There were no major physical conflicts of the Cold War. The "War" was actually a political stalemate and an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a period of tension and subdued hostility which gripped most of the world between the 1940s and the early 1990s. The primary actors in the Cold War were the United States and its allies, countered by Russia and countries aligned with that nation. Rather than engaging in a potentially devastating out and out war, the countries involved in the Cold War jockeyed for position in more subtle ways. There was evident paranoia in both countries of nuclear warfare, but it never amounted to anything but fear in the public. So when the first conflict of the Cold War occurred, it was very important.
The fleet in the Cold War's first mission was to prevent the conflict in Korea from spreading throughout the Far East by discouraging Mao Tse-tung's Chinese communists from invading the island of Taiwan, which was occupied by Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist government. For the rest of the Korean War, Seventh Fleet surface warships, patrol planes, submarines, and carrier task forces kept watch off China to discourage the People's Republic from invading Taiwan, whom they were after. Faced with this powerful deterrent, Mao ruled out an invasion of the island. Similar U.S. naval forces patrolled the sea and sky between the Soviet Union's Far East military bases and the Korean combat theater. The visible display of U.S. naval might then and later in the war also caused Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who had endorsed the North Korean aggression, to think twice about militarily supporting the invasion. He limited the extent of his country's air support and warned his forces not to attack U.S. and United Nations warships off Korea.
The fleet in the Cold War's first mission was to prevent the conflict in Korea from spreading throughout the Far East by discouraging Mao Tse-tung's Chinese communists from invading the island of Taiwan, which was occupied by Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist government. For the rest of the Korean War, Seventh Fleet surface warships, patrol planes, submarines, and carrier task forces kept watch off China to discourage the People's Republic from invading Taiwan, whom they were after. Faced with this powerful deterrent, Mao ruled out an invasion of the island. Similar U.S. naval forces patrolled the sea and sky between the Soviet Union's Far East military bases and the Korean combat theater. The visible display of U.S. naval might then and later in the war also caused Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who had endorsed the North Korean aggression, to think twice about militarily supporting the invasion. He limited the extent of his country's air support and warned his forces not to attack U.S. and United Nations warships off Korea.
The Korean War was the first armed confrontation of the Cold War and set the standard for many later conflicts. It created the idea of a proxy war, where the two superpowers would fight in another country, forcing the people in that nation to suffer the bulk of the destruction and death involved in a war between such large nations. The superpowers avoided descending into an all-out war with one another, as well as the mutual use of nuclear weapons. It also expanded the Cold War, which to that point had mostly been concerned with Europe. To me, the Korean War started a whole new war, but a not so violent and devastating one. It may have begun another crucial battle, but significant enough to not become an all out brawl.