the.com/cold war
Two superpowers arm-wrestling for 45 years without ever touching hands.
means A state of hostile tension between rival powers that never erupts into direct military combat, fought instead through proxy wars, propaganda, espionage, and arms races.
from The phrase pairs 'cold' (lacking the heat of actual battle) with 'war' to name conflict-by-other-means. It had scattered earlier use, but was popularized in the late 1940s — commonly credited to writer George Orwell in a 1945 essay warning of a nuclear standoff, and soon after to American commentator Bernard Baruch and journalist Walter Lippmann, who helped fix it as the term for the US–Soviet standoff. It stuck because it named something genuinely new: superpowers who could annihilate each other choosing, instead, to glare.
- actual combat
- fought through proxies, never directly, USSR vs USA
- peak absurdity
- nations built bunkers for wars that never came
- arms race
- enough nukes built to end civilization many times over
- ending
- USSR collapsed in 1991, no shots fired