Cold War Arms Race

Late 1940s to around 1990 marked a very significant point in history. This point in history contained evidence of the roller-coaster of a relationship between two great nations, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. The Cold War differed immensely from other wars. The Cold War was not a conventional war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but more a war of threats. A well-known term during this time was “Arms Race.” This term was the race between the two nations in the development of nuclear weapons. The fear of one of these nations destroying the other nation was a rapidly growing fear because of this “Arms Race.” In fact, many citizens, on both sides, lived in fear every day preparing for an attack. In class we studied
In Chapter 10 of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Drakulic talks about the Stasi post office and how privacy with mail was unheard of. “For me, something else was normal, for example, to see that my mail arrived open, especially mail from abroad, or to observe that letters from London, Stockholm, or New York sometimes take a week, sometimes a month, and sometimes never come at all” (p.98). Drakulic also comments on how her packages would come in a plastic bag with “DAMAGED IN TRANSPORT” stamped on it. Every piece of mail, every phone call, and everything that the government saw that had the potential to be personal, they intercepted. Nothing was personal, private, or “mine”. In all reality, everything belonged to the government, for they could take possessions away from individual’s any time they liked. Some mail never even got to their owners, that would be a felony in America but not in communist nations. These two experiences are essential to why communism
The paper was to be anonymous and put in a weekly journal in West Germany explaining East Germany’s halt on collecting suicide statistics which has skyrocketed higher than any other European country except for Hungary. In order to do this Dreyman uses a typewriter from West Germany which his Western friend smuggled over. This type writer could not be tracked to him because it was not one that could be found in the East. In East Germany, under communism control, each typewriter could be tracked to the person that used it. This situation was the government’s way of limiting freedom of speech, for the citizens new they could be found. Dreyman’s lack of variety, lack of freedom of speech which some would argue is a basic human right, was cut off. Another factor that communism failed was this lack of basic necessities like variety in typewriters or even the basic necessity of freedom of