Quotes About Cold War

During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose.

This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback—a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people's countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad.

There have been a few attempts to turn Prime Minister Diefenbaker into the tragic hero of Canada's lost independence, but that is ludicrous. For one thing, the country's independence was certainly compromised, but it was not really lost. For another, Diefenbaker is nobody's hero: he was a bombastic prairie politico who combined a crude but saleable version of English Canadian nationalism with an unwavering commitment to a Cold War view of the world.

If the Soviet Union and the United States have not experienced direct military confrontations, on the other hand, they supported, armed and trained Africans, to fight other Africans.

Even during the years of the Cold War, the intense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we always avoided any direct clash between our civilians and, most certainly, between our military.

Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War's most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty.

Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.

As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.

The lessons Noam Chomsky sets out to teach us in 'Toward a New Cold War' are invaluable. The United States, like any other nations, can and does err, and often in a big way. But Chomsky cannot support at all his implicit diagnosis that America is 'bad.'

With stealth technology, the U.S. could spy on its Cold War adversaries without running the risk of getting caught.

And so I trust that it is not too petty to point out that it was George H. W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan, who was president when Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.

I wrote somewhere during the Cold War that I sometimes wish the Iron Curtain were much taller than it is, so that you could see whether the development of science with no communication was parallel on the two sides. In this case it certainly wasn't.

a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world

The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist.

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

The Russians stopped being the bad guys back in the twentieth century!

Fred McLaren's terrific book, Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War

The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible.

In February, Nixon, his way paved by secret journeys that Kissinger took in 1971 to Peking, made a lavishly televised week-long visit to the People's Republic of China, thereby dramatizing his commitment to better relations with one of America's most determined foes. That Nixon, a life-long Cold Warrior who had assailed Truman for losing China, could and did make such a journey staggered and excited contemporaries.

Responding to these pressures from the Right, Eisenhower had announced that the United States would remove its Seventh Fleet from the straits between Taiwan and the mainland of China. Chiang, he implied, was now unleashed so that he could invade the People's Republic.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Since the end of the Cold War, hegemonism has become increasingly unpopular.

The United States emerged from the Cold War with unprecedented absolute and relative power. It was truly first among unequals.