Skip to main content

How We Outlived The Bomb

March 2023
1min read

The Cold War
A History

by Martin Walker, Henry Holt, 392 pages, $30.00 . CODE: HHC-2

Martin Walker, U.S. bureau chief for the British Guardian and author of a book on the Gorbachev era in Russia, The Waking Giant , has written what should become a basic text in the new field of Cold War studies. The numbing standoff that settled in after 1945 and came to bristle with nuclear menace is still difficult to think of as a single series of events like a great war. But Walker helps by stitching together the worldwide struggles of five decades into one convincing narrative. The familiar rhetoric, suspicion, armaments, and terrors all look different—are almost ennobled—taken as one story with a definite conclusion. “The Cold War was truly a global conflict,” Walker writes, “more so than either of the century’s two world wars…. [It] was also the first total war between economic and social systems,” and “the West prevailed because its economy proved able to supply guns as well as butter, aircraft-carriers and private cars, rockets as well as foreign holidays.”

Walker shows how U.S.-Soviet relations, warm toward the end of World War II, chilled over just one hundred days in 1945 and 1946. He follows the rivalry’s powerful effect on the growth of California and the Pacific Rim, the temporary stasis of détente, the crusade rejoined under Ronald Reagan, all leading up to 1989, when the Eastern bloc gently cracked apart. At the Cold War’s height, “Turks fought in Korea, Algerians fought in Vietnam, Cubans fought in Angola, and American and Russian schoolchildren, whose lessons had been interrupted by nuclear air-raid drills, grew up to die in Saigon and Kabul.” In the conclusion to this intelligent and highly readable history Walker warns that today, as in 1945, the opportunities of our hard-earned peace could be lost and Russia left once more dangerously estranged.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "September 1994"

Authored by: The Editors

“With Bleeding
Footsteps” Mary Baker
Eddy’s Path to Religious
Leadership

Authored by: The Editors

Defend the Valley
A Shenandoah Family in
the Civil War

Authored by: The Editors

The Cold War
A History

Authored by: The Editors

Juba to Jive
A Dictionary of African-
American Slang

Authored by: The Editors

The Face of Mercy
A Photographic History of
Medicine at War

Authored by: The Editors

McElfresh Map Co.
Civil War Maps

Authored by: The Editors

Taking Charge
The Electric Automobile in
America

Authored by: The Editors

Long Time Ago
American Songs by Aaron Copland

Authored by: The Editors

This Is San Francisco
A Classic Portrait of the City

Authored by: The Editors

Knopf Guides

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.