ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of consumption and domestic space during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Usually the Cold War is understood in terms of the military industrial complex, but the period was also one of intense and ‘war-like’ competition in the sphere of consumption and the pursuit of the industrialised good life: a material and ideological continuum extended from refrigerators to nuclear warheads as part of the terms of Cold War competition. Starting with the famous kitchen debate between Nixon and Khrushchev, the domestic sphere and domestic consumption will be examined as an alternate Cold War site focusing on the material culture of the home. Here the USA and USSR competed for supremacy and the material and social terms whereby the fruits of postwar modernity could be enjoyed.
