This was the greatest moment of collective inebriation in all of American history. This country was giddy with the sense of accomplishment, pride, prospects for the future.
David M Kennedy Stanford University
America’s 1945 victory over both Germany and Japan means that militarily and economically, it is now a superpower. It has more than half the world’s oil, two thirds of its gold and the average American family earns 15 times that of their European equivalent. And America has the atomic bomb. This weapon of mass destruction helped win victory over Japan and seems to assure America military supremacy for decades to come. But one of America’s wartime allies, Russia, has used spies to steal the secret of nuclear war long before the first mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.
Wartime allies by necessity, capitalist America has little in common with the various communist satellite states and countries that make up the Russian empire, the Soviet Union. Both ideologies try to export their belief system to others and view with suspicion any, and every, effort by the other. The American multibillion dollar economic and military aid package intended to reconstruct Europe, the 1948 Marshall Plan, is seen by the Soviets as an attempt to both control the rise of communist movements and, create market conditions suitable for American exports which, in essence, it is.
Did you know?
Thaddeus Russell argues in his book, ‘A Renegade History of the United States’, that “Juvenile delinquents won the cold war.” His argument being that it was the jazz playing, dope smoking, and the rock n roll lifestyle were the influences that destroyed the central command economies of communism., It wasn’t until 29 December 2006 that Britain finally finished paid back its last instalment of the Marshall Plan.
