Given Russia’s historical experience of invasions from the West and the immense death toll it recorded during the war (estimated at 27 million), the Soviet Union sought to increase security by dominating the internal affairs of countries on which it bordered, and especially Germany. Having combined to defeat the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), the Allies (principally, the USSR, the United States, and the United Kingdom) found themselves disagreeing on the shape of the postwar world. At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, the Allies could not reach a consensus on crucial questions like the occupation of Germany and whether Germany should be forced to pay reparations again. The addition of atomic bombs to their respective arsenals entitled them to a new title: superpowers. With the old “great powers” of Europe exhausted and battered by World War II, the United States (largely unscathed, the main creditor state in the world, and heavily industrialized) and the Soviet Union (badly beaten up but in a position to rebuild its defenses) emerged as the dominant powers. The Cold War was so named as it never featured direct military action between the two superpowers or their main allies. Its origins can be traced to several sources but it rapidly became a war of postures and proxy wars between the two heavy-hitters, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Cold War refers to the period of heightened tensions between the West (that is, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and their allies) and the Soviet Union, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1991. Lambert, reads a comic book in a foxhole in Korea, 1951. A soldier with the Vandoos, Private G.U.I. And you can enjoy them too: here are 10 of the best spy stories from Cold War history.9.4 The Cold War Figure 9.14 War is mostly about waiting. So I’ll have to stick to reading spy books. For starters, I’m a terrible liar and I hate to travel. ![]() But I always find the ones about spies to be the coolest. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been a ton of incredible Cold War history books written about all aspects of that period in history. ![]() The real-life spies involved in the long history of the Cold War were in it to win it. You’ve probably seen The Americans, and maybe you thought it was fake, but it’s not that far from the truth. And in those forty-something years, that is a heck of a lot of spying. Cold War spies account for some of the most audacious, long-lasting spy missions in history. That’s a long time to not actually be fighting. It is generally considered to span from the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It didn’t involve thousands of armed men fighting it out on battlefields, but instead was the name for the period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, after World War II. Because a war involving direct battle with nuclear weapons is called a hot war, this period of indirect conflict that had no actual large-scale battles was instead named the Cold War. The Cold War was not a war in the traditional sense. Or in the case of Cold War history, the lack of a war. Or they are spies out of necessity because of a war. When kids are little and adults ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they often say things like ‘fireman,’ ‘astronaut,’ and ‘dancer.’ But do you think any kid ever says ‘spy?’ I ask this because it seems like so many of the most famous spies start off in other professions.
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