Curated playlist
Cold War terminology
- Western BlocOn the 5th of March 1946, Winston Churchill stood in Fulton, Missouri, and told the world that an "iron curtain has descended across the Continent." That phrase gave shape to a division that had already begun forming, and it named a threat…
- McCarthyismMcCarthyism begins, in many ways, not with the senator whose name it bears, but with a single sheet of paper. On the 9th of February 1950, Joseph McCarthy stood before the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and brandished…
- Three-world modelThe three-world model sorted every nation on Earth into one of three categories, and for decades it shaped how politicians, journalists, and ordinary people understood global power. At its heart, the model was a lens of political analysis…
- Warsaw PactThe Warsaw Pact was born on the 14th of May 1955, eight days after West Germany joined NATO. Its founding declaration accused a remilitarized Western Germany of increasing "the danger of another war" and posing a threat to "the national…
- Third WorldThird World is a term born in crisis, coined not by a politician but by a demographer named Alfred Sauvy. On the 14th of August, 1952, his article appeared in the French magazine L'Observateur, and the phrase he used, tiers monde, was a…
- Sputnik 1Sputnik 1, a polished metal sphere barely 58 centimetres across, crossed the sky on the 4th of October 1957 and changed everything. At 19:28:34 UTC, the Soviet Union launched it from a remote stretch of the Kazakh steppe, and within…
- Second WorldThe Second World was one of three categories that Cold War strategists used to divide all of humanity. At its core sat the Soviet Union, founded in 1922, and around it orbited states from Mongolia to Cuba, from East Germany to Angola. The…
- Deterrence theoryDeterrence theory begins with an uncomfortable admission. Robert McNamara, who managed the Cuban Missile Crisis as US Secretary of Defense, later said that "it was luck that prevented nuclear war." Dean Acheson called the same crisis's…
- Iron CurtainFrom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Winston Churchill spoke those words on the 5th of March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Harry Truman…
- First WorldFirst World is a geopolitical label that carries more history than most people realize. It did not begin as a measure of wealth or living standards. It began as a weapon of the Cold War, a way of sorting the globe into camps based on which…
- We will bury you"We will bury you!" rang through the Polish embassy in Moscow on the 18th of November, 1956. Nikita Khrushchev stood before the assembled Western ambassadors and declared: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side." His personal…
- Strategic Defense InitiativeThe Strategic Defense Initiative arrived in the public imagination on the 23rd of March 1983, when President Ronald Reagan looked into a camera and asked America's scientists to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The speech…
- Domino theoryIn 1945, the Soviet Union brought most of the countries of eastern Europe and Central Europe into its influence as part of the post-World War II new settlement. This shift prompted Winston Churchill to declare in a speech at Westminster…