Munich Shuffle Aftermath

1945-1983

De: Michael Mullen

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Not the End of History…

The Allied victory in May 1945 may have brought a superficial peace, but war time alliances soon broke down and the Cold War saw the Iron Curtain descend across Europe. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany were divided between the western powers and the USSR, and fear of the latter would see wartime enemies seeking to form a common front. The conflict between capitalism and communism also reached out to Asia, which had its own long-standing enmities that came to the surface as China began its rise to become a global power and Japan refused to come to terms with the brutality of its imperial ambitions.
This competition for prestige and power led to vast technological and scientific progress. This was a double-edged sword. The same rockets that could explore the high frontier of space or deliver nuclear weapons to all corners of the globe and it would be years before anyone truly understood the consequences of using the atomic bomb in anger.
For some countries the postwar decades came to be seen as a golden age, but not every shared in the prosperity and for some nations division and oppression remained the norm. Whether one saw it as a time of greatness or suffering no era lasts forever and the global status quo began to fall apart at the beginning of the 1980s…