river deep, mountain high

And I was thinking the Cold War with the Soviet Union avoided
the Ultimate Insanity: matching nuclear capability vs. nuclear capability and thus Blowing Up The World,
by instead
expressing the conflict in ground wars, mainly 3, I think:

1. Korea in the 50s
2. Vietnam in the 60s and into the 70s
3. Afghanistan in the 80s -- which most people didn't know about because WE didn't fight it, the Afghans fought it & we arranged for them to get weapons (see film "Charlie Wilson's War"...many of us didn't understand U.S. backing of the 1980s Afghan rebel effort until four years ago when that movie came out.

We must turn to Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts to find out what's going on in world ...)

Basically -- meeting Soviet / communist aggression and pushing it back. And it's at the end of the 80s that the "wall came down" and communism was abruptly -- over. (Well, in Russia, anyway -- but they were the main ones...)

That's four-and-a-half decades of continuing struggle and periodically-renewed conflict, following World War II, to see communism defeated.

When I was a little kid, and while growing up, I didn't think we'd ever see the end of the Soviet Union. I thought that was simply a world dynamic we were going to live with forever.

And meanwhile of course, overlap -- as communist threat was cooling down, middle east and terrorists start to boil up as the new "Problem Crop." No sooner did communism end, than pretty soon, Gulf War. ...

-30-