ABSTRACT
The ending of the Second World War did not bring with it stability. The world had moved into the Atomic age with the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in . With the atomic bomb, the world was on a knife-edge: the world might end at any moment. This threat hung over the world until the end of the so-called cold war between the Communist bloc and ‘the West’ in the late s. The ‘Iron Curtain’ divided the world politically into Communist and non-Communist. The United States of America, which had entered the First World War in , entered the Second World War in late – and being on the winning side each time helped it become the dominant economic and cultural force in the world, a position which was strengthened by the fall of Communist regimes in the late s and early s.
