At the center of the Cold War are nuclear issues. It seems that these, thanks to their unequaled capacity for destruction, are largely responsible for the absence of large-scale conflict between the two blocs, since the superpowers have admitted that the use of nuclear weapons should be restricted as much as possible (admission made at the time of the Korean War). Thus the threat of nuclear conflict will have defused the Cuban missile crisis, as well as the Suez Canal crisis, limiting conflicts to regional or local theaters.
The two blocks (1947-1953)
The formation of the blocks is partly explained by the nuclear weapon that the United States possesses, but not the USSR (which will soon have it, however:in 1949). Each state, according to its ideology, therefore places itself under the protection of one or other of the superpowers:this is the “nuclear umbrella”. The rallying of the States is done by a series of pacts:it is the "pactomania", explaining the rapid establishment of the blocs during the Cold War. A bloc is therefore defined as a group of countries under the nuclear umbrella of a superpower. Very quickly, the world splits into two blocks.
The West Block
The formation of popular democracies is felt by Western countries as a threat. They react
* politically:on March 12, 1947, a year after Fulton's speech, President Harry Truman announced his policy of containment of communism, also called the Truman Doctrine, which considers the West/East opposition in a Manichaean way, as a conflict between two contradictory systems:democracy versus totalitarianism. The link between democracy and capitalist economy is weak. During the Cold War, many far-right dictatorships in Latin America and Europe (Spain, Portugal and Greece) supported American policies, which were seen as a bulwark against the rise of communism.
* economically:from 1947, the United States implemented the Marshall Plan, economic aid for the reconstruction of Europe, as a complement to the Truman doctrine.
* militarily:the United States and its allies created an important network of defensive alliances:the Organization of American States (1948), the Treaty of Brussels (1948), the Atlantic Pact (1949) endowed in 1950 with a structure military, NATO (with the establishment of clandestine stay-behind cells), ANZUS (1951), SEATO (1954) and the Baghdad Pact (1955). The signatory countries undertake to help each other in the event of aggression. In 1947, the intelligence services of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand sign the UKUSA agreement, under which the Echelon planetary listening system will be set up in the 1970s .
The Eastern Bloc
The USSR adopted a strictly parallel strategy. She reacts
* politically:in September 1947, in response to the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which according to them aims "at the economic and political enslavement of Europe", the Soviets set up the Cominform or Information Committee communist parties. The official purpose of this organization is “the exchange of experiences and the coordination of the activity of the communist parties”. During the constitutive meeting, Zhdanov, in the same Manichaean perspective as Truman, formulated the Soviet doctrine in matters of international politics:the world was henceforth divided into two hostile camps, the anti-imperialist and democratic camp and the imperialist and anti-democratic camp; the USSR is the leader of the democratic camp, while the United States is the head of the imperialist camp.
* economically:in January 1949, following the creation of the OEEC, the USSR founded the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON, in English COMECON), which is responsible for coordinating the economies of the people's democracies and planning trade trade with each other.
* militarily:in May 1955, following the admission of the FRG to NATO, the USSR created the Warsaw Pact, which formalized Soviet authority over the armies of the people's democracies.
Negotiation attempts
From 1947, several international conferences brought together the great powers in order to reach a consensus on the problems which divided them:the fate and status of Germany, international conflicts, general disarmament, etc. Although they constitute a kind of armistice in the middle of the Cold War, these meetings end in failure or lead to insignificant results.