THE COLD WAR
The Cold War is over. The world has become much more complicated.
History is that short period of peace between a war and another. How many times, during some boring history classes, we read the word "war" and we got excited? Probably because it looks us like a videogame, with a controller, some quests to do and breathtaking landscapes.
Reality is very different. A war is able to change world's balance, borders, economy. It causes an impressive number of casualties, political crises and consequences that sometimes can be life-changing for a single person and for a whole nation. Well, there is a particular event in the 20th century traditionally called "War", but that doesn't include fights and deaths on a battlefield. It is the Cold War, "fought" between about 1947 and 1991 by the USA and the Soviet Union.
This period could be defined as a state of extreme tension between these powerful countries based on opposing political systems. A sort of competition of pressures that scared the world for about 50 years, since the end of the WW2 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Capitalism vs Communism, a clash that divided the world, with the threat of the nuclear weapons. A long list of facts and events is related to this period. Competion did not stop on our planet. The USSR sent the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, but the American Neil Armstrong was the first one to step on the Moon. Everything was seen as a way to impose on the other country and to express its power and development in every area of the society.
The Cold War arrived also in sports events as the Olympic Games. USSR boycotted them in 1984 in Los Angeles, just as the USA did in 1980 in Moscow. But fate had some fun in 1972, when Fischer won a chess game against Spassky and the Olympics'basketball final game was played between USSR and USA.
No backcourt violation, no three point line, Michael Jordan was 9 years old. Different sport, different world. Some controversial calls by the referees in the last period gave to Betov the chance to win the game for USSR. And he did it, even if the American protested a lot for it (and it was a travel, so they were not wrong). An incredibile loss for the USA that had been unbeaten for 63 games at the Olympics. So URSS won a battle, but not the war.
Well, we should also say that USA's roster was not complete. There were a lot of college players and NBA stars were not in the team. For example, the leading scorer in points in NBA history (still nowadays), was missing: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did not play that game. Maybe he could have stopped the Cold War, if he wanted to...
As we have already said, the Cold War divided the world: the Iron Courtain set the line of separation between the two sides. Asia was once again the place where the risk of a 3rd world war became nearly reality. After the war in Corea in 1950, the civil war in Vietnam was another event of tension, that once again was won by Communism in 1975 and brought an unexpected number of victims on the American side.
However, the URSS system was not as strong as everyone thought. In 1987 Reagan and Gorbacev set the end of the nuclear danger. In 1989 the Berlin Wall was destroyed and so Germany could reunite after 40 years of division imposed by the Soviet Union.
Two years later, in 1991, the USSR definitively dissolved with the regret of the Warsaw Pact (the Communist opposition to the foundation on the NATO in 1949). So the Cold War ended too. There was no more USSR, but a lot of indipendent Communist states, while the USA, thanks to Reagan, where at the top of the world. There was no more fear in the world: it was the beginning of a new era.
