Let’s Learn About the Cold War Part 1: The Big Picture Published July 20, 2015 By Senior Airman Sean D. Smith Minot Air Force Base Public Affairs MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. -- Minot Air Force Base is a Cold War base, and every Minot Airman should have at least a basic understanding of that conflict -- but it's a big subject. The Cold War was less a war than a state of existence, a period of tension between the Western Bloc (the United States and NATO) and the Eastern Bloc, which was made up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its allies in Eastern Europe, a military alliance called the Warsaw Pact. The exact dates of the Cold War are subject to debate, but it began shortly after World War II, and ended in 1991. Why did it start? That's a big question, and the answer depends largely on who you ask. The United States and the USSR had a temporary wartime alliance against the Axis powers during World War II. After the war, the world was left with two emerging superpowers with very different ideologies. The United States was a capitalist nation with freely elected leaders. The Soviet Union was a Marxist-Leninist power with only one political party: the Communist Party. This contrast in ideas, along with the basic desire of each superpower to become dominant on the postwar world stage, are widely considered to be at the root of the conflict. After World War II, the USSR began to exert control over the Eastern Bloc, and to show signs of a developing program of aggressive expansion, obliging the United States to push back. The war had changed the global balance of power, and NATO saw the danger in letting a power as large as the USSR go unchecked, particularly with a political ideology as contentious as communism. Suddenly communism and capitalism, east and west, were in competition. Both the American and Soviet militaries had been weakened by the long and difficult war, as had their respective economies. At one time a contest like this might have been resolved on a battlefield, but with nuclear weapons in the mix, the second half of the 20th century was the stage for a new kind of conflict between superpowers. The Cold War, which went on for more than forty years, is characterized by numerous crises and proxy wars, memorable propaganda and historical figures on both sides. In future weeks we'll look at things like mutually assured destruction, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iron Curtain, and many of the things that led to the founding of bases like Minot, the role played by strategic bombers and nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles in a conflict that shaped the world we live in today.