Origin: 1946
The curtain came down and the temperature dropped. That was the political climate of 1946. In the first full year after the end of World War II, the long-sought peace had become another kind of war. It was the climate in which, a few years later, George Orwell published 1984 with its famous slogan, "War is Peace."
Though it had been fabricated in Europe, and had earlier been used even by Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, iron curtain was first put prominently on display on April 5, 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. There it was the focus of a speech by Winston Churchill, the prime minister who had led Britain to victory in World War II. He warned his audience of what looked like aggressive preparation by the Soviet Union for yet another war: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow." This, Churchill said, "is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace."
At about the time Churchill was pointing out the curtain, journalist Herbert Bayard Swope used the phrase cold war in a speech he wrote for financier and political adviser Bernard Baruch. Baruch decided not to use the phrase publicly, however, until a year later, when in Columbia, South Carolina, he declared, "Let us not be deceived: today we are in the midst of a cold war."
