Post #16

I could not imagine the way that people felt during the cold war. People lived under constant threat from the Soviet Union. At any moment the US could be blown up by the nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union possessed. I also think that it is funny to look back at all of the drills that the schools and many offices practiced in case of a nuclear attack. One drill was to get under your desk because it would help protect you. We now know that this isn't going to do anything if a nuclear bomb is even remotely near you. It is also strange to me that the huge build up of military might between the Soviet Union and the US did not lead to war. There was so much division in the world between communist and non-communist that I felt a war would have been inevitable. There were also many reasons to go to war such as the Cuban Nuclear Crisis, or the B2 bomber incident.
We can still see the impact of the Cold War in the world today. A prime example is with NATO. This organization was formed as a counter to the Warsaw pact which was a group of communist countries forming an alliance. The thought behind NATO was that it would deter the Warsaw countries from attacking and could combat communism.
I find the two different revolutions between the Soviet Union and China to be very interesting. I believe that these two countries used the marxist beliefs to gain power for themselves. At first it seemed as if communism was better than capitalism as it had immediate success in a lot of countries. In the long run it was clearly not the best choice because it caused countries to collapse and millions of people to suffer. I like how in Russia the soviet revolution only took one year while in China the revolution was a struggle that lasted many years.
It is very interesting that it was communism that brought about many feminist reforms that were later adopted in the West. In Russia many women enjoyed full legal and political equality while women in the West still had a few years to go before they ever got any rights.