It seems almost irreverent to say so – given the millions of people who died because of it – but the whole Cold War thing was no more than a lack of communication.   Both sides decided at Potsdam that the other was impossible, and they just stopped talking to each other.   As soon as Kennedy installed the hotline, the Cold War ceased to be a threat to humanity.   And the Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of Communism in 1991; it ended long before that, when Gorbachev and Reagan started being honest with each other.

Stalin wanted Russia to rule the world and – like the Terminator – there was no way he was ever going to stop unless someone stopped him.   It wasn’t just America – the whole free Western world was aware of the threat.             And what would life have been like in a world dominated by Stalin?   The Communists murdered and imprisoned their own people by the million.   They oppressed Muslims and Christians alike.   They sent in the tanks to any Iron Curtain country which looked like it wanted to be free.   Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire'; and he was right.             Stalin caused the Cold War; the West was just defending itself.

The Cold War was caused by the social climate and tension in Europe at the end of World War II and by the increasing power struggles between the Soviet Union [and the United States].   Economic separation between the Soviets and the west also heightened tensions, along with the threat of nuclear war.

The atomic bomb did help seed the Cold War.   Let's face it, the bomb was not just meant to buckle Japan into surrender, it was also a political statement towards the Soviet Union.   A statement of power towards a nation who practiced a political ideology different from America which was unacceptable to the "free democratic" United States…

The Cold War was a great power conflict between the two geo-politically dominant powers which emerged from the Second World War.  ‘The Cold War was caused by the rise of Soviet power and the fear this caused in the West’.

The U.S. commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U.S. influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.

Leninism and totalitarianism created a structure of thought and behavior which made postwar collaboration between Russian and America impossible- in any sense of civilized intercourse between national states- inherently impossible. 

On any rational assessment, the USSR presented no immediate danger to anyone outside the reach of the Red Army's occupation forces. It emerged from war in ruins, drained and exhausted, its peacetime economy in shreds, its government distrustful of a population, which at times showed a lack of commitment to the regime.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Washington “mistook Stalin’s determination to ensure Russian security through spheres of influence for a renewed effort to spread communism.”