The Cold War

The electrician who signed the Gdańsk Agreement with an oversized pen for the cameras may also have signed a secret police collaboration agreement a decade earlier, and Polish historians still can't agree which document says more about him.

The Soviet Union invaded to save a communist government from collapse, and the war that followed helped collapse the Soviet Union instead.

Cuba sent thirty-six thousand troops to Angola on its own initiative and caught Moscow by surprise, a rare instance of a Cold War proxy acting well ahead of its patron.

1948

1961

1776

1946

1991

1962

1959

Historians still can't agree whether Reagan's pressure or Gorbachev's own convictions ended the Cold War, and the honest answer is probably that neither side wants to give up the credit.

Roosevelt built the United Nations around a partnership between four great powers he did not live to see tested, and the Cold War tested it almost immediately.

1956

Both the Soviet Union and the West backed Iraq at once, and the United States kept supporting Saddam even after learning he was using chemical weapons on Iranian troops.

A war that ended without a peace treaty, fought over a border two American officers drew on a map in a single evening five years earlier.

Six hours after landing with ninety seconds of fuel to spare, a man got out and walked, watched by roughly a fifth of the people alive.

1946

1991

Six days of fighting, launched on the strength of a false Soviet intelligence report, redrew the map of the Middle East for the following half century.

A contest with no agreed winner, because the two sides were competing for different kinds of proof: American landings against Soviet firsts.

1957

1968

1989

Two decades of war produced a death toll that still cannot be given as a single number, only as a range spanning millions.