Spies, Secrets, Espionage and the Cold War
38 videos • 288,343 views • by The Why Files When kids are little and adults ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they often say things like ‘fireman,’ ‘astronaut,’ and ‘dancer.’ But do you think any kid ever says ‘spy?’ I ask this because it seems like so many of the most famous spies start off in other professions. Or they are spies out of necessity because of a war. Or in the case of Cold War history, the lack of a war. The Cold War was not a war in the traditional sense. It didn’t involve thousands of armed men fighting it out on battlefields, but instead was the name for the period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, after World War II. Because a war involving direct battle with nuclear weapons is called a hot war, this period of indirect conflict that had no actual large-scale battles was instead named the Cold War. It is generally considered to span from the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.