Cold War and Communism

Cold War and Communism
My grandfather used to tell me about the Cold War and how the constant threat of nuclear war was extremely stressful. In modern times, we live under the threat of terrorist acts, mainly from extremist Islamic groups in the Middle East. There are many similarities. The fact that both generations have lived under the threat of attack is the ultimate similarity. It is also possible that both generations’ fears weren’t quite as real as they might have imagined. 9/11 was an unbelievably cruel act, but since then we have not experienced any major domestic acts of terrorism from Islamic groups. The Cold War was predicated on propaganda and fear. Certain acts heightened these fears, like the Cuban Missile crisis, but the overwhelming fear of nuclear annihilation proved to be partly overblown. One major difference between the two threats is that the threat from terrorist groups has actually proven to be a viable threat to our national security. The attacks on 9/11 have forever embedded themselves into the national perspective on world views and their safety on domestic soil. Even without ever experiencing an attack on foreign soil throughout the Cold War, the fear was probably even more ripe during that period of time because the threat of nuclear war devastating the entire world was such a pandemic problem. At the root of that comparison is that you fear lots of small scale attacks from independent terrorist groups today, but during the Cold War you had the second most powerful nation in the world and the most powerful nation in the world with their fingers hovering over the doomsday button (or at least that was the perception). It felt like at any time the entire world could be decimated, which is a lot harder to rationalize than the fear we have today that we might be at the wrong place at the wrong time when a terrorist