In his October 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, Orwell described an emerging post-war order in which “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds…would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” The atom bomb, then, given its enormous cost and technical sophistication, was “likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.”
The eminent historian of the Cold War Odd Arne Westad instead awards this distinction to the British writer George Orwell. Others, however, reject either Baruch or Swope as coiners. Just months earlier, for instance, in April 1947, the financial magnate Bernard Baruch gave a speech in which he singled out “Russia” as the lone resistor to the American “way of life” and quest to reign as a “global guardian of safety”: “Let us not be deceived,” continued Baruch, “we are today in the midst of a cold war.” Multiple sources thus credit Baruch with coining the term, though technically the credit should go to his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope. Lippmann, however, was not the first person to use the term.
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