The 1914 and 1939 Wars that engulfed almost the entire world were known as World Wars due to their unprecedented impact and dimension. In this context, answer the following:
Explain the consequence of the Second World War with reference to the Cold War.
Topic: The Cold War
Answer
The Second World War destroyed the old powers of Europe and left TWO SUPERPOWERS — the United States and the Soviet Union — whose wartime alliance broke down almost at once, since one was capitalist and democratic and the other communist and totalitarian.
The world divided into TWO BLOCS: the capitalist bloc led by America, bound together by NATO, and the communist bloc led by Russia, bound by the Warsaw Pact. Europe was split by what Churchill called an "iron curtain", with Germany itself divided.
The rivalry that followed was called the COLD WAR because the two never fought each other directly. It was waged instead through propaganda, espionage, economic pressure, an arms and space race, and proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere — an armed and uneasy peace that lasted until 1991.
Three marks: the emergence of the superpowers, the division into blocs, and the nature of the Cold War itself. Define the term as part of the answer — "cold" because the two powers never fought each other directly. That is what the question is really testing. Churchill’s "iron curtain" phrase is worth quoting. The link to the rest of the syllabus is worth a closing line: it was precisely to stay out of these two blocs that the Non-Aligned Movement was founded.