Today we’re looking at an essay from October of 1945 by George Orwell called “You and the Atom Bomb”.  In this essay Orwell speculates on the future of the world and gets a few things right and is off target on a few other things, either way it’s good insight into the times from one …

Today we’re looking at the division of Germany immediately following WWII.  This is significant because, well, it will ultimately end up as the major fault line and focal point of the Cold War.  Germany will truly be where East meets West in the world going forward. In this episode we will just look at the …

The story of one of the most famous songs of Russia (and the world, really) is very similar to that of Alexander Nevsky.   This song is remarkably unpolitical, which leads us to ask if it’s a sign of things to come for the USSR – will they abandon revolutionary zeal in favor of more …

We’re right around the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…and every year at this time the moral debate of whether or not it was ok to nuke Japan in order to (potentially) forego an invasion of mainland Japan and save hundreds of thousands of American lives. There’s more to the story …

As the war was winding down, members from all 44 allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to discuss the postwar economic order.   Over the course of three weeks, they hammered out the details on creating the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the precursor to the World Bank (the International Bank of Reconstruction and …

The Manhattan Project was a top secret collaboration between the US government and the civilian scientific community to take the theory of an atomic bomb into reality.   Spoiler alert – it worked.  This program was one of the most remarkable scientific achievements in history, especially considering it was pulled off during a time of …

Along with Orwell’s 1984, this book is one of the most important of the Cold War era.   Orwell was a socialist and not entirely unsympathetic to the political theories behind communism.  Instead of building bridges between the Soviet regime and the Western democracies, he wound up being one of the fiercest critics of the …

In April of 1945 Soviet and American troops met in the middle of Germany in the town of Torgau on the Elbe River.   This meeting produced some great photo ops and the last “warm” moment between the two ideological camps for quite some time.   While there was a real “mission accomplished” feel to …

Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt – all under one roof!   Well, maybe not at Potsdam.  The heads of state of the UK, US and USSR met three times during the course of the war to discuss war plans and the postwar world order.   These conferences not only brought them literally face to face, but …

This one is slightly off our timeline, but last week Russia celebrated Victory Day, commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.  The Victory Day parade in Red Square has produced some of the most iconic imagery of the Cold War over the course of time and today is a bit of a throwback to …