The Cold War

The Cold War was a confrontation between military giants, and it was the balance of terror, which preserved the world's peace. But the balance was maintained at a ridiculously high and costly level. Both the United States and the Soviet Union equipped themselves with thousands more nuclear missiles than were needed for self-defense. Those weapons, added to conventional armaments, cost the superpowers trillions of dollars.
In 1955 President Eisenhower warned, "The problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." One of many different estimates show that more than eight trillion dollars were spent, worldwide, on mainly nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1996. At one point, the world's nuclear stockpiles held 18 billion metric tons of explosive energy: 18,000 megatons. Today, they still hold about 8,000 megatons. Compared to these totals with the entire explosive energy released by all bombs dropped i...