Why is it called the Cold War?

Orwell’s essay, October 1945

Ten weeks after Hiroshima, George Orwell wrote a short piece for the London weekly Tribune, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” published on October 19, 1945. His argument turned on cost. If the bomb stayed rare and expensive, only two or three huge states could build it. They would be too strong to be conquered and too afraid of each other to fight, and the world would settle into a long, armed standoff. He wondered what beliefs and what kind of society would grow inside such a state, which he described as

a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours

Orwell put the words in quotation marks and did not claim them as his own, but his essay is the earliest known use of the phrase for a standoff between atomic powers. He was not writing only about America and Russia. He pictured a whole world parceled out among super-states, a vision that returns in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), with its three powers forever at war.

Baruch, Swope and Lippmann, 1947

The term crossed the Atlantic in 1947. On April 16 Bernard Baruch, a financier and adviser to presidents who had just represented the United States on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, told an audience in Columbia, South Carolina, that the country was already in a cold war. The phrase came from his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, a former newspaper editor. Later that year the columnist Walter Lippmann published a short book called The Cold War, collecting his columns against George Kennan’s case for containing Soviet power (Kennan’s Long Telegram). Lippmann feared containment would tie America to weak clients all around the Soviet border, and preferred to negotiate the withdrawal of both armies from Europe. His argument lost; his title won.

Moscow described the same split in its own terms. In September 1947 Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s spokesman on ideology, spoke of “two major camps,” an imperialist one led by America and another led by the Soviet Union (the Marshall Plan).

What “cold” meant

“Cold” meant that the two superpowers never openly sent their armies against each other, not even over Berlin or Cuba (the Cuban Missile Crisis); Soviet fighter pilots did fly over Korea, but in secret. The Bomb was the main reason. After the first Soviet test in 1949, a direct war could destroy both sides, the logic later called mutually assured destruction (what MAD means). So the contest moved into everything else: alliances, money, propaganda, spies, arms races and rockets to the Moon. It was never cold everywhere. In Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and in civil wars across Africa, Asia and Latin America, millions died in wars where the superpowers backed opposing sides or sent their own troops against the other’s allies.

Words from the same years

The late 1940s left the language several words still in use. Superpower, in its modern sense, comes from a 1944 book by the American scholar William Fox; iron curtain became famous at Fulton in 1946 (Churchill’s phrase); containment came from Kennan; and the Doomsday Clock first appeared on a magazine cover in June 1947 (why the clock was made). In Russian the term is kholodnaya voyna, the same two words.