The Cold War
Read this article for a general overview of the Cold War, with close attention to the "historiography" section. Historians frequently disagree about why something occurred, and the Cold War has many competing explanations.
Intelligence
Military forces from the countries involved rarely had much direct participation in the Cold War – the war was primarily fought by intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; United States), Secret Intelligence Service (MI6; United Kingdom), Bundesnachrichtendiens (BND; West Germany), Stasi (East Germany) and the KGB (Soviet Union).
The abilities of ECHELON, a United States-United Kingdome intelligence sharing organization that was created during World War II, were used against the USSR, China, and their allies.
According to the CIA, much of the technology in the Communist states consisted simply of copies of Western products that had been legally purchased or gained through a massive espionage program. Stricter Western control of the export of technology through COCOM (Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls) and providing defective technology to communist agents after the discovery of the Farewell Dossier contributed to the fall of communism.