The Cold War: Seven Minutes to Midnight

The end of the Second World War was met with riotous jubilation at the victory over the Axis powers and with the establishment of the United Nations there was the dream of a new world order of freedom, prosperity and above all peace. Even the advent of the Atom Bomb, the decisive weapon that ended the war was celebrated for it was believed it was so powerful it would render warfare obsolete.

And yet even before the guns fell silent, concerned whispers were being shared in the halls of power regarding the capitalist Allies of the west and the communists in the east who hitherto had been united against Fascism. With there no longer being a common enemy to unite them, age-old rivalries and fears began to re-emerge. 

The western Allies of America, Britain, Canada and France had not forgotten that the Soviet leader Stalin had worked with the Nazis to carve up eastern Europe before Germany invaded Poland in 1939. They were also concerned about Stalin’s refusal to surrender his grip on territories in eastern Europe which the Red Army had liberated and his land grab in Asia during his last-minute intervention in the Pacific theatre against Japan.

Stalin himself, as paranoid as ever, was convinced that the western allies deliberately delayed the D-Day landings in order to bleed the Soviet Union of its people in an effort to weaken the vast country. The fact that American soldiers had fought in the Russian Civil War against the Communists in 1919 only helped fuel his belief that after Napoleon and Hitler, the next leader to take a massive army into the Soviet Union would be American.

With both America and the Soviet Union having suffered devastating surprise attacks in the war, they were both determined that it would never happen again. They readied their armies to fight what would prove to be one of the most abstract conflicts in history – the Cold War.