What is the cold war? Why do we call it that?

Writing in 1893, Bernstein criticized the tit-for-tat arms race underway between Imperial Germany and her fellow Great Powers of Europe: “I don’t know if the expression has already been used, but one could call it cold warfare. Given this rather accidental usage, however, it makes more sense to credit the German socialist theorist and politician Eduard Bernstein with having first used the term. The year 1860, then, is the earliest date (so far discovered) that the term “cold war” appears in any language. Westad thus plausibly classifies “cold war” as a “late twentieth-century neologism” which didn’t exist “prior to World War II.” Orwell therefore anticipates with considerable insight and trepidation a world-order which, while ostensibly post-war, moves not towards peace but instead into a wholly new and uncertain period of indefinite standoff under the constant threat of mutually assured destruction.

In his October 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, Orwell described an emerging post-war order in which “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds…would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” The atom bomb, then, given its enormous cost and technical sophistication, was “likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.” The eminent historian of the Cold War Odd Arne Westad instead awards this distinction to the British writer George Orwell. Others, however, reject either Baruch or Swope as coiners. Just months earlier, for instance, in April 1947, the financial magnate Bernard Baruch gave a speech in which he singled out “Russia” as the lone resistor to the American “way of life” and quest to reign as a “global guardian of safety”: “Let us not be deceived,” continued Baruch, “we are today in the midst of a cold war.” Multiple sources thus credit Baruch with coining the term, though technically the credit should go to his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope. Lippmann, however, was not the first person to use the term.

What is the cold war? Why do we call it that?