DAVID E. SANGER

New York Times

When President Harry S. Truman signed the law creating the Defense Department from the remnants of the War Department in August 1949, Josef Stalin was 16 days from proving the Soviets could detonate a nuclear weapon, and Mao Zedong was less than two months from declaring the creation of the People's Republic of China.

It was a terrifying time for Americans, and the new name was intended to reflect an era in which deterrence was critical — because war, if it broke out among the superpowers, could be planet-ending. For decades, the odds of avoiding that nuclear exchange, or direct superpower conflict, seemed slim at best. So to many historians, the greatest accomplishment of the Cold War is that it largely stayed cold, despite wars in Korea and Vietnam, the

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