Cold War

Shortly before his death, Hyman Frankel, the last surviving member of the team whose work led to the development of the atom bomb, talked to Maureen Paton about why he decided not to join the Manhattan Project.

In 1959 Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba after a masterly campaign of guerrilla warfare. Drawing on this success, Castro and his followers, including Che Guevara, sought to spread their revolution, as Clive Foss explains.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 kept the cold continent out ofthe Cold War and fostered collaboration on scientific research. The world now faces a different challenge as climate change affects this vast region.

Military concerns drove the development of nuclear weapons. But a by-product of this huge deployment of scientific resources by the US and the UK was an upsurge in biological research leading to a new age of regenerative medicine. Alison Kraft discusses the history of stem cell biology.

Ed Dutton looks at how the experience of Finland during the period 1945 to 1989 has led to a historical identity crisis for the nation that remains unresolved.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 two German nations became one for the first time in almost half a century. Paul Betts looks at the further consequences of the collapse of Soviet Communism.

Mark Rathbone analyses the continuing influence of the Munich conference on post-war events.

Richard Cavendish explains how, on September 12th, 1959, the Soviet Union launched Luna 2, the first spacecraft to successfully reach the Moon.

Catherine Merridale examines competing versions of Russia's troubled past in the light of present politics.

In 1969 men set foot on the Moon for the first time. The Apollo space programme that put them there was the product of an age of optimism and daring very different from our own, argues André Balogh.