We should look back on the Cold War as having indeed been a hopeful experience.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 4, 2006.
Military historian John Lewis Gaddis rethinks the Cold War and predicts what historians four hundred years from now are likely to remember about it. Noting that his current students were young children when the Berlin Wall fell, Gaddis presents the Cold War as a mystifying conflict in which powerful weaponry was used as a threat rather than as tools of active warfare. He articulates the responsibility of the Cold War’s politicians in the use or lack thereof of weapons of mass destruction. The rule of caution during the conflict helped bring equality, human rights, and, eventually, optimism to the forefront of world thinking during its forty-five-year duration.
