Hitler’s defeat in 1945, Germany was divided into four zones administered by the U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The first three countries merged their areas in 1949 to create West Germany (a.k.a. the German Federal Republic), leaving the USSR in control of East Germany (a.k.a. the German Democratic Republic). The German capital, Berlin, was also divided into West and East halves despite being located well inside East Germany. Technically, both Germanys were independent states, but their proximity to the Iron Curtain made their involvement in geopolitics all the more significant.

In 1949, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Iceland, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, forming the international military alliance now known simply as NATO (O stands for organization). NATO was created to deter Soviet aggression, but also to promote the political integration of Western Europe and justify the continued presence of American troops in Europe. 

West Germany was accepted as a member of NATO in 1955 and began to reestablish its military—an obvious provocation to the USSR. To protest West Germany’s inclusion, the USSR and its Eastern European satellites, including Albania (which withdrew in 1968), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, signed the Warsaw Pact. Like NATO, the Warsaw Pact ensured that its member countries would provide military support if one of them was attacked.

The USSR’s less-sophisticated tech helped it get ahead in the Space Race.

The USSR launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into Earth’s orbit on October 4, 1957—and shocked U.S. scientists who were working on the same goal. In rapid succession, the Soviets next launched the first living animal in space in November 1957 and the first human in space in April 1961, while the U.S. launched its first satellite, Explorer I, in February 1958 and the first American astronaut in February 1962. Moscow’s success in the early stages of the Space Race was astonishing, considering how far it lagged behind the U.S. when it came to developing technology for nuclear weapons or microchips. 

Some historians have suggested that it was precisely those technological limitations that allowed Soviet scientists to get ahead. Soviet rockets, the BBC reports, were made from the same parts as intercontinental ballistic missiles, and “because Soviet nuclear weapons were bigger and heavier than their U.S. counterparts, the rockets had to be more powerful.” They were powerful enough, it turned out, to send a person beyond the stratosphere and return them safely to Earth.

The Berlin Wall was East Germany’s idea.

East German politicians started calling for the construction of a wall separating East and West Berlin as early as 1953, when a workers’ revolt rocked East Germany and led to widespread migration to the West. The trend continued for several years and East German officials pressed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev for ideas. Khrushchev did not want to provoke the Western powers and toyed with the idea of turning Berlin into a “free city,” controlled by neither the Soviets nor the Americans, to stem the flow of citizens from the socialist East to the capitalist West. In 1961, when the only viable solution was for the USSR to annex West Berlin, Khrushchev relented, and the barb-wired wall’s construction began. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis came close to unleashing nuclear war.

In 1959, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro deposed Cuba’s authoritarian president and established a communist regime, bringing the Cold War’s western front within 100 miles of Florida. The U.S. tried to overthrow Castro in 1961 by invading the island at the Bay of Pigs, but the mission ended in utter failure. The USSR responded by secretly installing missile bases on the island. When Washington discovered the project, Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy stared each other down in what historians now refer to as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the 13-day standoff, the world came close to nuclear armageddon several times, with the closest call occurring in October 1962 when U.S. destroyers and anti-submarine planes surrounded a Soviet submarine. Svetlana Savranskaya, director of the USSR’s National Security Archive, later revealed that the commander of this submarine panicked and called for the preparation of an atomic warhead. He then realized that the American troops were merely encircling them, not attacking, leading him to call off the launch. 

Twenty years later, another miscommunication almost launched nuclear weapons.

In September 1983, the Soviet military shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on its way to Seoul from New York City via Anchorage, Alaska, after a navigational error allowed the plane to enter Moscow’s airspace. All 269 passengers and crew died. The USSR insisted the commercial aircraft had been on a spy mission, while American President Ronald Reagan called the incident a “massacre.” The event touched off an especially tense period of the Cold War.

Three weeks after the crash, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov received an alert at the command center of the USSR’s satellite-based early-warning system. It stated that ballistic missiles were on their way to Russia from the U.S. 

The scenario was plausible—South Korea was, and is, an American ally—and the missiles could be retaliation for shooting down Flight 007. Petrov had to make a choice: treat the alert as a false alarm, or tell his superiors that the USSR was under a nuclear attack. Fortunately for all life on Earth, he correctly identified the alert as a glitch in the system. Petrov, who passed away in 2017, is now remembered as the man who “saved the world.”

A documentary inspired Reagan to push harder for nuclear disarmament.

The number of functional nuclear warheads in the world rose sharply in the first decades of the Cold War. The arms race began with the U.S. and USSR, but included the UK, France, China, and India by the late 1970s. Reagan had initiated the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the USSR in 1981 with the goal of reducing each country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Negotiations were ongoing when he watched The Day After in 1983.

The made-for-TV movie imagined what nuclear war might look like in the American Midwest. According to Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, the film made Reagan “greatly depressed.” But he also saw an opportunity to sell his vision of nuclear arms reduction. Before the movie aired on ABC, Reagan prepared a short speech that blamed the Soviets for standing in the way of progress, yet invited the USSR to negotiate in good faith [PDF]. As Reagan wrote in his diary after viewing The Day After, “My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.”  

It wasn’t until 1987, when Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, that arsenals began to shrink. 

Gorbachev introduced reforms that led to the Soviet Union’s demise.

The Soviet economy was in a rut by the mid-1980s. Gorbachev “realized that unless a bold reform was attempted, the Soviet Union would not enter the 21st century as a superpower,” Igor Lukes, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, told BU Today. In 1986, Gorbachev announced perestroika (“restructuring”), a plan to overhaul the country’s economy by allowing market systems and privatizing industries. A concurrent policy of glasnost (“transparency”) would reduce government restrictions on free speech and on its Eastern European satellites. But for these plans to work, the USSR needed to stop spending so much money and energy on the nuclear arms race.

The foundation underlying the Cold War began to shift. Gorbachev’s reforms and economic incentives from the U.S. decreased animosity, allowing more cooperation with the West. The greater openness to Western ideas and policies, though, ultimately spelled the end of the USSR.

East Germany accidentally opened the Berlin Wall.

Citizens in other countries behind the Iron Curtain were inspired by Gorbachev’s reforms and began demanding more rights and freedoms. During the spring and summer of 1989, people demonstrated in East Berlin against the less glasnost-inclined East German government.

Then a miscommunication on November 9, 1989, started a chain reaction. East German officials, who wanted the crowds to disperse, decided to announce at a press conference that the restrictions on leaving East Berlin were lifted—except that was not really true. The delivery of the statement was so confusing that journalists in the room asked follow-up questions and believed the wall had been opened, effective immediately. They reported as much, prompting thousands of people to rush to the checkpoints. With the massive crowds facing them down, but no official orders, border guards opened the gates and transformed Europe overnight.

The legacy of the Cold War continues to shape contemporary politics.

Following East Germany’s lead, activists in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria ousted communist leaders and installed democratic governments (Poland actually did so before the Berlin Wall fell). In December 1991, three Soviet republics broke from the USSR and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991.

The conflict’s shadow continues to loom over the world, however. In Russia, frustration over the economic hardship and political humiliation following Gorbachev’s tenure provided fuel for Vladimir Putin’s accumulation of power and invasion of Ukraine. Historians have described the resulting war as an attempt to reconstruct the Soviet empire and a rebellion against American dominance. In Germany, economic divisions between the struggling East and thriving West have been identified as key factors in the rise of right-wing political parties, especially east of the former Iron Curtain. Some analysts say the Cold War isn’t really over—it has simply resumed after a few decades’ break.

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