“Cold War” term coined

Their common enely defeated and split between the victors, the year 1945 also marked the end of any serious efforts at cooperation between Russia and the United States. An uneasy truce developed, with American threats of nuclear weapons holding back the surging Red Army at bay. Political scientists had not yet come up with a dominant theory of the USSR’s motivations, but everyone was terrified in the knowledge that America’s nuclear supremacy was a very short-lived thing. What would happen after, no one could put into words — though one almost accidental phrase stood out.

On this day, April 16, 1947 Bernard Baruch, the multimillionaire financier and advisor to President Truman, stepped in front of the South Carolina general assembly to address the state of relations between the two countries. “Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war,” he said. “Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.”

The phrase caught on, particularly after Baruch’s close friend and respected journalist Walter Lippman used it in column for the New York Herald Tribune. Baruch said that the phrase “cold war” was suggested to him by H. B. Swope, editor of the New York World publication, but the earliest used of that phrase from none other than George Orwell, who in a 1945 essay used it to describe his preference for a “peace that is no peace” than a a cataclysmic nuclear war.