Exercise 3. Read the text about the Cold war and explain the words in bold.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 438.

Reading

The Cold War (1945-1991) was a continuing state of political and military tension between the powers of the Western world, led by the United States and its NATO allies, and the communist world, led by the Soviet Union, its satellite states and allies. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occu-

pied, maintaining these as satellite states. The post-war recoveryof Western Europe was facilitated by the United States' Marshall Plan, while the Soviet Union, waryof the conditions attached, declined and set up COMECON (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) with its Eastern allies. The United States formedNATO, a military alliance using containment of communism as a main strategy through the Truman Doctrine, in 1949, while the Soviet bloc set up the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Some countries aligned with either of the two powers, whileothers chose to remain neutral with the Non-Aligned Movement.

The Cold War was so named as it never featured direct military action, since both sides possessed nuclear weapons, and because their use would probably guarantee their mutual assureddestruction. Cycles of relative calm were followed by high tension which could led to a war: the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989). The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states, espionage, propaganda, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the space race. The US and USSR fought wars of various types: in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and fostered communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies. To alleviate the risk of a potential nuclear war, both sides sought détente in the 1970s to relievepolitical tensions.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressureson the Soviet Union, which was suffering from the economic stagnation. In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika (1987) and glasnost (1985). This opened the country and its satellite states to a mostly peaceful wave of revolutions which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power.