Cold War

The final years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule were marked by political uncertainty, international tension, and the long shadow cast by India’s 1962 war with China.

In 1961, rattled by Soviet advances in space, President John F. Kennedy declared that, within a decade, the United States would land a man on the Moon. David Baker tells the story of how it took the US Air Force to change NASA and make the dream a reality.

Though Harold Wilson’s government rejected US requests to send British troops to Vietnam, Britain did not stay out of the war.

Geoffrey Chandler analyses the complex pattern of reasons why Greece became the arena where the first violent post-war trial of strength took place between Communism and the West.

During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.

Bashar al-Assad is a child of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. These events underpin Syria’s authoritarian regime and its horrific actions.

Roger Howard recalls a moment when Israel was rocked by exaggerated claims of a threat posed by Egypt.

For over half a century, James Bond’s mix of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ has proved enduringly popular, outlasting the Cold War that birthed him. Why? 

The battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a key moment in the smokescreen conflict of the Cold War played out in southern Africa. Gary Baines looks at the ways in which opposing sides are now remembering the event.