aren't you glad the cold war's over?

I wouldn't swop my current unease on George Bush Jr's warmongering against an outnumbered and outgunned state with the real prospect of mutually assured destruction. Equally I'm very glad that the hawk in the White House wasn't in said house then (unless it was to visit his pa).

One thing I do know for certain -- the Poles are definitely that the Russians are gone. Though that has as much if not more to do with history and culture than economics.

but the post-cold war world is much less stable, i think, and all those weapons didn't disappear (or, at least, not very many of them did). neither did the kind of leaders we felt uneasy about then, knowing they could exercise the nuclear 'option'.

maybe i'm just a half-empty kind of guy but it seems very unlikely to me that we'll get to the 100th anniversary of hiroshima and nagasaki without another one getting used by someone or other. and i think the end of the cold war, in a way, makes this more likely to happen.

With Ally Sheedy and bad Amstradtastic war-sim graphics? BESTEST!

Alan T, will you marry me?

Can anyone who knows about such things tell me whether the historical (!) evidence suggests that post-Cuban MC how real this possibility was? Obv. we were fed the line that the Soviets were planning to take us all over any moment, but was there ever an expansionary agenda in place? Or are we just talking about mutual paranoia and mistrust resulting in the button being pressed in the fear that the other side were about to do something? In which case, couldn't we still see the US doing this?

Can we talk about WarGames yet?

Or Nena!

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/nyregion/17SILO.html

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n15/gabriel-winant/we-can-breathe

"The Cold War’s chief political accomplishment may well have been the end of the international solidarity formed in the fight against fascism."

This piece is a great little digest of left-wing militant history.

It's nice isn't it? The quiet

From Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method, page 68:

“It’s the strategy of divide
et impera,” (Sakono) said, using the Latin for “divide and conquer.” “It is the Cold
War,” he said. “Let me explain—‘Cold War’ is the name they have given to
the process by which America tries to dominate countries like Indonesia.”

Did the cold war end, or just shift into different phases

Yes that's right in the same way that "fall of the Roman Empire" is an illusory myth but at the same time there is a clear fracture along ideological lines and the question here as events unfold is "was totalitarianism worse than libertarian dictatorship in the big scheme?"