Chill in the East

In October 1945, in the wake of the two atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to an end, the British author George Orwell wrote an essay about the fundamental geopolitical change that atomic weapons created. The changes underway, as Orwell pointed out, had begun over a dozen years before. Atomic bombs were new, devastating tools for a longer-term ideological conflict between East and West. As usual, Orwell was correct. Western powers were effectively engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union long before they knew it.