FREE: THE COLD WAR | A History

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The Cold War | A History
By Martin Walker
Paperback | 1995 | 416 pages

"The history of the Cold War has been the history of the world since 1954." So begins this wide-ranging narrative by an award-winning political commentator, which is the first major study of the Cold War. Now that it is over, it is crucial to our future to understand how the Cold War has shaped us and, especially, to recognize it as the economic and political dynamic that determined the structure of global economy.
 
Walker reminds us how easy it is to forget that there were many occasions for the late 1940s on when victory seemed far from assured, and that lent a particular urgency to the efforts of postwar Western leaders. The West continued to be alarmed by the prospect of defeat right up to the Soviet empire's last breath. At the end of the 1940s the fear was generated by communist expansion into Eastern Europe and China; in the 1960s by the prospect of defeat in Vietnam. In the 1970s the failure of détente and the West's economic crisis brought a new generation of dedicated anti-Communists to prominence. For more than forty years, as this detailed analysis makes clear, the outcome of the Cold War was in doubt.

Using newly opened Kremlin archives and his own experiences in the field, the author has written a brilliant analysis of the conflict that has shaped the contemporary world.