Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship and newly uncovered evidence, this book discusses cold war politics, superpower confrontations, and the threat of nuclear disaster that engulfed the world from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Comrades, 1917-1945 -- Iron Curtain, 1945-1947 -- Marshall Plan, 1947-1952 -- Berlin, 1948-1949 -- Korea, 1949-1953 -- Reds, 1948-1953 -- After Stalin, 1953-1956 -- Sputnik and the Bomb, 1949-1961 -- The wall, 1958-1963 -- Back yard : Guatemala and Cuba, 1954-1962 -- Vietnam, 1954-1968 -- MAD, 1961-1972 -- Culture wars, 1960-1968 -- Detente, 1969-1975 -- Surrogates, 1967-1978 -- Freeze, 1977-1981 -- Reagan, 1981-1984 -- Gorbachev, 1984-1988 -- People power, 1989 -- Endings, 1990-1991.