Cold War

COLLEGE PARK -- Roald Z. Sagdeev says the end of the Cold War will fundamentally alter the goals and methods of scientific research by history's two most advanced technological societies.The prominent physicist, who for 15 years was the chief architect of the Soviet space program, has spent the past 2 1/2 years as a professor at the University of Maryland and as the founding director of an institute there now called the East-West Space Science Center.Dr. Sagdeev (pronounced sag-DAY-ev), was awarded the title of 'Hero of Socialist Labor" in 1986 for directing a multinational effort to rendezvous with Halley's Comet and became then-President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's chief science adviser.

Paris -- During the 42-odd years of the Cold War, the United States ceased to be the society it was when that era began. When people examine the anxieties and uncertainties provoked among Americans by the Cold War's end, and by the loss of the political certainties that governed American life during four decades, they are inclined to overlook how much has changed that had nothing to do with the Cold War.The first and fundamental change is very simple....

"Breaking Free; A Memoir of Love and Revolution," by Susan Eisenhower. 295 pages. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. $23As an 8-year-old, Susan Eisenhower was charmed by a friendly little man named Nikita Khrushchev, whom she met in 1959, when the Soviet Premier visited the Gettysburg, Pa., farm of her grandfather, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. But her father, John Eisenhower, promptly deflated her enthusiasm for the rolly-polly stranger. If Russia invades America, he said, the Eisenhower family would be the first to be shot.

LITTLE in the post-communist world is going according to script.In Hungary, the voters just returned former communists to power, following a similar reverse last year in Poland.The cold bath transition to capitalism in Russia is a dismal failure; it is not yet clear whether the army, the ultra-nationalist right or the regional mafias will inherit the mess.China continues to achieve prodigious growth rates as an unexpected hybrid that is mostly communist and slightly capitalist. Theorists used to insist that you couldn't be a little bit capitalist any more than a little bit pregnant.

When Rep. Clarence D. Long served Maryland's 2nd Congressional District for 22 years, he probably had no idea he'd be immortalized in a Hollywood movie. But about halfway through the film Charlie Wilson's War, you hear that a House of Representatives subcommittee chairman named "Doc" Long holds the key to funding the mujahedeen rebels' covert war against Soviet troops in 1980s Afghanistan. "Doc" was Long's nickname. Before he graced the halls of Congress, he was an economics professor at the Johns Hopkins University.

Congress is engaged in a historic post-cold war debate. It will decide whether the instruments of the "Reagan doctrine" are still the most appropriate means for solving conflicts in the Third World -- in this case, Angola.Despite increased cooperation between Washington an Moscow in the Persian Gulf, Central America and other parts of the world, sterile, cold war rhetoric still dominates the Angola debate, in Congress, in the State Department and in the White House.Both the House and Senate are scheduled to debate this week whether the United States should increase its covert military aid to the Angolan rebels, known as UNITA, which has opposed the government (and the ruling party, known by its Portuguese acronym, the MPLA)

The late, unlamented Cold War certainly left its mark on the world of music.A lanky Texan pianist named Van Cliburn achieved immortality when he became the first American to win the Tchaikovsky International Competition in 1958.When a Richter, Gilels or Oistrakh came to the United States in periods of diplomatic thaw, the air was as redolent of international summitry as it was of music.And when the Soviets tried to sabotage the career of a young, highly regarded Russian pianist named Vladimir Feltsman because he applied to emigrate to Israel, the Western publicity machine trumpeted the tale of the "the latest Russian lion of the piano" brutally silenced by Communist authorities.

When it comes to the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues, Republicans like to hark back to the stalwart presidents of the Cold War. Sen. John McCain has invoked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as kindred spirits, and so has George W. Bush. Which raises the question: Why do they embrace those leaders while rejecting their policy? The centerpiece of the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union was captured in a famous 1947 essay by American diplomat George Kennan, who rejected either war or retreat in favor of "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

The Cold War was, in many ways, a dark period in world history, an era in which the United States and the U.S.S.R. spent billions of hours of labor, godless sums of money and an incalculable amount of intellectual energy on the business of "national defense." Decades of duck-and-cover drills and ominous rumblings from across the Atlantic turned eight U.S. presidents and generations of Americans into neurotics. Don't you miss it? Hard as it might seem to believe, many Americans do seem to pine for the days when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table at the United Nations, shouting that his mighty country would "bury" the West.

WASHINGTON -- The cold war is over, and the military-industrial complex has won. If there is any doubt, it should have been dispelled May 2, when the Senate and House defense committees approved bills adding approximately $13 billion to the Pentagon's request of $254 billion in spending authority for the fiscal year that begins on October 1.A year ago, the Republican-dominated Congress added $7 billion to the Pentagon's request. President Clinton over the last three years has added some $75 billion to his own defense program.