The End of the Cold War

by Christine Hatt

Book Overview

This book asks how the end of the Cold War was brought about with a detailed analysis of the changing relationship between the USA and the USSR during the 1970s and 80s. The effects of the continuing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0836852753
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: World Almanac Education
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.5" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Explaining the complex end of the Cold War to young students

Obviously if there is one picture that symbolizes "The End of the Cold War," then that would be the Berlin Wall coming down, and indeed on the cover of this final volume in "The Cold War" series that picture is front and center. Flanking it are pictures of President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, I have no problems with the latter, but if we are talking about the American presidents who were responsible for bringing the Cold War to an end then we are talking Richard Nixon, for opening up detente with the Soviets and visiting Red China, and Ronald Reagan, who effectively bankrupted the U.S.S.R. by pushing for this Strategic Defense Initiative and forcing the Soviets to try and keep pace. Fortunately, both Nixon and Reagan are given due credit in this informative volume written by Christine Hatt.Although this is one of several volumes in this series--which includes books on "The Causes of the Cold War," "The Cuban Missile Crisis," and "The Vietnam War"--it does encompass more than the entire lifetime of any young readers who crack it open. Hatt begins with the Changing Time presented by the first half of the 1970s, when the Cold War became dramatically less frosty because of the policy of detent pursued by Nixon and his national security adviser/secretary of state Henry Kissinger. After getting into the specifics of what that meant (new relations with China, SALT I, the end of the Vietnam War, etc.), Hatt presents the Carter years as the collapse of detente, and the Reagan years as "Cold War II." At that point the push for SDI (a.k.a. "Star Wars") and problems in Poland that resulted in the birth of the Solidarity trade union, set the stage for the end game of the Cold War. Consequently, Hatt does a very nice job of setting up how the time for reform arrived in the Soviet Union, and how Mikhail Gorbachev pushed the U.S.S.R. in the new directions of "perestroika" (restructuring the economy) and "glasnost" (increased political openness). The end of the Cold War resulted in widespread changes, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the reunification of Germany, and finally the internal collapse of the Soviet Union. Ironically, Gorbachev ended up falling to Boris Yeltsin after the August Coup by the hard-line communists in 1991. Hatt also touches on the legacy of the Cold War, in terms of what it has meant for the United States, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the rest of the world. The final word on the subject is the ironic statement of Lawrence Eagleburger, Deputy U.S. Secretary of State, who pointed out that: "For all its risk and uncertainties, the Cold War was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relationships among the great powers." If young readers can appreciate how this statement would be supported by the world in which they now live, where we are currently under an orange/high level of alert, then they will begin to grapple with some of the bi