Cold War

The Cold War was warm enough to be worrying about it becoming a hot war, World War III. The amount of Soviet armour in East Germany was impressive, worrying, a real threat. Propaganda operations were big time. The communists had Willi Münzenberg who was a master of the business, using his Innocents Clubs. He was very effective until he was murdered by Joe Stalin. They were still effective without him. Stories about the Red Scare were very effective Red Herrings. Abusing Joe McCarthy paid off. So did using the Main Stream Media to pretend that John Beaty did not exist or write The Iron Curtain Over America
PS One Cold War didn't achieve what various War Mongering rogues wanted so now they are working on Cold War II. Or perhaps contra the Merchants of Death want the multigigabuck cash flow that goes with it.

Cold War ex Wiki
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The Cold War, often dated from 1945–1991, was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO and other allies; versus powers in the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union with the Warsaw Pact and other allies. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. A neutral faction arose with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia, this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led East.

The Cold War was so named because the two major powers—each possessing nuclear weapons and thereby threatened with mutual assured destruction—did not meet in direct military combat. However, in their struggle for global influence they engaged in ongoing psychological warfare and in regular indirect confrontations through proxy wars. Cycles of relative calm would be followed by high tension which could have led to war. The most tense involved the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983), and the “Able Archer” NATO military exercises (1983). The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to client states, espionage, massive propaganda campaigns, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The US and USSR became involved in political and military conflicts in the Third World countries of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. To alleviate the risk of a potential nuclear war, both sides sought relief of political tensions through détente in the 1970s.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). This opened the country and its satellite states to a mostly peaceful wave of revolutions which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy, and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare.
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It did make life more interesting.