Chapter 22

The second half of chapter 22 seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.  The brief alliances made in World War II between the United States, Russia, and Britain to stop Germany worked effectively in solving that problem but they were not necessarily good matches for each other as Russia and the United States saw each other’s way of governing was wrong. This was the cause of a bitter rivalry and division of all of Europe and most of the world. Fortunately though, the battle that seemed most imminent did not occur due to agreements made by JFK and the Soviet leader. However all these threats and fragile relationships still ended up having a huge impact in the form of the nuclear arms race. Though no one really fought each other in the cold war, the arms race was definitely a huge result which still today is a problem seeing as how we have enough bombs to blow up the world 20 times over. I mean that sounds like a lot of power but what are we going to do with the extra 19 when we destroy the world the first time. Nuclear weapons have been a huge problem since the cold war because of Russia, and now it is still a problem because of countries in the Middle East and North Korea working on these things that could potentially destroy us. In America we seem to think that we should be able to police the whole world and try to control who should be able to have these globe changing weapons but the question is, should ANYBODY have them at all? Furthermore, we have the expansion of military bases throughout the world and the chapter says that there were over a million soldiers in 30 countries including Greenland, because the polar bears were definitely a serious threat to our national security (sarcasm), and we have also had a bunch of roles in different alliances and treaties. Overall, it seems that we just went way overboard on trying to defend ourselves having soldiers all over the world and building even bigger bombs than the Atom bombs dropped in Japan.  Maybe at the time all these precautions seemed necessary but looking back it’s hard to justify the need for all those things looking at how things turned out because of our actions then, but then again hindsight is pretty much always 20/20. A lot of times in history the cold war was a scary time in America because of McCarthyism and the Red Scare and we think that we had the worst of it. However, when you look at Eastern Europe they had it a lot worse than we did. The Russian people themselves were victims of relentless propaganda and the Sovets even had to go into their supposed allies’ counties to put down resistance groups which really says a lot about the freedom of choice Eastern Europe had under the communist bloc during the Cold War. Overall, the cold war was a really accurate name for this time period as the relationships between countries and communication between governments and people were extremely cold; figuratively of course.