Every day from Japan’s surrender to the end of the USSR: who sided with whom, the Iron Curtain, colonies winning independence and every crisis as it happened.
Drag the slider or press ← → to move a month (Shift for a year, PgUp PgDn for a decade) · Space to play
This interactive map follows the Cold War one day at a time, from Japan’s surrender on 2 September 1945 to the end of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991. Drag the slider through all 16,917 days to see who sided with whom, which colonies won independence, where the dividing lines ran and where the rivalry turned into open war.
Colours show each state’s side on the selected day. Treaty membership decides first, so NATO and the Warsaw Pact change colour on the day a state signed or left. Hatching marks colonies and occupied land in the colour of the power that held it. Tap any country to see why it has its colour, with a link to the source.
Each turning point below opens the map on the day it happened.
British, American and Soviet troops had occupied Iran during World War II and agreed to leave within six months of the war’s end. The deadline passed on 2 March with Soviet forces still in the north, where a Soviet-backed government held Tabriz. Under pressure at the new United Nations and in exchange for an oil promise that Iran’s parliament later rejected, Moscow withdrew by May. It was one of the first open tests of the wartime alliance.
View 2 March 1946 on the map →
Speaking at Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman beside him, Winston Churchill described an iron curtain falling across Europe from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. The map shows how much of it was already true: Soviet troops held eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Germany and Austria were divided into occupation zones, drawn here in the colour of each occupier.
View 5 March 1946 on the map →
Britain could no longer afford to support Greece and Turkey, so President Truman asked Congress for 400 million dollars in aid and declared that the United States would help free peoples resist outside pressure. Many histories date the start of the Cold War from this speech. On the map, Greece’s northern provinces are hatched as contested: its civil war between the government and Communist-led forces ran until 1949.
View 12 March 1947 on the map →
Czechoslovakia was the last state in Eastern Europe with a coalition government. When non-Communist ministers resigned in protest in February 1948, the Communist Party used the crisis, the police and worker militias to take full power. President Beneš accepted a new cabinet on 25 February. The shock in the West helped push the Marshall Plan through Congress and sped up talks on a defence pact.
View 25 February 1948 on the map →
Sixteen European states formed the organisation that would share out American recovery aid, about 13 billion dollars over four years. Moscow refused the plan and made its neighbours refuse too, so aid itself became a line across the continent. Several recipients turn light blue on this date, showing Western alignment before NATO existed; Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland took the aid and stayed neutral.
View 16 April 1948 on the map →
After the Western powers introduced a new currency in their zones, the Soviet Union cut road, rail and canal links to West Berlin, deep inside its own zone. The United States and Britain supplied the city by air for almost a year. The blockade was lifted on 12 May 1949 without a shot fired between the powers, and it made the division of Germany permanent.
View 24 June 1948 on the map →
Twelve states signed the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, promising that an armed attack on one would count as an attack on all. It was the first peacetime military alliance the United States had joined in the modern era. The founding members turn dark blue on this day. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952 and West Germany in 1955.
View 4 April 1949 on the map →
The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, years before most American forecasts expected it. The US monopoly on the weapon had lasted four years. President Truman announced the test in September and in January 1950 ordered work on the hydrogen bomb. The arms race that followed shaped every crisis on this map.
View 29 August 1949 on the map →
Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing after a civil war that had moved quickly once Manchuria fell in late 1948. Follow the slider from that autumn to see province after province change hands, one main city at a time. The Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan in December. With China now allied to the USSR, the Cold War had become a contest in Asia as well.
View 1 October 1949 on the map →
North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, the line along which the US and USSR had divided Korea in 1945. Within six weeks they had pushed South Korean and American troops into a corner around Busan. The UN Security Council, which the Soviet delegate was boycotting at the time, backed a US-led force.
View 25 June 1950 on the map →
After the Inchon landing in September, UN forces crossed the 38th parallel and drove toward the Chinese border. Chinese troops had already crossed the Yalu in secret, and in late November they launched a huge offensive that forced the longest retreat in US military history. Seoul changed hands twice more before the front settled near where the war had begun.
View 25 November 1950 on the map →
Three months after Stalin’s death, a strike by East Berlin construction workers over raised work quotas spread to hundreds of towns across East Germany. Soviet tanks put it down within days. It was the first mass revolt inside the Eastern Bloc, and the pattern would return in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
View 17 June 1953 on the map →
After two years of talks and fighting along a nearly static line, an armistice was signed at Panmunjom. It created a demilitarized zone close to the 38th parallel and was never followed by a peace treaty. Estimates of the dead vary widely and run to several million, most of them Korean civilians.
View 27 July 1953 on the map →
Two months after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva conference ended the First Indochina War. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel until elections due in 1956, which were never held. Laos and Cambodia were already independent. The United States stayed out of the agreement and began to back the state in the south.
View 21 July 1954 on the map →
Twenty-nine Asian and African states met in Indonesia, most of them recently independent. They represented more than half of humanity and wanted no part in choosing between the two blocs. The meeting was the forerunner of the Non-Aligned Movement, founded at Belgrade in 1961. On the map, watch the hatching of colonial rule start to clear across Asia.
View 18 April 1955 on the map →
Nine days after West Germany gained sovereignty, and days after it joined NATO, the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European states signed a mutual defence treaty in Warsaw. Europe’s two blocs now had matching military alliances, and the map shows them facing each other from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The next day, the Austrian State Treaty offered a different path: a neutral Austria, with all occupation troops gone by October.
View 14 May 1955 on the map →
Israel invaded Sinai, and Britain and France followed with landings at Port Said after Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal. Washington and Moscow both demanded that they stop, and US financial pressure forced Britain out within weeks. The crisis marked the end of Britain and France as independent world powers in the Middle East, and it raised Nasser’s standing across the Arab world.
View 29 October 1956 on the map →
What began as a student protest in Budapest on 23 October became a national uprising, and Imre Nagy’s government announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact. On 4 November Soviet forces returned in strength. Thousands died, about 200,000 people fled the country, and Nagy was later executed. The West, distracted by Suez, did not intervene, which showed the limits of its talk of liberating Eastern Europe.
View 4 November 1956 on the map →
The USSR launched the first artificial satellite from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. The same rocket could in principle carry a warhead to America, and the shock led directly to NASA and to a surge of US spending on science. Soviet firsts continued with Yuri Gagarin in 1961, until Apollo 11 put Americans on the Moon in 1969.
View 4 October 1957 on the map →
Fulgencio Batista fled Havana on New Year’s Day after two years of guerrilla war led by Fidel Castro. The new government clashed with Washington over land reform and US-owned property, and turned to Moscow for oil and sugar sales. Cuba restored relations with the USSR in May 1960 and changes colour on the map that day: a Soviet ally 150 kilometres from Florida.
View 1 January 1959 on the map →
Seventeen African states became independent in 1960, and the hatching of colonial rule clears across the map month by month. Congo’s independence from Belgium on 30 June collapsed almost at once into mutiny and secession. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to Moscow, alarming Washington, and was murdered in January 1961. The new states would be courted by both sides for the rest of the Cold War.
View 30 June 1960 on the map →
About 2.7 million people had fled East Germany since 1949, many of them through Berlin, where the border was still open. Overnight on 13 August East German troops closed it with barbed wire, and the concrete wall followed. It stood for 28 years. Turn on the dividing lines to see it, or read our page on the Berlin Wall.
View 13 August 1961 on the map →
Twenty-five states met in Belgrade at the invitation of Tito, Nehru and Nasser and refused to join either bloc. Their members turn green on this day. The group grew at each summit as colonies won independence, and by 1979 it included most of the world’s states, though some members leaned clearly to one side.
View 1 September 1961 on the map →
US spy planes found Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba. On 22 October President Kennedy announced a naval quarantine of the island and demanded their removal. For six days the world came closer to nuclear war than at any other time. Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles on 28 October, in return for a US pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret promise to remove American missiles from Turkey.
View 22 October 1962 on the map →
Shaken by the Cuban crisis, the US, USSR and UK agreed to stop nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and under water. A hotline between Washington and Moscow was set up the same year. Testing moved underground and went on for decades: turn on the nuclear tests layer to watch the count rise. France and China did not sign.
View 5 August 1963 on the map →
After reports of attacks on US destroyers off North Vietnam, one of which is now known not to have happened, Congress gave President Johnson broad authority to use force. US combat troops landed at Da Nang in March 1965, and within three years more than 500,000 Americans were serving in Vietnam.
View 7 August 1964 on the map →
Alexander Dubček’s reforms of the Prague Spring promised “socialism with a human face”. On the night of 20 August, troops of the USSR, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded to end them. Moscow then declared the right to intervene wherever socialism was threatened, known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. Romania refused to take part, and Albania formally left the Warsaw Pact in protest.
View 20 August 1968 on the map →
Chinese and Soviet troops fought on Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River, and the two Communist giants came to the edge of a wider war that year. China had been coloured separately since the split of 1960. The clashes convinced Beijing that the USSR was the greater threat, which opened the way for talks with Washington.
View 2 March 1969 on the map →
President Nixon’s visit to Beijing ended more than 20 years of hostility and turned the Cold War into a three-way contest. Three months later he signed the first strategic arms limits with Brezhnev in Moscow. This was the height of détente, the easing of tension that lasted through most of the 1970s.
View 21 February 1972 on the map →
Two years after the last US combat troops left, North Vietnam’s final offensive took just eight weeks, and you can watch it come down the map province by province from March. Cambodia had fallen to the Khmer Rouge two weeks earlier, and Laos followed in December. Vietnam was formally reunified in July 1976.
View 30 April 1975 on the map →
Thirty-five states, including the US, USSR and every European state but Albania, accepted Europe’s post-war borders. Moscow saw this as a victory. But the Accords also committed signatories to human rights, and dissident groups across the Eastern Bloc began to hold their governments to that promise.
View 1 August 1975 on the map →
Portugal’s empire collapsed after its 1974 revolution. In Angola three movements fought for power, with the Soviet-backed MPLA holding Luanda with Cuban troops while South Africa and the US backed its rivals. The Cold War had reached southern Africa, and this war ran on long after it ended.
View 11 November 1975 on the map →
The Shah, the main US ally in the Gulf since the coup of 1953, fell to a revolution that was neither capitalist nor Communist. Iran left CENTO, which collapsed, and joined the Non-Aligned Movement that September. In November students seized the US embassy and held its staff for 444 days.
View 11 February 1979 on the map →
Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to save a failing Communist government, killed its leader and installed another. Détente ended: the US Senate shelved SALT II, Washington boycotted the Moscow Olympics, and the CIA began arming the mujahideen through Pakistan. The last Soviet soldiers left in February 1989, after a war often called the USSR’s Vietnam.
View 25 December 1979 on the map →
Strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard forced Poland’s government to accept the first independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc. Within a year Solidarity had about ten million members. General Jaruzelski imposed martial law in December 1981, but the movement survived underground and won Poland’s partly free election in June 1989.
View 31 August 1980 on the map →
It was the most dangerous year since Cuba. Reagan announced his missile shield in March, a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean airliner in September, and later that month a Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged a satellite warning of US missiles to be false. In November the NATO exercise Able Archer alarmed Moscow, and US missiles began arriving in Europe.
View 7 November 1983 on the map →
At 54, Mikhail Gorbachev was far younger than the leaders before him, and he inherited a stagnating economy and a costly war. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were meant to save the Soviet system. He met Reagan at Geneva that November, and in 1988 he told the UN that Eastern Europe could choose its own path.
View 11 March 1985 on the map →
Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty eliminating all their ground-launched missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometres, the first agreement to scrap a whole class of nuclear weapons, with inspectors on each other’s soil. A year earlier at Reykjavík they had come close to agreeing to abolish nuclear weapons altogether.
View 8 December 1987 on the map →
Poland had elected a non-Communist government in the summer, and Hungary had opened its border with Austria. When an East German official announced new travel rules on 9 November and said they applied immediately, crowds gathered at the Wall and the guards let them through. Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania all changed regime within weeks.
View 9 November 1989 on the map →
East Germany joined the Federal Republic less than a year after the Wall fell, and the united Germany stayed in NATO, with Soviet agreement. The inner German border disappears from the map on this day, and the eastern states turn NATO blue.
View 3 October 1990 on the map →
The alliance’s remaining members dissolved it in Prague. Six weeks later hardliners tried to overthrow Gorbachev in Moscow. The coup collapsed in three days, in the face of crowds led by Boris Yeltsin, but the republics began declaring independence at once, and they turn grey one by one on the map.
View 1 July 1991 on the map →
Gorbachev resigned on 25 December and the Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin that evening. The next day the Supreme Soviet voted the USSR out of existence, and the map ends. Most of the alliances and dividing lines shown here were gone, though Korea’s armistice line, Vietnam’s Communist government and Cuba’s stand-off with Washington all outlived the Cold War.
View 26 December 1991 on the map →The 320 most significant battles, campaigns and political events of the Cold War, by the date they began. Select one to see it on the map.
The map starts on the day World War II ended, but the rivalry is older. The United States, Britain and France sent troops into Russia during its civil war after the 1917 revolution, and Washington did not recognise the Soviet government until 1933. They became allies only because of Hitler. As victory came closer, they argued over what would follow, above all over Poland and Germany, at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and at Potsdam that July. Both links open our World War II map on that day.
The treaties that decide the map’s colours, with the date each member signed or joined. Select a date to see that day on the map.
The conflicts where the rivalry turned violent, with the outside powers that backed each side. Select a war to open the map there, with the proxy wars layer on.
| Conflict | Years | Western backers | Eastern backers | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greek Civil War Government forces beat Communist-led rebels, who had help from Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. It was the first test of the Truman Doctrine. | 1946–1949 | United States, United Kingdom | — | Government victory |
| Chinese Civil War The US backed the Nationalists with aid and advisers. The USSR handed captured Japanese arms in Manchuria to the Communists. | 1946–1949 | United States | Soviet Union | Communist victory |
| Korean War The one war in which US and Chinese armies fought each other directly. Soviet pilots flew in secret. | 1950–1953 | United States, United Kingdom | China, Soviet Union | Armistice near the 38th parallel |
| Coup in Iran The CIA and MI6 helped remove Prime Minister Mosaddegh after he nationalised Iran's oil. | 1953 | United States, United Kingdom | — | Shah's power restored |
| Coup in Guatemala The CIA organised the overthrow of President Árbenz, whose land reform threatened the United Fruit Company. | 1954 | United States | — | Military rule |
| Vietnam War More than 500,000 US troops were there at the peak. Moscow and Beijing armed the North, while competing with each other. | 1955–1975 | United States | Soviet Union, China | North Vietnamese victory |
| Cuban Revolution The US armed Batista until 1958. The Soviet alliance came only after the rebels had won. | 1956–1959 | United States | — | Rebel victory |
| Laotian Civil War The CIA ran a secret army of Hmong fighters, and Laos became the most heavily bombed country per person in history. | 1959–1975 | United States | North Vietnam, Soviet Union | Pathet Lao victory |
| Congo Crisis Lumumba's appeal to Moscow alarmed Washington. After his murder the CIA backed Mobutu, who ruled for over 30 years. | 1960–1965 | United States | Soviet Union | Mobutu in power |
| Coup in Chile The US spent years working against Allende, then welcomed the military government that followed him. | 1973 | United States | — | Pinochet in power |
| Angolan Civil War Tens of thousands of Cuban troops fought for the MPLA government against South Africa and US-backed UNITA. The war went on until 2002. | 1975–1991 | United States, South Africa | Soviet Union, Cuba | Bicesse Accords; war resumed in 1992 |
| Mozambican Civil War RENAMO, set up by Rhodesia and then backed by South Africa, fought the FRELIMO government. The war ended in 1992. | 1977–1991 | South Africa | Soviet Union | Peace in 1992 |
| Ogaden War The USSR dropped its ally Somalia to back Ethiopia's new Marxist government, and Cuban troops turned the war. | 1977–1978 | — | Soviet Union, Cuba | Ethiopian victory |
| Salvadoran Civil War The US funded the government against FMLN rebels supplied through Cuba and Nicaragua. The war ended in January 1992. | 1979–1991 | United States | Cuba | Peace in 1992 |
| Soviet–Afghan War About 100,000 Soviet troops fought mujahideen armed through Pakistan by the CIA, with Saudi money. | 1979–1989 | United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia | Soviet Union | Soviet withdrawal |
| Contra War The CIA funded rebels against the Sandinistas, and the secret funding led to the Iran–Contra scandal. | 1981–1990 | United States | Soviet Union, Cuba | Sandinistas lost the 1990 election |
Founded at Belgrade in 1961 by states that refused to join either bloc. Members are listed by the summit at which they joined, and the map colours them green from that date.
The era in pictures, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, drawn from public archives including the US National Archives, the German Federal Archives, RIA Novosti, the Dutch National Archives, Fortepan and NASA. Select a photograph to see it full size.
973 photographs in 31 collections. Each is public domain or openly licensed, and credited below.
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Historians divide the period in different ways. These are the common phases this page follows.
| Era | Years | What defined it |
|---|---|---|
| Origins and containment | 1945–1953 | Division of Europe, the Berlin Blockade, NATO, China’s revolution, the Korean War |
| Arms race and the Third World | 1953–1962 | Warsaw Pact, Hungary and Suez, Sputnik, decolonisation, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis |
| From confrontation to détente | 1962–1979 | Test Ban Treaty, Vietnam, Prague 1968, the Sino-Soviet split, Nixon in China, SALT, Helsinki |
| Renewed tension | 1979–1985 | Afghanistan, Solidarity, the Euromissiles, the Strategic Defense Initiative |
| The end | 1985–1991 | Gorbachev’s reforms, the INF Treaty, the revolutions of 1989, German reunification, the end of the USSR |
Era boundaries follow common usage, and historians differ on the dates.
Estimated stockpiles, every five years. The exact figures were secret, especially on the Soviet side, so treat them as estimates.
| Year | United States | Soviet Union |
|---|---|---|
| 1945 | 2 | 0 |
| 1950 | 299 | 5 |
| 1955 | 2,422 | 200 |
| 1960 | 18,638 | 1,605 |
| 1965 | 31,149 | 6,129 |
| 1970 | 26,008 | 11,643 |
| 1975 | 27,519 | 19,055 |
| 1980 | 23,368 | 30,062 |
| 1985 | 21,392 | 39,197 |
| 1990 | 10,904 | 37,000 |
Source: Wikipedia, “Historical nuclear weapons stockpiles and nuclear tests by country” (CC BY-SA 4.0), which draws on estimates by Norris and Kristensen in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. US government figures, which are public, put the American peak at 31,255 warheads in 1967 and the total at 22,217 in 1989.
Tests carried out in each five-year period. The drop after 1963 in some countries reflects the move underground, not an end to testing.
| Years | United States | Soviet Union | United Kingdom | France | China |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1945–49 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1950–54 | 43 | 17 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 1955–59 | 145 | 65 | 18 | 0 | 0 |
| 1960–64 | 198 | 147 | 4 | 12 | 1 |
| 1965–69 | 230 | 85 | 1 | 19 | 9 |
| 1970–74 | 136 | 101 | 1 | 32 | 6 |
| 1975–79 | 96 | 126 | 4 | 37 | 10 |
| 1980–84 | 84 | 116 | 8 | 51 | 6 |
| 1985–89 | 71 | 56 | 4 | 41 | 2 |
Source: Wikipedia, “Historical nuclear weapons stockpiles and nuclear tests by country” (CC BY-SA 4.0). Counting rules vary between sources, so totals may differ slightly from the map’s nuclear tests layer, which uses Wikidata.
There is no single start date. Many histories use 12 March 1947, the day of the Truman Doctrine speech. Others begin with the arguments over Poland and Germany at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945, and some trace the rivalry back to the Russian Revolution of 1917. This map starts on 2 September 1945, the day World War II ended, so it continues directly from our World War II map.
Common end dates are the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the Malta summit of December 1989, German reunification on 3 October 1990 and the end of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991. The map runs to the last of these.
Because the United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other directly in a declared war. Their rivalry was carried on through alliances, arms races, propaganda, espionage and wars fought by or alongside other states. For the people living through those wars, in Korea, Vietnam, Angola or Afghanistan, it was far from cold.
NATO’s twelve founders in 1949 were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, West Germany in 1955 and Spain in 1982. The Warsaw Pact of 1955 joined the Soviet Union with Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The full tables are below.
The term for the line dividing Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from the West, made famous by Winston Churchill in March 1946. In places it became a real barrier of fences, mines and watchtowers, above all the inner German border and the Berlin Wall. Turn on the dividing lines layer to see it on the map.
A group of mostly newly independent states that refused to join either bloc, founded at Belgrade in September 1961 by 25 states and led by figures such as Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and Nkrumah. The map colours its members green from the summit at which they joined. Some members were in practice close to one superpower, and those few are coloured by that alignment instead, with the reason given.
A war in which a rival power backs one side with money, weapons, advisers or troops rather than fighting its main enemy directly. Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan are the best known of the Cold War. Most began as local conflicts, and the superpowers joined in because each feared the other would gain from them. Turn on the proxy wars layer to see them, with lines from their backers.
Over 2,000. The map shows the 2,145 tests between 1945 and 1991 that Wikidata records with a place, most of them by the United States and the Soviet Union. Turn on the nuclear tests layer and drag the slider to see them spread from New Mexico and the Pacific to Kazakhstan, Algeria, Australia, French Polynesia and western China. The numbers table on this page breaks them down by country.
Membership of NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the other treaties is a matter of record, and those dates are the signature or accession dates. Softer alignment, such as Cuba’s with the Soviet Union, is a judgement that historians can argue over, so each such call names its reason and source when you tap the country.
The map is built from about 770 territorial units: each is a modern country (Natural Earth, public domain), split into provinces only where a war, a partition or a colony divided it, with cuts along the 38th and 17th parallels. Borders are close to today’s at this scale, so a unit stays fixed and only its holder changes. We tested the historical polity outlines used on our World War maps and did not use them here, because they cover land more than once (about 66 million km² in 1945, and still about 12 million in 1985) and leave gaps, such as Poland in 1946.
Every holder’s colour comes from a written order of priority. NATO and Warsaw Pact membership come first, then named judgement calls such as Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union, then Non-Aligned Movement membership, then other Western treaties such as the Rio Treaty. Treaty dates are signature or accession dates. Non-Aligned members are dated by the summit at which they joined. Tap a country to see the reason behind its colour on that day.
Fighting is drawn at the level of provinces: a region is shown as taken when its main city fell or most of it was held, and as contested while fighting lasted. These lines come from dated keyframes compiled for this page from standard chronologies. They show who held what in broad terms, not exact front lines.
Events combine four sources: the battles, operations and political events that Wikidata records as part of the Cold War with a known day or month; coups from Wikidata; conflict episodes from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset; and treaties, summits and firsts in space and nuclear weapons that we added ourselves. Where a source gives no coordinates, the event is pinned at its named location or at the centre of its country, so a pin does not always mark the exact spot. Event summaries are the opening sentences of the matching English Wikipedia article (CC BY-SA 4.0), or our own wording.
Proxy wars and their backers are a selection we compiled and wrote for this page. The lines show which outside powers armed, funded or fought alongside each side, not the routes the support took. Nuclear tests come from Wikidata, and the stockpile figures are published estimates, because the true numbers were secret.
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