The Wars Of History
Painted portrait of people in heavy coats walking through a snowy city during the Cold War

The file on

Cold War

c. 1947-1991

Documentary coming soon

For more than forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union prepared for a war that would have ended civilization, and that war never came. In this hour-long episode of The Wars Of History Podcast, Mike tells the full story of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991, a struggle of ideas, spies, rockets and nerves that shaped borders, governments and daily life across the planet. It's a conversational deep dive that gives a fair hearing to the American side, the Soviet side, and the many non-aligned countries that refused to choose either camp.

We begin with American and Soviet soldiers shaking hands on the Elbe, the huge Soviet losses of World War II, Yalta, Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, George Kennan's Long Telegram and containment, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Then the Berlin Blockade and Airlift, Gail Halvorsen the "Candy Bomber", the founding of NATO, the first Soviet atomic bomb and Mao's victory in China.

Next, the Cold War turns hot in the Korean War, the hydrogen bomb and mutually assured destruction, duck and cover drills, McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Stalin's Gulag and Khrushchev's secret speech, and Eisenhower's "Chance for Peace" speech. We look at the CIA-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala, the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement of Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah and Tito, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Sputnik.

Then the Kitchen Debate, the U-2 incident, Yuri Gagarin, the Bay of Pigs, the building of the Berlin Wall, Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" and the Cuban Missile Crisis, including Khrushchev's "knot of war" letter, Black Saturday, Vasily Arkhipov aboard submarine B-59, the secret Turkey deal, the hotline and the test ban treaty.

After that come the Prague Spring, the Sino-Soviet split, Nixon in China, SALT and détente, the Apollo 11 Moon landing and the Apollo-Soyuz handshake, the Helsinki Accords, Andrei Sakharov and Václav Havel. We cover the proxy wars in Congo, Chile, Angola, Ethiopia, Central America and Afghanistan, the Olympic boycotts and Poland's Solidarity movement.

Finally, 1983's war scare (Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Stanislav Petrov's false alarm, Able Archer), Reagan and Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, Chernobyl, the Geneva and Reykjavik summits, "tear down this wall," the Baltic Way, Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution, German reunification, the 1991 coup and the end of the Soviet Union. We close with seven lessons from the Cold War.

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