The darker side of the space race was built into those rockets, just as the redundant fuel delivery systems and guidance controls were. Have you ever considered what those rockets also meant? They meant that two nations were, in effect, saying "See what we can do to you? Those moon rockets were, after all, simply ICBMs with a facelift.
The Cold War means all those things. And who fought the war? Just the politicians and the men and women in uniform? Or did the artist and rock musician have a say in the outcome of the Cold War? Did novelists such as Neville Shute and Richard Matheson help to "win" the war? Did those 50's-era film makers with their badly realized alien invasion fleets flitting across Cinemascopic dreamscapes contribute to the front lines of that war?
One way you can begin to fathom that shadowy, paranoid period of time is to look at it against the mosaic of popular culture. It won't always be scientific or logical, but it will be a lot of fun, and we can examine everything from "The Incredible Shrinking Man" to "Pink Floyd's The Wall," "On The Beach" to "Dr. Strangelove" to the rise of Playboy Magazine.
Another way to get some sense of the Cold War is to examine nuclear policy, go from Manhatten to Trinity to the latest Tomahawk cruise missiles, see what makes one of those devices tick. Did you know the world almost found itself fighting an accidental thermonuclear war in 1995? And that many atomic bombs sit on the bottom of the world's oceans, unaccounted for?
Many roads. Tricky roads, too. In most of the wars that proceed this peculiar conflict, lines were drawn, fronts existed in real, geographic locations, and the participants, although not always easy to spot, usually wore the uniforms of their prospective sides. In the Cold War, everyone, in some way or another, were active participants in that war. And that probably includes you.
