Cold War crucible: the Korean Conflict and the postwar world

'Cold War Crucible' reveals the Korean War as the catalyst for a new postwar order.

The conflict led people to believe in the Cold War as a dangerous reality, a belief that would define the fears of two generations.

Alarmed by the idea of enemies from within and faced with the notion of a bipolar conflict that could quickly go from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount.

In discovering how policymaking and popular opinion combined to establish and propagate the new postwar reality, 'Cold War Crucible' offers a history that reorients our understanding of what the Cold War really was.