The Cold War

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to fall apart.

By 1948 the Soviets had installed left wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe and were intent on spreading communism worldwide.

The threat that this posed to the Western ideal of democracy sparked the fierce political battle that was to become known as the Cold War.

A war waged on ideological, political, economic and propaganda fronts, with only limited recourse to weapons, it dominated western politics and international relations from the end of the Second World War until the collapse and splintering of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this highly readable, accessible and important book, Tony Judt explains this most ideological and unbloody of wars.

He discusses the key events of the birth of Nato, the role of nuclear weapons, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall - historical realities that have shaped the political and geographical picture of Europe and that are embedded in all our consciousnesses.