Explanation:
In its course, the Cold War became a growing threat to world peace and when it reached its highest form of confrontation, as a direct and indirect consequence, numerous people suffered great misfortunes. Since the end of the war up until its subsequent century, the Cold War had many effects on nation-states and targeted them in many economical and social ways, for example in Russia, military spending was cut dramatically since 1991 creating a decline in the Soviet Union’s military-industrial sector. Such a dismantling left hundreds of millions of employees (throughout the former Soviet Union) unemployed thus affecting Russia’s economy and military[1]
After Russia embarked on several economic reformations in the 1990s, it underwent a financial crisis and a recession more oppressive than the United States and Germany experienced during the Great Depression. Although Russian living standards worsened overall in the post–Cold War years, the economy held an overwhelming growth after 1995 and in early 2005 it became known that it had returned to its 1989 levels of per-Capita GDP.
The legacy of the Cold War continued to influence world affairs, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post–Cold War world is widely considered as unipolar—with the United States the sole remaining superpower. The Cold War defined the political role of the United States in the post–World War II world: by 1989 the United States held military alliances with 50 countries and had 1.5 million troops posted abroad in 117 countries which institutionalized a global commitment to huge, permanent peacetime military-industrial complexes and large-scale military funding of science.
Military expenditures by the US during the Cold War years were estimated to have been $8 trillion, while nearly 100,000 Americans lost their lives in the Korean War and Vietnam War.
In addition to the loss of life by uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia. Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; the incidence of interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and Disagreements between the leaders of the nations that were affected by the warfare declined sharply in the post–Cold War years.
The legacy of the Cold War conflict is not easily erased as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and a large increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the annulment of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union the Cold War had been officially terminated, but despite it all, military development and spending continued, particularly in the deployment of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and defensive systems, because there was no formalized treaty ending the Cold War, the former superpowers have continued to various degrees to maintain and even improve or modify existing nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Moreover, other nations not previously acknowledged as nuclear-weapons states have developed and tested nuclear-explosive devices.
The risk of nuclear and radiological terrorism by possible sub-national organizations or individuals is now a concern.
