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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed from the remnants of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had been disbanded after World War II, its functions scattered among the Interim Research and Intelligence Service of the State Department and the Psychological Warfare Division and the Strategic Services Unit of the War Department. Quickly recognizing a need for permanent coordination of intelligence gathering, analysis, and dissemination, President Harry S. Truman, by executive order, brought those units together again in the Central Intelligence Group. Despite heavy opposition from the State Department, the military, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—all of which had intelligence and counterespionage roles they wanted to preserve—Congress took up the reorganization of the entire national security apparatus. Truman signed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947. The act restructured the nation’s military, foreign policy, and intelligence operations at the outset of the Cold War. It set up the National Security Council (NSC) in the White House, created the Department of the Air Force, merged the Departments of War and the Navy into the National Military Establishment (later renamed the Department of Defense), and established the CIA as the nation’s first peacetime intelligence agency.

After World War II, relations between the main world powers— the West and the East—broke down. Repressive political policies, collectivization of land, nationalization of industry, and imprisonment of anyone opposed to the authorities became common in the Eastern Bloc. This political disintegration reached its height on August 13, 1961, when the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, ordered that the thirteen-foot-high, steel and concrete Berlin Wall be built, ostensibly to stop a “population hemorrhage”—the flight of unhappy East Germans to the West—that was draining East Germany’s economy. The next twenty-eight years produced a multitude of political crises, from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu on December 25, 1989.

When détente (literally, “relaxation”) became the prevailing framework of U.S.-Soviet relations in the early 1970’s, neither its meaning nor its implications were clear. On the surface, its most important result was a series of nuclear arms agreements—with corollaries in trade, education, space research, and more—between the United States and the Soviet Union, beginning with the first treaty that came out of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), signed by President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in May, 1972. At a deeper level, it reflected a new and more pragmatic turn in the long history of the Cold War; among European and Middle Eastern peoples, détente aggravated fears that the two superpowers would freeze their strategic options, thus precluding genuinely credible deterrence to protect them. By its very nature, détente, as manifested in SALT I, was encouraging to some and troublesome to others. Two other SALT treaties followed, culminating in the SALT III pact. SALT III was signed by President Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev in 1979 but was never ratified by the U.S. Senate because of Soviet suppression of Jews and dissidents.

Period of tension and competition between two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—lasting from 1945 to 1991. The Cold War defined U.S. foreign policy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who famously referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” As a result, the threat of nuclear annihilation haunted the American popular imagination throughout the 1980’s. At the end of the decade, however, the Cold War came to an end, as the Soviets instituted liberal reforms and the Berlin Wall was torn down. At the beginning of the 1990’s, the so-called evil empire collapsed, and Russia and its former republics and satellite nations embarked on a project of rebuilding and transforming their governments.

The Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and Western democratic countries began soon after the end of World War II. Disputes over territory, a continuing and expanded arms race, deployment of opposing military forces, and rival ideological systems threatened world peace.

The success of Explorer I came soon after the humiliating explosion of America’s Vanguard I only seconds after its launch from Cape Canaveral in late 1957. With Explorer I, the embarrassment of Vanguard quickly diminished. The origin of the Cold War competition to orbit an artificial satellite can be traced to earlier attempts to develop rockets as military weapons. As World War II drew to a close, members of the scientific and engineering team that developed German V-1 and V-2 rockets sought the protection of either Allied or Soviet forces. Among those emigrating to the West was Wernher von Braun . Von Braun and his colleagues began developing and testing missile systems for the U.S. Army. Captured V-2’s test-fired in the New Mexico desert ultimately led to development of advanced rockets.

Struggle for world power carried on between Eastern and Western nations during the post-World War II years of ostensible peace. “Cold war” differs from “hot war”in the matter of violent conflict. In a hot war, actual military hostilities occur. No such hostilities occur in a cold war, but it is the nature of the concept that a cold war can erupt into a hot war at any time. In the historical struggle between the West, led by the United States, and the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, no hot war ever developed. However, a nuclear catastrophe nearly did occur during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Moreover, tensions over the status of West Berlin through the Cold War threatened to erupt militarily at various times. Nevertheless, the two dominant superpowers managed to avoid open hostilities largely because they came to realize what ruin they faced if they allowed their conflict to develop into nuclear warfare.

The cold war between the United States and the former Soviet Union that began shortly after the end of World War II started to wind down in the late 1980s. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was not willing to continue the decades-old conflict, which had taxed the economic and military resources of the Soviet Union to the breaking point. Furthermore, the peoples of the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern Europe were growing increasingly restless under the totalitarian communist regimes that governed them.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an interdisciplinary organization founded in 1972 with the aim of promoting East-West cooperation during the Cold War. It now devotes its efforts to complex systems problems of international or global scope. Through its various programs, IIASA conducts research into major economic, demographic, social, and environmental issues, including global climate change. The scope of IIASA research projects is huge, beyond the capabilities of any one country or national research institution to manage. IIASA research projects collect massive amounts of data on a variety of factors, such as the connection between climate change and air pollution, and then build computer simulations and statistical models based on various “what if” future scenarios. Since the days of its founding in the midst of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, IIASA has maintained a position of strict political neutrality in its research projects. At the same time, IIASA tries to build scientific consensus in order to present credible research findings to technical advisors for political policy makers.

The arrest and confession in 1950 of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had been educated at the University of Edinburgh and who had subsequently worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, led the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to his spy courier, known to Fuchs only as “Raymond.” Raymond was, in fact, Harry Gold, who, in 1950, confessed to his part in a spy ring that involved a technician at Los Alamos named David Greenglass. Once Greenglass was arrested, he implicated his wife, Ruth; his sister, Ethel Rosenberg; and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. Ruth was never arrested, but Julius was arrested in May and Ethel was arrested in August.

At its 555th plenary meeting on December 14, 1955, under the leadership of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and Assembly President José Maza, the U.N. General Assembly adopted resolution 995 (X), admitting sixteen new members to the United Nations. They were Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

The twin historical currents that brought about the Outer Space Treaty can be directly traced to World War II. Although the Communist Party had ruled since 1917 in what became the Soviet Union, and had always been mistrusted by most Western powers, it was only in 1945 that the Soviet Union was in the position to rival the strength and influence of other European powers. Thus, the United States became the leading power among the Western democracies and the Soviet Union became the leader of the Communist bloc.

One of the more entertaining events of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted from the late 1940s until 1991 when the Soviet state collapsed, took place on October 12, 1960. It was on that date that the mercurial Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev took the United Nations General Assembly by surprise when during a heated discussion he took off one of his shoes and started pounding it on his desk, shouting, “We will bury you!” before the stunned delegates. He was referring to the Marxist belief that communism would eventually and inevitably triumph over and succeed capitalism, leaving Western countries such as the United States in the “dustbin of history.” Khrushchev's relationship with the United States was often contradictory, since despite this incident he also worked toward peaceful relations with the West, and yet he would eventually be removed from office by the senior Soviet hierarchy after nearly causing a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

American interests in the Caribbean region go back to the pre-independence era, when Great Britain was developing trade relationships between its Caribbean and North American colonies. After the United States won its Revolutionary War during the early 1780’s, it stood as the only independent nation in the Western Hemisphere. In the early nineteenth century, a wave of independence movements swept throughout Latin America. Ironically, although the Caribbean island nation of Haiti became the second country in the Western Hemisphere to assert its independence in 1804, most of the region’s islands—including all of Great Britain’s colonies— remained colonial dependencies throughout the rest of the century. Some did not become independent until as late as the 1970’s and 1980’s, and ten territories remained colonial dependencies into the twenty-first century.

Relations between Grenada, an independent republic within the British Commonwealth of Nations, and the United States began to deteriorate in the late 1970’s with the creation of a Grenadian Marxist government, the New Jewel Movement (NJM), led by moderate socialist Maurice Bishop. Beginning in 1979, Bishop established cordial relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba, including an exchange of diplomatic recognition and the beginnings of extensive Cuban-Soviet military and financial aid to Grenada. As a result, the United States government initiated a boycott of the Bishop government, refused to accept the credentials of the Grenadian ambassador in Washington, D.C., and withdrew the United States ambassador to Grenada.

President of the United States (1945-1953). Truman defended and institutionalized the New Deal reform program of Franklin D. Roosevelt and established the doctrine of containment that guided American policymakers in the Cold War era. Part of his legacy includes sanctioning the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August, 1945, which ended World War II in the Pacific and placed the Soviet Union in a position of accommodation to U.S. demands.

President of the United States (1981–1989). Reagan stemmed the general feeling of instability that surrounded the office of the US president. Almost by sheer personality and by exuding an enormous self-confidence, Reagan reversed many of the negative images of the office. His tenure was marked by economic recession and recovery, problems of unemployment, complicated foreign affairs, a foreign policy scandal, expanding American military buildup, and silence regarding HIV-AIDS. However, his optimism appealed to voters and his conservatism produced a number of programs that changed American government in fundamental ways.

President of the United States (1953–1961). During World War II, Eisenhower served with distinction as Allied commander for the invasions of North Africa, Italy, and France. He won the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 and guided the United States through eight years of relative peace and prosperity.

Fallout shelters, bomb shelters designed to protect people from radioactive fallout in the event of a nuclear war, were advocated by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in the 1950s. The Korean War (1950–53) and the Hungarian Revolt (1956) spurred fears of imminent war between the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which possessed nuclear weapons. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a steadily ticking “doomsday clock,” and many popular films and works of fiction focused on the possible effects of nuclear war. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, argued that the US government should spend billions of dollars on shelters because he believed they might save 90 percent of the population. Nevertheless, only fifteen hundred shelters had been built by 1960.

The Warsaw Pact—formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance Between the People’s Republic of Albania, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People’s Republic, the Romanian People’s Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Czechoslovak Republic—was signed on May 14, 1955. To a large extent, this multilateral alliance must be seen as an outgrowth of Soviet concerns over the rearming of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).

In a televised press conference on September 9, 1965, President Charles de Gaulle of France startled his Western allies with a threat to pull his country out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by 1969 at the latest, when its twenty-year term expired, because of his wish to “end the subordination which is described as integration.” Suddenly, the essentially political and defensive Atlantic Alliance, which for a generation had stood as Western Europe’s seemingly indispensable bulwark against possible Soviet aggression, was in jeopardy of collapsing from within.

At the close of the Yalta Conference in February of 1945, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had agreed that they would meet again to settle remaining European problems resulting from the defeat of Germany. These problems concerned peace treaties with the former Axis nations and satellites. For the Western Allies, the problems included the Soviet Union’s violation of its agreement to allow the establishment of free governments in Eastern Europe.

Early in 1945, as Russian armies were advancing on Germany through Eastern Europe and American and British armies were entering western Germany, the leaders of the Allied nations met at Yalta, in the Russian Crimea, to consider the political problems arising out of the approaching defeat of Germany, to plan an occupation policy for the conquered nations, and to discuss the problems of the United Nations, Eastern Europe, and the Far East.

Comic books reflected shifts in American culture during the prolonged Cold War period, providing commentary and catharsis while suffering from censorship that forever altered the comic book industry and the medium’s methods of telling stories.

The Cold War War Cold War was a 45-year-long period of bitter competition between two large groups of nations. It lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The two groups never came to direct combat—hence the term “cold”—but it was a war in every other way, fought with deadly ferocity in the political, economic, ideological, and technological arenas. It was also a time of unprecedented investment in new mathematical ideas, driven in part by the desire of each side to dominate the other through nuclear intimidation, economic strength, espionage, and political control. The Cold War had a great impact on mathematics education, on the study of codes and code-breaking algorithms, and the development of new fields such as game theory. More generally, the term “cold war” can be applied to any fight-to-the-death competition between nations in which the two sides avoid direct military combat.

Within two years after the end of World War II, it was becoming increasingly clear in the United States that the nation's wartime alliance with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was turning sour. Many in the United States wondered how this could have happened so quickly. One man who not only gave an answer, but also a prescription for what to do about it was America's chargé d'affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan. Writing in the July 1947 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, under the pseudonym “X,” Kennan wrote from his firsthand knowledge of the Soviet government. He wrote of the history of Russia's desire to expand and the ideological backing now given to it by Stalinism, advising a policy that came to be known as “containment”—the long-term limitation of the Soviets to their own sphere of influence and swift attention whenever they tried to exceed that.

Less than three months after the official end of the World War II, the United States, its allies, and the United Nations began the work of reconstruction. During a Senate debate over an appropriation to the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Michigan senator Arthur H. Vandenberg expressed his concerns over the “iron curtain” that repressed democracy and the free flow of information in the Soviet-occupied nations of central and Eastern Europe. Vandenberg also cautioned against the sharing of information about the American atomic energy program in light of the secretive behavior of the Soviets.

Since the Potsdam Agreement at the end of World War II in August 1945, both the German nation as a whole and its capital city of Berlin had been divided into four zones, each occupied by one of the four victorious Allied Powers. In what became one of the first crises of the Cold War, on June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union began a blockade of the American, British, and French sectors of Berlin, which lay entirely within the Soviet sector of Germany. This resulted in the Berlin Airlift—an unprecedented effort to sustain the food and fuel needs of an entire city. After the blockade had been in effect for nearly ten months, the Soviets showed no signs of weakening resolve, and the Americans showed no signs of ending their flights of supplies. The situation had devolved into a stalemate. At that point, US ambassador-at-large Philip Caryl Jessup contacted Jacob Malik, the Soviet representative to the United Nations Security Council, in an attempt to begin back-channel negotiations that would allow the blockade to come to an end.

The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was signed on August 1, 1975. This agreement, known as the Helsinki Accords, provided the capstone for a series of promising international developments in the early 1970’s and was the formal culmination of the effort to achieve détente between the Soviet Union and its bloc and the West.

The meeting between teams from the United States and the Soviet Union on the ice at Lake Placid, New York, during the Winter Olympics in 1980 was more than just a hockey game. In the aftermath of the debacle of the Vietnam War, many Americans were questioning their nation’s greatness. In addition to long lines at gasoline stations and a stagnant economy, the United States faced trials on the international front. In 1979, Islamic radicals had seized the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, and taken the embassy staff hostage, and the United States seemed impotent to do anything about the situation. In the same year, the Soviet Union extended its influence by invading Afghanistan, again reinforcing the perception that the United States was weak and no longer able to impose its will as a global superpower. At a time when the United States never seemed weaker, the Soviets seemed ever stronger.

Powerful nuclear weapon that generates a large portion of its explosive power through nuclear fusion. J. Robert Oppenheimer led the development of the atomic bomb, but he thought that creating a hydrogen bomb was both unlikely and unnecessary. His stance put him at odds with Edward Teller , who had pushed for the “super,” a fusion bomb, since 1942. The “super” was given priority only after the Soviets tested their atomic bomb in 1949, because it was seen as a way to maintain American dominance of nuclear weapons and thereby limit Soviet adventurism.

On October 5, 1986, the Soviet newspaper Pravda reported in a brief article that a fire had broken out on an unnamed Soviet nuclear submarine carrying ballistic missiles. The ship was in waters some one thousand miles northeast of Bermuda. According to the article, three crew members died in the fire, but the fire had been brought under control with the aid of Soviet ships that came to the rescue. Soviet experts determined that there was no danger of accidental missile discharge or of nuclear leakage from the submarine. Despite the implication in the article that the submarine would be kept afloat, however, two days later Pravda reported that at 11:03 a.m. on October 6, the ship sank.

The summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, between U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on October 11-12, 1986, followed from their first meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1985. Though no arms control agreements were initialed at Geneva, the two leaders of the world’s most powerful states did declare that a nuclear war could not be won by either side and that such a war should never be fought.

U.S. foreign policy to defeat communist expansion by supporting anticommunist forces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Although the term “Reagan Doctrine” was not coined until 1985, the policy of attempting to push back communism was always part of the Ronald Reagan administration’s foreign policy. President Reagan inherited President Jimmy Carter’s policy of actively supporting forces opposing the Soviets and the Soviet-installed government in Afghanistan. Many of Reagan’s conservative allies sought ways of expanding this policy to other locations. Initially, most of the support was handled by covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations, with the second phase being the expansion into Angola and Nicaragua. However, as Congress became aware of this use of the CIA, it began to seek oversight of the operations. After this time, Reagan’s support of anticommunists became part of his public policy.

President Ronald Reagan proposed increases in the military budget to deploy Cruise and Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Europe in order to match the Soviet Union’s SS-20 missiles, thus raising suspicions that he might launch nuclear war against the Soviet Union and frightening many international observers into calling for a freeze on the deployment, development, and manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Structures built to protect people during atomic attacks. Before the invention of atomic bombs, military targets consisted primarily of military bases, factories, and bridges; after atomic bombs, military targets became civilians. When the Soviet Union built its first atomic bomb in 1949 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, Americans (who in 1945 had been first to build and use the bomb) became potential targets for nuclear war.

Winston Churchill, who had been defeated by Clement Attlee in the 1945 British general election, was on a Florida vacation after he was invited with the blessings of Harry S. Truman to speak at a small Presbyterian school, Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill visited Washington, D.C., several times to discuss the contents of the speech with Truman. While traveling by train to Missouri, Churchill made final adjustments to the speech and distributed copies to Truman, his advisers, and the media. Although Truman would subsequently claim not to have known of the contents in advance, he read the speech prior to its delivery. Entitled “The Sinews of Peace,” the lengthy speech was warmly received by the audience and Truman, who was on the platform. Churchill called for Anglo-American solidarity in the face of the Iron Curtain that divided Europe.

The United States declared victory over Japan in World War II on V-J Day, August 15, 1945, following Japan’s unconditional surrender. On September 2, 1945, the date of Japan’s formal surrender, General Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), took control over Japan, but the U.S. government had decided upon basic policies beforehand. SCAP also worked through existing parliamentary institutions and the bureaucracy. General Order Number One assigned the task of demobilizing the Japanese armed forces to the Japanese themselves, a task they completed in two months. MacArthur and his staff, however, would not let the Japanese decide the nature and scope of subsequent reform. When Japanese leaders prepared a draft providing for modest revisions in the Meiji Constitution, U.S. officials instantly rejected it and formulated a new document. Effective in May, 1947, the American-written constitution swept away all vestiges of elitism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Trials punished war criminals, and 200,000 military, government, and business leaders who had supported the war were purged.

Biological warfare antedates by several centuries the discovery of the gene. Just as the history of genetics did not begin with Gregor Mendel, whose pea-plant experiments eventually helped found modern genetics, the history of biological warfare began long before the Japanese dropped germ-filled bombs on several Chinese cities during World War II. For example, the Assyrians, six centuries before the common era, knew enough about rye ergot, a fungus disease, to poison their enemies’ wells. The ancient Greeks also used disease as a military weapon, and the Romans catapulted diseased animals into enemy camps. A famous medieval use of biological weapons occurred during the Tatar siege of Kaffa, a fortified Black Sea port, then held by Christian Genoans. When Tatars started dying of the bubonic plague, the survivors catapulted cadavers into the walled city. Many Genoans consequently died of the plague, and the remnant who sailed back to Italy contributed to the spread of the Black Death into Europe.

President of the United States (1974–1977). Becoming president after Richard M. Nixon resigned in disgrace, Ford restored integrity to the office of president of the United States and a sense of decency and unity to the nation.

Shortly after the end of World War II (1941-1945), the United States and the Soviet Union became engaged in a military, economic, and ideological rivalry known as the Cold War. For more than four decades, the United States carried out a foreign policy aimed at halting the spread of Soviet influence abroad. This “containment” strategy had a domestic counterpart: preventing the infiltration of Soviet agents and the spread of communist ideology in the United States.

The intensification of the Cold War in the 1950’s as well as new technologies made North America increasingly vulnerable to an air-based attack from overseas. The vast reaches of oceans surrounding the continent no longer guaranteed or provided safety from an attack. New missile and aviation technology increased the possibility of a Soviet threat to North America, particularly a bomber attack. Ottawa, the Canadian capital, and Washington, D.C., the U.S. capital, agreed in the early 1950’s to establish three successive radar detection networks, each farther north than the other, to detect a possible air attack.

The end of World War II, with its widespread destruction and loss of life, left the nations of Western Europe with one common bond: a determination to prevent anything like it from ever occurring again. In particular, they were determined to prevent the resurgence of German military power, as had occurred after World War I. They determined, therefore, to sign treaties of mutual defense in which each would come to the aid of another signatory who was the victim of German aggression.

By the mid-1950’s, the two Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had virtually forced most nations, including the poorer nations of the Third World, to align themselves politically, economically, and often militarily with one or the other. The existence of the Warsaw Pact bloc, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) proved the attractiveness of aligning one’s government with one of the superpowers. At the same time, however, the disbanding of the European colonial systems of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium saw the birth of numerous new countries, most of which were highly nationalistic, poor, and fiercely independent. These nations often felt that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union showed sufficient concern for their interests. They felt that the same attitude was displayed by the European powers, which were only now beginning to divest themselves of their colonial empires. Largely at the insistence of the “Colombo Group” (a group of Third World countries that had recently won independence), as well as the urging of Indonesia, Ceylon, Egypt, India, Pakistan, and Burma, the Asian-African, or Bandung, Conference was organized by Indonesian foreign minister Ruslan Abdulgani, with the backing of Indonesian president Sukarno.

Conclusion of the Cold War between the Western democracies led by the United States and the communist nations led by the Soviet Union. While the policies of U.S. president Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had significant impact on the end of the Cold War, the primary factors were internal to the Soviet Union. Symptoms of decline in the Soviet leadership and its system of governing were evident during the late 1970’s. Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, and he immediately moved to diffuse tensions between the East and the West. Gorbachev found the Soviet Union to be in a hopeless condition of stress that resulted from two major causes: a dismal economic and fiscal situation stemming from excessive military spending and exorbitant foreign aid commitments, and mounting public criticism of the war in Afghanistan and, then, in 1986, the government’s handling of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown.

The years following World War II brought not peace but a new kind of conflict. The Western powers, led by the United States, and the Communist block, led by the Soviet Union, vied with each other in a tense diplomatic game termed the cold war. Both sides managed to avoid direct military confrontation, since a “hot” war would inevitably involve nuclear weapons and thus the destruction of the world, but they tested each other's resolve in third-party arenas. One such arena was the Korean peninsula in Asia.

In the winter of 1946-1947, European nations struggled to recover from the widespread devastation of World War II. The conflict had leveled cities, destroyed thousands of factories, disrupted transportation and communication systems, and rendered machinery for extracting raw materials useless. The European standard of living had fallen drastically below prewar levels, even in nations that had not borne the brunt of the fighting. In the spring of 1947, two million British industrial workers were unemployed, and many others were underemployed because of shortages in raw materials. In Italy, industrial production stood at 20 percent of prewar levels. In Germany’s Ruhr region, coal production had dropped to 45 percent of its previous level, and similar declines elsewhere affected industrial production and transportation systems throughout Europe. Millions of homeless and displaced citizens strained the existing social services beyond their limits.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, the capital city Berlin was occupied as was the entire country by the four victorious powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. Berlin, located deep within the Soviet zone of occupation, however, was to be administered jointly by the four powers. In 1948, when the ideological rift between the East and West increased, the Soviets denied the Western powers access to Berlin. The Western allies had sponsored the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, made up of the Western zones of occupation. The Soviets’ main purpose for the blockade was to drive the West out of Berlin to gain a free hand in converting their zone into a communist dictatorship. The Soviets rightly feared that a continued Western presence in the middle of their planned state would prevent the consolidation of the communist political and economic system.

The United States, the Soviet Union, Germany, and other countries pursued separate programs to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. The precise capabilities and effects of such theoretical weapons were not known, but it was generally assumed that they might spell victory for the country that successfully developed them. The United States won that wartime arms race when it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August, 1945. The Japanese surrendered within days.

In the aftermath of the Suez Canal crisis of October, 1956, which created a power vacuum in the Middle East as a result of Great Britain’s and France’s invasion of Egypt, the U.S. government reconsidered its position and policies in the Middle East. Acting through the United Nations, and for once in agreement with the Soviet Union, the United States had brought about the withdrawal of British and French forces from Egypt. The entire episode seemed not only to have weakened Western unity but also to have strengthened the position of the Soviet Union in the Arab countries and that of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, as the leading spokesman of Arab nationalist feeling.