The Silent Conflict

It was a war in which the two main combatants never fired a shot at each other, yet it shaped nearly half a century of human history, redrew the map of the world, sent men to the Moon, and brought civilization within minutes of annihilation. From the rubble of 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War was the organizing fact of American life—the lens through which every election, every invention, and every foreign crisis was seen. John F. Kennedy called it "the long twilight struggle," and no phrase has ever described it better: not quite war, never quite peace. The conflict began where World War II ended. The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies of necessity against Hitler, but their visions for the postwar world were irreconcilable.