I joined the Communist Party when I was 18. When I was 10, there was the miners’ strike, and the Cold War was going on; it was quite a potent time to get involved in politics. I got involved through my grandfather, who was a member.
On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, and within a few weeks the full-scale reformation he attempted to carry out both inside his country and in its cold war relations with the West, particularly the United States, began to unfold.
After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.
I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn’t.
What Americans can’t face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.
To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.
For far too long we have continued to mark our military prowess by the size of our forces: believing that numbers of ships, planes, and brigades is what most matters – just like during the Cold War.
Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.
The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn’t really affect it.
The Bay of Pigs is one of America’s most infamous Cold War blunders, and it has been studied, debated, and dramatized endlessly ever since.
With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.
The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.
For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they’d take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country’s most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination.
So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.
The first ‘Red Dawn’ was made at a time when Hollywood didn’t stint in its use of Russian stereotypes. Cold war capitalist ideology construed the Soviets as different for two reasons – not only did they belong to another political-economic system, they didn’t seem to possess the same emotions that ‘we’ do.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, it has been our paramount interest in Europe to strengthen NATO and to extend it – an effort I was part of when I served in the State Department and the NSC in two administrations.
Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden.
The lessons Noam Chomsky sets out to teach us in ‘Toward a New Cold War’ are invaluable. The United States, like any other nations, can and does err, and often in a big way. But Chomsky cannot support at all his implicit diagnosis that America is ‘bad.’
Amin is the shame of the whole world. The fact that he managed to rule so long and commit so many crimes was only possible thanks to the hypocrisy of the East and the West who were waging the Cold War for world domination.
We’ve always had this experience that things take long, but I’m 100% convinced that our principles will in the end prevail. No one knew how the Cold War would end at the time, but it did end. This is within our living experience… I’m surprised at how fainthearted we sometimes are and how quickly we lose courage.
The ’60s are my favorite decade – with the Cold War, the women’s movement. And then there’s the music, the fashion, the clothes, the hair.
We in the West walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again, there will be consequences.
All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude for his strong, principled leadership that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to millions of people.
Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe.
In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.
Following the end of the Cold War, there was much discussion concerning the point of NATO. In the event, it was reinvented as a means of reducing Russia’s reach on its western frontiers and seeking to isolate it. Its former East European client states were admitted to NATO, as were the Baltic states.
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn’t easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
Yuri’s Night is a world celebration for everyone who’s interested in a human presence in space – without concern for politics, the Cold War, countries that do and don’t have space programs.
People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.
The safest period of my lifetime was the Cold War, when Europe was more sharply divided than ever.
The new century has brought on its own terrible dangers, which although not reaching the apocalyptic potential of the Cold War, still have the capacity to shake our world.
Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we’re moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.
By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over.
The Cold War was obviously driven by a very intense ideological struggle that was very clearly defined.
You know, there is a long tradition in the U.S. of, um, promoting elections up to the point that you get an outcome you don’t like. Look at Latin America in the Cold War.
When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.
The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.
The ‘Bachelor’ producers have scripted and are responsible for certain events: the first moon landing, the end of the cold war, Astro-turf, and the Internet (sorry, Al Gore, it was us). But we are not responsible for, nor have we ever scripted, the ending of this show.
Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.
One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush’s foreign policy – above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should send troops to Vietnam.
I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.
What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world, and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by any supposed national interest.
Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War – both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There’s a pulse to it.
One effect could be that the huge atomic arsenal created in the cold war could be reduced significantly.
I go into Daunt Books in Marylebone every couple of weeks. My wife Sara demolishes books, but I only buy stuff occasionally. I like boys’ things, spies and the Cold War.
Both World War II and the subsequent Cold War gave America’s involvement in world affairs a clear focus. The objectives of foreign policy were relatively easy to define, and they could be imbued with high moral content.
The Berlin Wall wasn’t the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.
Before progressives were apocalyptic about climate change they were apocalyptic about nuclear energy. Then, after the Cold War ended, and the threat of nuclear war declined radically, they found a new vehicle for their secular apocalypse in the form of climate change.
