Beginning with World War II and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is an account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age, with portraits of its major personalities and insight into its most crucial events. Drawing on newly opened Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why -- from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev.