According to popular Western understanding, the Cold War was a political, geopolitical, and ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism, pitting the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe, North America, andJapan, led by the USA, against the Communist Soviet Union and allied Eastern Bloc. It began after the Second World War and turned nuclear when the Soviets acquired atomic weapons in1949. Though the prospect of nuclear Armageddon prompted mass movements against nuclear weapons, and though the world came very close to it at least once, there was no nuclear war: deterrence worked.
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