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Truman advisor Bernard Baruch coined the phrase “Cold War” to encompass enemies both abroad and at home. With the increasing pitch of the Berlin crisis, the term became widely applied to the tension between the “superpowers”.⁷ The perspective evidenced by both regimes was hegemonic, assuming that political power could be maintained in uncertain equilibrium by global military superiority. This view of history was retrospective, propounding a logistic of conventional military stalemate outside of a formal declaration of war. It created the material substance of the Cold War. This entrenchment was possible in 1948 because both juggernauts conducted their antagonism by proxy. An aversion to new bloodshed further stimulated a conflict of interests expressed in political re-alignment and economic prosperity on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Churchill’s metaphor is apt: the steely veil between superpowers rendered the adversaries faceless. Civil conflict such as in Czechoslovakia and Hungary characterised this first Cold War view of history, one which allowed the implacable nature of mass militarism to be considered as a power asset. Investment in NATO (1948) and the Warsaw Pact (1955), meant that the peace dividend associated with de-militarisation was largely foregone.

The Cold War, plausibly, was perpetuated by a different view of history, founded on resurgent optimism. Its primary exponents, John F Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev: both envisioned mankind’s destiny as enabled by the power of science. Reaching for the stars became a literal objective. “Space programmes” assumed a major propaganda role.

If this view of history was forward thinking and progressive, it was nevertheless directed at discovering improved methods of delivering a nuclear payload. A crucial difference between the retrospective stalemate of Eisenhower and Malenkov on the one hand and Kennedy and Krushchev on the other, was that the emerging political agenda addressed limitless horizons where man’s future was liberated by unleashing individual potential and seizing as its corollary equally boundless military potency. Over the decades succeeding the USSR becoming a nuclear power in 1949, the United States became increasingly concerned about communism as an insurgency and the ability of the USSR to deliver a nuclear first strike. A transition took place underwritten by an Armageddon scenario. This view of history, despite promulgating an atmosphere of boundless scientific achievement, offered the prospect of human annihilation and shifted the military focus away from conventional tactics.