From behind the iron curtain

To cut a long story short, the cold war was a bizarre period of time that emerged from the allies failing to agree on who should decide what happened to Germany and the liberated lands of Europe immediately after World War 2. Nothing really happened – there was no real war, yet it fuelled a silent, super long distance game of tug-o-war between Russia and the United States, with Britain and everyone else sandwiched in between. If you weren’t communist, you were Russia’s enemy. Meanwhile, if you weren’t American or at the very least from Western Europe, you were 100% a communist. The US is said to have spent more than $8 trillion on military expenditures alone, and raced the Russians to the moon in order to try and bankrupt them into submission. Without delving any further into the greasy details – of which there are nearly five decades worth – it was a completely bonkers ordeal but without such a period of intensive rivalry much of the 20th century technology that we were graced with simply wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for their metaphorical sausage-swinging. That (I think) brings us not so graciously to the subject in question.

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