The Blitz Experience is one of the key attractions of London's Imperial War Museum. This display has visitors huddle together in a re-created air-raid shelter and uses not only sounds (radio reports, sirens, exploding bombs) but also smells to evoke the experience of an attack on London during World War II. To the best of my knowledge, no one has tried to create a similar display about the Cold War, and the reasons are not difficult to understand. Of course, the Cold War had a deep impact on popular culture, but there was no sensual drama to its key military event: the standoff between two huge, nuclear-armed empires. In East and West alike, every citizen knew that if the Cold War were to turn hot, it would probably last only a few hours. The awareness that global destruction could come at the push of a button only added to the horror.

This aspect of the Cold War experience is worth recalling for two reasons. First, it helps us to understand the ironies involved in any discussion of turning points in the history of the Cold War. For all the evidence that the essays in this collection muster, the significance of the Cold War for the environment clearly pales in comparison with the potential turning point that the Cold War could have been had someone pushed that button.