The Cold War and Vietnam

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? portrays a world that has survived a nuclear holocaust, a possibility that did not seem too far-fetched in the 1960s. Since the end of World War II, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the Soviet Union had been developing their own nuclear arsenal. Many Americans saw the spread of Soviet Communism as the country's greatest threat, and they engaged the Soviets in a "Cold War" throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The two sides never directly engaged each other in combat, although they came close in 1962, when the U.S. challenged the Soviets over their placement of missiles in Cuba. By the late 1960s, both sides bad enough nuclear missiles to destroy each other-and the entire world-several times over. The Cuban Missile Crisis, however, had shown both sides that a nuclear confrontation was something...