Nib asked, and Nib — askNib's tutor — drew the answer live at a whiteboard. This is the spoken transcript; enable JavaScript to watch it drawn.
how did the cold war get its name
The United States and Soviet Union never openly fought each other. So why call it a war, and who named it? Nobody declared this one.
Bernard Baruch often gets the credit, but George Orwell used the words in 1945. Baruch applied them to the Soviet standoff in 1947, and Walter Lippmann's book spread them.
On April 16, 1947, Baruch told South Carolina lawmakers, we are today in the midst of a cold war. Most of his speech was about labor; the phrase is what people kept.
Then columnist Walter Lippmann wrote a run of newspaper columns, gathered into a 1947 book titled The Cold War. The title gave the nickname a home, and it stuck.
So why cold? Because two nuclear-armed superpowers avoided open war. Orwell had guessed that bombs too terrible to use would bring a standoff like this.
The shooting happened elsewhere: Korea from 1950 to 1953, Vietnam, Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. The giants backed sides instead of meeting head on.
So the name was never official: an essay's phrase, a speech's slogan, a book's title, for a standoff that lasted until the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991.
No one signed a treaty naming it; a phrase from an essay and a speech simply fit a standoff where the superpowers never openly fought.