cold war 'By the beginning of the twentieth century, weapons of war were themselves contributing to the outbreak of wars ... It comes as something of a surprise, then, to realize that the most striking innovation in the history of military technology has turned out to be a cause of peace and not war," (Gaddis 85). In fact, the most striking military innovation until that point, the creation of nuclear weapons, did turn out to be a cause of war, albeit the Cold War. In his book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, author John Lewis Gaddis examines the development of nuclear arms, their impact on the Cold War, and the impact of the Cold War on the development of nuclear arms. In fact, early nuclear armament closely mirrored Cold War ideology, especially the way nuclear weapons were used as a sort of political collateral. The Manhattan Project also represented the first time the United States was at the helm of new weapons development. As the author notes, the Manhattan Project was unusual in its being an American-led and British and Canadian-backed military endeavor. In Chapter Four, "Nuclear Weapons and the Early Cold War," Gaddis describes nuclear weapons as the ironic harbinger of a new type of world peace. The author argues that the most destructive weapons theretofore created were just so frightening as to deter those who had them from ever using them. In Chapter Eight, "Nuclear War and the Escalation of the Cold War," Gaddis takes his argument one step further to suggest that nuclear weapons "had a remarkably theatrical effect upon the course of the high Cold War," (258). The Cold War impacted the proliferation of nuclear arms because the weapons offered the semblance of absolute power and threat, while nuclear arms influenced political conduct during the Cold War with their frightening presence. The Cold...
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