COLD WAR
fig. 1-3 Cold War military alignments.
The Cold War, which lasted at full terrifying strength at least until the early 1970s, and remained a major factor in Euro-American foreign policy and internal politics until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was a period of intense political and ideological rivalry between the United States and its European allies, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and its “satellites,” on the other. After the Soviets successfully tested an atom bomb of their own in 1949, the Cold War constantly threatened to erupt into an actual military engagement with the potential to destroy civilization. In a widely used phrase of the time, the world was permanently poised on “the brink of World War III.” It was widely assumed in “the West” that the Soviets had been aided toward their scientific achievement by espionage, some of it carried on not by the Soviets themselves but by Westerners under Communist discipline. (Some, indeed, were detected: in the United States Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed for passing “atomic secrets”; in Great Britain, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby were exposed but escaped to the USSR.) Political suspicion, directed not only at the potential enemy, but at fellow citizens, now became a fact of life in East and West alike.
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 21 May. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-001003.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 21 May. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-001003.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 1 Starting from Scratch." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 21 May. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-001003.xml
