A news column that is appropriately drenched in the gravitas of the day because it announced that the short-lived age of "atomic security" that brought W.W. II to a close had come to an end. A new epoch had arrived at 11:00 a.m., September 23, 1949, when President Harry Truman announced
"We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR."
With nuclear bombs must come a nuclear strategy:
click here to read about that...
By the time 1951 rolled around, the benefits of the Marshall Plan were hitting on all cylinders throughout Italy, and manufacturing had returned to it's pre-war levels. The sweet words of Marxism that once had such alure were now falling flat. Although Red candidates had done quite well in 1946, by 1951 they attracted few voters.
During the opening week of October, 1949 President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded its own nuclear weapon. Americans were deeply shocked and wondered aloud as to what this would mean - Would the peacetime draft call be doubled?
"...Russia had caught the U.S. flatfooted. For the first time in history every American looked straight down the gun barrel of [a] foreign attack."
The pace of the Cold War picked up soon after this event took place.
The outcome of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis was seen as a largely tasteless affair by the brass caps in Moscow. They believed Premiere Khrushchev and his diplomatic bungling left the U.S.S.R. in a weaker position and they wanted him out, pronto. Numerous men in the Soviet Army and within the Kremlin united in a plot to force him out. The Premiere proved himself a master at seeing through such intrigue; he stopped the coup dead in its tracks with a boatload of key arrests and executions which then knocked the remaining confederates off their game, sending them hither and yon.
Ten months later the Kremlin forced Khrushchev into retirement. "Nikita Khrushchev told the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party:"
'We need a well-considered and orderly system of scientific-atheist education that will embrace all strata and groups of the population and will prevent the dissemination of religious concepts, especially among children and adolescents.'
"In these words, Mr. Khrushchev is highlighting a basic inherit characteristic of Communism - its war against the dignity of man as a child of God. Pathfinder Magazine publisher Graham Patterson put pen to paper in an effort to articulate what the Cold War was in its simplest form, and what were the differences between a communist government and a democracy.
"It is important for free people to know their avowed enemy, to understand communism, to recognize the difference between their present freedom and the way of life communism would force upon them." | 
