Cold War

The crisis in Ukraine has revealed to the world the divisions that exist throughout Europe about how the Second World War is remembered. Gareth Pritchard and Desislava Gancheva look at the controversial debate around wartime collaboration.

In 1961, rattled by Soviet advances in space, President John F. Kennedy declared that, within a decade, the United States would land a man on the Moon. David Baker tells the story of how it took the US Air Force to change NASA and make the dream a reality.

Geoffrey Chandler analyses the complex pattern of reasons why Greece became the arena where the first violent post-war trial of strength took place between Communism and the West.

During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.

Bashar al-Assad is a child of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. These events underpin Syria’s authoritarian regime and its horrific actions.

Roger Howard recalls a moment when Israel was rocked by exaggerated claims of a threat posed by Egypt.

For over half a century, James Bond’s mix of ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ has proved enduringly popular, outlasting the Cold War that birthed him. Why? 

The battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a key moment in the smokescreen conflict of the Cold War played out in southern Africa. Gary Baines looks at the ways in which opposing sides are now remembering the event.

John Herschel Glenn Jr was the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20th 1962.