The Cold War, often dated from 1947 to 1991, was the sustained state of political and military tension between the powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO and other allies; versus the powers in the Eastern Bloc; dominated by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and its allies. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Germany, leaving the US and the USSR as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. A neutral faction arose with the Non-Aligned movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia, this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the USSR-led East.
The Cold War was so named because the major powers--each possessing nuclear weapons and thereby threatened with Mutual assured destruction--did not meet in direct military combat. However, in their struggle for global influence they engaged in ongoing Psychological warfare and in regular indirect confrontations through Proxy wars. Cycles of relative calm would be folowed by high tension which could have led to war. The tensest times were during the Berlin Blockade (1948-1949), the Korean War (1950-1953), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis (1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1959-1975), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Soviet shootdown of KAL Flight 007 (1983), and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises (1983). The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to client states, espionage, massive propaganda campaign, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, technological competitions such as the Space Race. The US and the USSR became involved in political and military conflicts in the Third World countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. To alleviate the risk of potential nuclear war, both sides sought relief of political tensions through detente in the 1970s.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev introduced liberalizing reforms of Perestroika ("reconstruction", reorganization") and Glasnost ("openness") This opened the country and its satellite states to a mostly peaceful wave of revolutions (Revolutions of 1989) which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy, and is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of Nuclear warfare.