The Nuclear Arms race between the United States and Soviet Union during Cold war - Term Paper Example

Both states continued to build bigger and more bombs. The United States tested a more powerful and new weapon (hydrogen bomb) in 1952. This prompted the Soviet Union in 1953 to follow with its version (Watts 38). The key features of the Cold War were ideological rivalry where the United States sought to spread capitalism around the world while the Soviet Union sought to spread communism. The second main feature of the Cold war was rivalry over nuclear arms race between the West led by the United States and the Communist countries led by the Soviet Union.

Primarily, the United States and the Soviet Union rivaled over global primacy. Arms race is described as a form of cold war whereby two or more countries are competing to gain an advantage in nuclear and/ or conventional weapons, thus causing a spiraling upward of the number and destructiveness of weapons held by either side (Doeden 17). This paper will mainly discuss the nuclear arms race between the United States and Soviet Union during Cold War. There is a consensus among historians that the Cold War was a time of sharp opposition between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union and their respective allies.

It stretched from the end of the Second World War until early 1990s, the end that was marked with the Soviet Union dissolution. The arms race and the so-called terror balance between these two major blocks was the primary feature of the Cold War. These two superpowers had frosty relationship, but it never escalated into open war. However, the war put its mark on the political situation in the international system during about 45 years of the Cold War (Hoffman 29). Armed conflicts in South and Central America, Asia, and Africa were in most cases heightened by the involvement of these two superpowers with one party siding with either parties of the regional or national conflicts, supporting with money and guns.

Carr Watts identifies four phases of the arms