cold war

a period of rivalry that included a nuclear arms race between the West and Communist countries—primarily between the US and the former USSR—over global primacy. It began just after WWII and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s when the USSR dissolved. It left the USSR bankrupt, and the fall of the communists dissolved the USSR into separate countries now known as the Commonwealth of Independent States. The US then became the soul superpower in the world. During the cold war, the Soviets sent the first person into outer space, but it was the US that landed on the moon. The cold war led to the Red Scare, a fear of Communism in America by which people would build bomb shelters in case the Soviet Union attacked. In the 1960s, the USSR and the US nearly went to war over the Cuban Missle Crisis. In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and boldly demanded that they tear down the Berlin Wall.