"Races" during the Cold War were tense but not warfare

The argument

Supporters of this position draw a distinction between rivalry and warfare, and argue that the contests usually cited as evidence of a Cold War fall on the rivalry side of it. The Arms Race and the Space Race were, on this view, competitions: each was a sustained effort by the United States and the Soviet Union to outdo the other, conducted through investment, engineering and prestige rather than through force. Competition of that kind can be bitter and consequential without becoming war, and proponents hold that the word "war" ought to be reserved for something more specific. What that something is, they argue, is the actual exchange of violence. The test they apply is whether a battle occurred: whether bombs fell, whether forces met, whether either state attacked the other. By that test the Cold War fails. Both powers assembled a deadly arsenal of atomic bombs, and proponents accept that this accumulation was risky; but an arsenal is a capacity for war rather than an instance of one. No war, no bombing and no battle between the two ever came to fruition, and on this account a confrontation in which no fighting takes place is a standoff rather than a war. The Space Race illustrates the point most clearly for supporters of the position. It was simply an expensive contest between the two nations to test the human boundaries of space exploration, a race to achieve something rather than to destroy anything, and its instruments were directed outward rather than at an enemy. Taken together, proponents conclude, the period displays intense opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union, enormous expenditure, and a genuinely risky accumulation of atomic bombs, but no tangible fight or war of any sort. Since warfare requires fighting, they hold, the Cold War should not be considered a war.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument fixes on the Arms Race and Space Race and concludes that 'no tangible fight or war of any sort ever materialized', but that is false at the level of the wider conflict. The Cold War was fought through a long series of proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and others — in which the United States and the Soviet Union armed, funded, trained and at times directly deployed forces against each other's clients, with casualties running into the millions. Selecting only the two 'races', which were indeed non-military contests, frames the whole period by its least warlike features while omitting the shooting wars that defined much of it. The term 'war' in ordinary and scholarly use covers indirect and proxy warfare, not merely direct battle between two principals, and the very label 'cold' already encodes the point being disputed — it marks the absence of direct combat between the superpowers while affirming that a real, global, deadly conflict was underway. Whether to classify the entire era as a single 'war' is partly a definitional choice, but the argument's supporting premise — that no fighting occurred — is empirically too strong, and once proxy conflicts are admitted the case for 'mere rivalry' loses much of its force.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] That no direct battle occurred between the US and USSR omits the Cold War's many proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola — where the powers armed, funded and sometimes fought, with millions killed. [Rejecting P1] Selecting only the Arms and Space Races frames the era by its non-military contests; 'war' standardly includes indirect and proxy conflict, which this period had in abundance.