1949 may have been the most dangerous year of the Cold War.* That was the year that Chinese Communists (the “Red Chinese”) finally gained victory in their long-running civil war over the Nationalists and took over all of mainland China. The Soviet Union—already the largest land power in the world geographically—had now added to its ideological ranks a country roughly the size of the United States, and which contained a full quarter of the world’s population. That year, in order to begin to cobble together a united defense strategy among countries still trying to recover from the damage of the
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