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The threat of nuclear annihilation restrained the armed forces of the
United States and the Soviet Union from directly confronting each other
in battle. The closest call came in 1962, when the Soviet Union secretly
placed offensive missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, and provoked
an American naval quarantine that brought the two superpowers to the brink
of war. For the most part, the superpowers fought by subverting unfriendly
regimes or covertly arming surrogate forces. Both sides regularly provided
military advisors to countries or factions they supported.
Even if the armed
forces of the superpowers rarely confronted each other, they still saw
plenty of action. The Red Army suppressed dissent in East Germany (1953),
Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968). It also fought a border war
with China (1969) and invaded Afghanistan (1979). U.S. forces intervened
in Korea (1950), Lebanon (1958, 1982), Vietnam (1961), the Dominican Republic
(1965), Cambodia (1970), and Grenada (1983).
At other times the
two countries sought common ground or mutual benefit, as when they signed
the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, shifting all nuclear weapons testing
underground; or the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, which restricted
an entire class of nuclear weapons.
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