Never mind the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; according to certain historians and political scientists, the formal end of the Cold War occurred eleven years ago today. Why today? Because it was back on this date in 1990 that leaders attending the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Paris agreed to dramatically reduce conventional weapons in Europe.
The phrase cold war was born in 1945, the year the hot war that had preoccupied the world for six years was winding down. A hot war is a conflict that involves actual fighting: a cold war, in contrast, refers to a conflict over ideological differences that is carried on by methods short of sustained overt military action and usually without breaking off diplomatic relations. Cold war also has the broad sense of a condition of rivalry, mistrust, and often open hostility short of violence, especially between power groups and the specific, with the often capitalized sense naming the 46-year long ideological conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Just as the creation of the term cold war prompted the corresponding coinage hot war, so too did it inspire the term cold peace. As you might expect, cold peace names the unstable peace among nations formerly engaged in a cold war.