First Military Conflict of the "Cold War"
The Berlin Airlift: First Battle of the Cold War. The Berlin Blockade was the first major Crisis of the Cold War, setting up the stage for the decades of tension that were to follow. In 1948, Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, blocked all rail and road access to Berlin. This sudden and unexpected move led to a major U.S. operation known as the Berlin Airlift, in which supplies were flown into the city for almost a year.Strictly speaking there were no battles in the Cold War, that's what the term means. The two sides faced each other with ever growing arsenals of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction, knowing that each had the power to wipe the other off the face of the Earth, but in the knowledge that they too would be wiped out by retaliation from secure launching sites.