What held the two sides back from a hot war ... was the certain knowle — Cold War

"You know, I thought that when we ended the Cold War, one of the most profound, I would say, principles was one that President Gorbachev, then the president of the Soviet Union, expounded. He said, you know, security must be security for all. And that was precisely how he justified reduction in the Soviet military. And even before the Soviet Union broke up, we were living in peace, and we had a united Europe. Many people seem to feel that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the end of the Cold War. That’s wrong. It had ended two years before that. And the breakup of the Soviet Union did not occur because of Western pressure; it occurred because of internal pressures within the Soviet Union. And it was something that President Bush did not wish. As a matter of fact, one of his last speeches, when there was a Soviet Union, was in Kyiv, when he advised Ukrainians to join Gorbachev’s voluntary federation, that he was proposing, and actually warned against suicidal nationalism. Those words, you know, are not remembered much now. People seem to think that Ukraine is free because of the end of the Cold War and the pressure of the West as one of the fruits of victory in the Cold War. This is simply incorrect. It turns history upside down."

"Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But it was also the way out of Wertham’s trap. By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically."

"Israel has fought one battle after another, clinging to survival in the decades after its people were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. But the story of self-determination and Arab-Israeli conflicts spills out far beyond the borders of the Middle East. Israel wasn’t just the site of regional disputes—it was a Cold War satellite, wrapped up in the interests of the Soviets and the Americans. The U.S.S.R. started exerting regional influence in a meaningful way in 1955, when it began supplying Egypt with military equipment. The next year, Britain and the U.S. withdrew financing for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam project over the country’s ties with the U.S.S.R. That move triggered the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Egypt, with the support of the USSR, nationalized the Suez Canal, which had previously been controlled by French and British interests."

"In the Soviet Union the fear that the West was about to unleash a hot war was growing. The installation of the Reagan regime and its inflammatory rhetoric had so concerned the Soviets that at a session of the KGB high command and senior staff, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chief Yuri Andropov stated that the United States was actively preparing for a nuclear attack on the USSR. It was announced internally that the KGB and Soviet military intelligence would mount a new intelligence collection operation aimed at monitoring nuclear preparedness and to warn of U.S. nuclear war preparations. The intelligence alert sought information on key U.S./NATO political and strategic decisions about the USSR and the Warsaw Treaty Organization; early warning of U.S./ NATO preparations for launching a surprise nuclear attack; and new U.S./NATO weapons systems intended for use in a surprise nuclear attack. Code named Operation RYaN for raketno-yadernoye napadenie, or nuclear-rocket attack, agents spread across Europe and the rest of the world in search of the signs of an impending U.S. attack on the Soviet Union."

"The globalization of the Cold War took place in the course of the 1950s. In its geopolitical aspect, this was the natural outcome of a confrontation that pitted one power which dominated the land mass of Eurasia against another which could project land, sea, and air forces to all parts of the world. In its political, economic, and ideological aspects it reflected the rivalry of one bloc with pretensions to the worldwide patronage of communist-led revolution and another wedded to democracy, capitalism, and free trade."

"Suspicions and fears of others, from rival gangs to countries, can create perceptions of threats even where they might not exist, just as they do for our cousins the chimpanzees. During the Cold War the mutual mistrust of the West and the Soviet bloc meant that each tended to interpret words and actions by the other, even accidents, in the most unfavourable light. A bear trying to climb a fence around an American missile was mistaken for enemy intruders, flocks of birds appeared on American and Canadian radar to be planes or missiles, or the sun glinting off clouds looked like an incoming attack to Soviet technicians, and the Third World War, briefly, came much closer. Once an American technician put a training tape into a computer at the North American Air Defense Command by mistake and suddenly command centres got warnings that Soviet missiles were heading in. Bomber crews went to their planes and American missiles were put on heightened alert. Fortunately the mistake was discovered in time. In 1983, after it had accidentally shot down the Korean airliner KAL007, the Soviet Union wove together unrelated coincidences – NATO training exercises, for example, and an increase in encrypted communications between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan – to construct a scenario of an imminent nuclear attack."