Chamberlin will examine the darker side of the superpower struggle: a vast, bloody conflict fought to prevent nuclear war, mark out the boundaries of the American and Soviet empires, and decide the fate of societies throughout the developing world. The Cold War tore through the Third World as a series of military interventions, proxy wars, and violent revolutions – a nearly unbroken chain of violence between 1945 and 1990 that left some 15 million dead.