While 1991 is often given as the end of the Cold War, the truth is that the Cold War never ended; it just paused before resuming again.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of Germany the following year, and the collapse of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day in 1991, scholars and informed observers have operated on the belief that, together, these three events marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new era.

Since the conflict in Ukraine started in 2014, it has been very popular to refer to the New Cold War, the Cold War 2.0, and the like. But did the Cold War actually end? Was the existence of the Soviet Union necessary for the Cold War to continue? I think there is an alternative explanation centered on the persistent durability of factors that suggest that the Cold War did not end in 1991, or, in the best-case scenario, that it was very briefly suspended before resuming.

The most significant feature of the Cold War was the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that was tempered by the existence of nuclear weapons, which made conflict between the superpowers “unthinkable,” in the words of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

One cannot separate the Cold War from the advent of nuclear weapons. George Orwell was the first to coin the phrase “Cold War” in October 1945 in his essay “You and the Atom Bomb.” He imagined “the prospect of two or three monstrous super states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them,” and he concluded rather darkly that this situation was likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace.’”

It is hardly a coincidence that the only time nuclear weapons were ever used was in 1945. That was done by the United States when it had a monopoly on them. Stalin immediately understood the significance of these weapons, and for that reason never discussed them in public and virtually pretended they did not exist in post-World War II negotiations about the future world order. He did, however, order his most capable administrator, Lavrentiy Beria, to take charge of the Soviet bomb project, and in 1949, the Soviets defied US intelligence estimates by exploding their first nuclear device.

Once the Soviets had broken the US nuclear monopoly in 1949, the Cold War was on in earnest. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was also founded in 1949.

In the following decades, the Soviet Union and the United States madly built tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, as well as delivery vehicles that included ballistic missiles, airplanes, and submarines, in the effort to guarantee second-strike capability, i.e., that each country could launch a deadly strike after being hit by a first strike. These weapons were aimed at thousands of targets and kept on hair-trigger alert to ensure they could be launched on warning. That was the world of mutually assured destruction (MAD) that I grew up in and in which I was trained as a Sovietologist in the 1970s and 1980s. And that is the world my children grew up in and that in which we continue to live in today.

The absolutely core feature of the Cold War — the nuclear standoff between Washington and Moscow — did not change at all when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Neither US nor Soviet leaders expressed the slightest interest among themselves to redress this massively dangerous situation, yet we all, certainly Americans more than Russians, believed that the Cold War was over. Nearly 34 years after the fact, this strikes me as some kind of truly bizarre charade. As far as I know, nobody has made this quite obvious observation as such.

Sergei Radchenko, in his masterful recent account of the Soviet side of the Cold War, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power (2024), comes close. He wrote the following on pg. 8:

“Nuclear superpowers would continue to exist unless they decayed internally and fell apart (as, to be sure, the Soviet Union did in the end). But a direct conflict between the superpowers became downright unthinkable, leading logically to the possibility of an unending Cold War; a Cold War after a Cold War after a Cold War. In retrospect, it seems naïve that we did not perceive this basic reality of the global order in 1989.”

Calling this naïve strikes me as scholarly generosity at this point, although I am as guilty as the rest. I frankly do not have a good explanation for what seems like a case of colossal collective cognitive dissonance around the so-called end of the Cold War. Yes, the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies in Western and Eastern Europe —  a core Cold War feature — did dissolve with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany, eliminating the most dangerous territorial divide. But even this territorial respite in Europe has proven to be only temporary with a raging war in Ukraine that started 11 years ago.

It seems even harder to argue that the Cold War in Asia ended in 1991 when Japan and the Soviet Union/Russia have still not signed a peace agreement regarding World War II, and the Korean War, more than 70 years ago, ended the fighting with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. North and South Korea remain armed to the teeth in a standoff that shows no end in sight. And now the North Koreans and the Russians have again embraced in a full alliance, while China and Russia are in a virtual alliance that seems friction-free compared to the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s.

So not only did the Cold War never end, but the situation today, with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, seems as dangerous as any time in the last 80 years.

One takeaway is that history is more sticky and persistent than we often think. It did take about 100 years to resolve the challenge of a rising Germany in the international system. We are now 80 years into dealing with the rise of the Soviet Union/Russia with no end in sight.