The Long Twilight Struggle

For nearly half a century, two superpowers and the coalitions they led confronted each other across a divided Europe and a contested globe, armed with weapons capable of ending civilization — and the astonishing fact of the age is that the war everyone feared never came.

This is the whole sweep, told in a single volume: the breakdown of the wartime alliance and the descent of the Iron Curtain; the Berlin Blockade, Korea, and the nuclear arms race; the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world stood at the brink; the global Cold War fought in the blood of Vietnam, the Congo, and a dozen proxy wars; the long thaw of détente and the renewed terror of the 1980s; and the peaceful revolutions that brought the Wall down and the Soviet empire to its end.

Sober, sourced, and sweeping, this is a clear-eyed popular history of the conflict that defined the twentieth century — how it came, how it was waged, and how, against the odds, it ended without the catastrophe the world had dreaded for forty years.