Cold war (term)
A cold war is a state of conflict between nations that does not involve direct military action but is pursued primarily through economic and political actions, propaganda, acts of espionage or proxy wars waged by surrogates. This term is most commonly used to refer to the American-Soviet Cold War of 1947–1989. The surrogates are typically states that are satellites of the conflicting nations, i.e., nations allied to them or under their political influence. Opponents in a cold war will often provide economic or military aid, such as weapons, tactical support or military advisors, to lesser nations involved in conflicts with the opposing country.
This article is about the general term. For the 20th century tension between the Soviet Union and the United States, see Cold War.Origins of the term[edit]
The expression "cold war" was rarely used before 1945. Some writers credit the fourteenth century Spaniard Don Juan Manuel for first using the term (in Spanish) regarding the conflict between Christianity and Islam; however the term employed was "tepid" rather than "cold". The word "cold" first appeared in a faulty translation of his work in the 19th century.[1]
In 1934, the term was used in reference to a faith healer who received medical treatment after being bitten by a snake. The newspaper report referred to medical staff's suggestion that faith had played a role in his survival as a "truce in the cold war between science and religion".[2]
Regarding its contemporary application to a conflict between nation-states, the phrase appears for the first time in English in an anonymous editorial published in The Nation Magazine in March 1938 titled "Hitler's Cold War".[3][4] The phrase was then used sporadically in newspapers throughout the summer of 1939 to describe the nervous tension and spectre of arms-buildup and mass-conscription prevailing on the European continent (above all in Poland) on the eve of World War II. It was described as either a "cold war" or a "hot peace" in which armies were amassing in many European countries.[5] Graham Hutton, Associate Editor of The Economist used the term in his essay titled "The Next Peace" published in the August 1939 edition of The Atlantic Monthly (today The Atlantic). It elaborated on the notion of cold war perhaps more than any English-language invocation of the term to that point, and garnered a least one sympathetic reaction in a subsequent newspaper column.[6][7] The Poles claimed that this period involved "provocation by manufactured incidents."[8] It was also speculated that cold war tactics by the Germans could weaken Poland's resistance to invasion.[9]
During the war, the term was also used in less lasting ways, for example to describe the prospect of winter warfare,[10] or in opinion columns encouraging American politicians to make a cool-headed assessment before deciding whether to join the war or not.[11]
At the end of World War II, George Orwell used the term in the essay "You and the Atom Bomb" published on October 19, 1945, in the British magazine Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a "peace that is no peace", which he called a permanent "cold war".[12] Orwell directly referred to that war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.[13] Moreover, in The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that "[a]fter the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire."[14]
The definition which has now become fixed is of a war waged through indirect conflict. The first use of the term in this sense, to describe the post–World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its satellites and the United States and its western European allies, is attributed to Bernard Baruch, an American financier and presidential advisor.[15] In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech (by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope)[16] saying, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war."[17] Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency, with the book Cold War (1947).[18]
The term "hot war" is also occasionally used by contrast, but remains rare in literature on military theory.[19]
According to academic Covell Meyskens, the term "cold war" was not employed in China during the Maoist era.[20]