The Cold War can be defined through the alliance formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. NATO was first created in 1949 it was between the U.S. and other Western European (capitalist) countries. The Warsaw Pact of 1955 was essentially the same thing, only with the East-- that is, a defense alliance between the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. These defense alliances demonstrated how the West & the East felt regarding each other--no trust. Some of the conflicts during the Cold War were actually non-violent. Two examples are the space race and the Olympics which acted as gauges of 'competitions' between the ideological opposites. A little more intense example of this is the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent Berlin Blockade/Airlift. But the Cuban Missle Crisis was perhaps the closest these two Superpowers came to nuclear war. But it was the Cold War Proxy Wars that witnessed the major violence. Proxy wars were, in short, wars (usually civil) fought in a country with one side supported by communists and the other by capitalists. It was kind of a bunch of replacements for a real war-- it was a sort of test to see which was stronger. Examples of Proxy Wars are the Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam War (1959-1975), Angolan Civil War (1975-2002), and the Sandinista-Contras conflict in the midst of the Nicaraguan War (1977-1990).