IN 1945, World War 2 ended and another war began. This was not a shooting war — it was the Cold War, a period of geopolitical tension involving erstwhile allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, now competing for hegemony. This rivalry divided the world roughly between the Western and Eastern blocs, classified by their ideological and political moorings; the former championing the capitalist free market economies and the latter, the socialist-communist planned economies.

This rivalry became more intense impelled by two approaches. The first was the nuclear arms race resulting in each accumulating enough weaponry to annihilate each other and the planet several times over. This gave rise to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) which posits that "...any use of the nuclear arsenal by any attacker against a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities, would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender." Except as a threat, this took the nuclear option off the table in pursuit of world hegemony,

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