Editing The Cold War (section)

==Legacy of the Cold War==
{{topquote|When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.  That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.|Boris Yeltsin, after visiting a Randall's grocery store in Texas}}
Techwise, the main advances of this era for civilians were plastics, aluminium, computers, air flight, satellite (which played a huge role in navigation and communications), and eventually the cellphone. Most of these spawned off military development from the Cold War and/or proceeding World War II. Short version: The Cold War made sure state-funded research took off on both sides and brought us this very computer and the website, once state research [[Capitalism|trickled down to the private sector]].

Plastics existed since the [[Industrial Revolution]], and by [[The World Wars]] had uses in clothing (Nylon) and small, non-moving, components had serious use, but now they had matured enough they were considered a major construction material. Being lightweight, cheap, relatively sturdy for its weight, non-conductive, immune to rust (as well as most other forms of corrosion), able to be made into a wide variety of shapes, and having minimal waste of material during construction with easy recycling of the little that was wasted made plastics a wonder material. 

Similarly aluminium had continued its falling prices due to increased demand for military applications in and after World War II (it's great for making aircraft out of), and the falling cost of electricity. While aluminium is really common on Earth, without the [[Wikipedia:Hall–Héroult process|Hall–Héroult process]] (and the high amounts of electricity required) and [[Wikipedia:Bayer process|Bayer process]] for refining it, it's near impossible to get pure and previously more precious than gold (hence why the Washington Monument is topped with it), and still energy intense enough it's often cheaper to ship ore to a different country to refine with cheaper electricity and ship it back. By the 1960s, people were making disposable cans out of it. In 1956 Eugune Stoner of Armalite invented the AR10, which used plastics and aluminium for large portions of its components and allowed it to be a full pound lighter than other contemporary rifles. Despite early success, military hardware that made extensive use of plastics was derided as "toys" (with persistent and baseless rumors the components really were made by the toy company Mattel) and plastics would not see widespread acceptance for serious applications till after the 1960s. This was not helped by a series of bureaucrats screwing the M16 (a scaled down AR10) over repeatedly, giving it ammo that was deliberately made wrong, a substandard barrel, telling people it didn't need to be cleaned and to reuse the disposable magazines, resulting in a faulty, unreliable weapon cursed by an entire generation.

Titanium similarly fell in price, but its use was limited by requiring magnesium (which actually ''is'' rare) until the 2000s (and that was under patent protection till the late 2010s) and by the largest deposits being on the eastern side of the iron curtain.

The advancements of computers is obvious: you're reading this on one (or were a smart ass and printed it out with one). While early computers were used in World War II to break encryption, their use would become standard during this era. Computers made large scale data computation simple and fast while allowing vast amounts of information to be stored with tiny physical space. Linking together computers in a network for data sharing led to the internet you obtained this text from. By the end of the Cold War and beyond, computers had become so important to life that the late Cold War and beyond are often dubbed the "Information Age" where, like [[Stone Age|stone]] and [[Bronze Age|bronze]] before it, information was the big deal of the day.

Computer development got a big boost from '''SPACEEEEE!!!!'''  Space travel had been a feature of science fiction for close to a century, but it took the Cold War to actually make it happen.  Ex-Nazi rocket engineers were snapped up by both sides to make rockets for weapons, and once that problem was solved, the USA and USSR needed something for them to work on next.  Space travel became a prestige achievement for the superpowers, each trying to top the other's achievements with cost-no-object super projects that provided huge technology boosts (such as the development of compact, insensitive computers).  The USSR ultimately put the first man in space, in orbit, and launched the first space station, while the USA put flags on the moon and got all of the firsts for sending probes beyond Mars. 

On a societal level, things changed massively during the cold war. The increasing globalization of the Western economies lead to the gradual decline of their traditional industrial sectors, especially in heavy industry and mining. From the seventies onewards, it became far less common for any given person to work the same job from when they entered the workforce until they retired. Undesirable and lower-qualified jobs that require a lot of labour got outsourced to the emerging economies of the third world. People became as a result much more mobile and much more willing to change their place of living than in previous decades. The service sector replaced blue-collar jobs as the most common form of employment (especially in the US and UK).

Politics wise, though it is never a smart subject to bring forward in a site dedicated to tabletop gaming, it made both sides adopt(or attempt to do so) policies and methods of their adversaries. The Western Bloc adopted functions and policies which were regarded communist back then: solid, tax-funded compulsory state education from childhood instead of child miners as recent as 1910, founding government funded institutions of research rather than letting rich assholes hire idealist inventors, bilk them of everything and killing the golden goose early, and establishing a strong social net and racial equality attempts lest its [https://youtu.be/A8f69JZvgto working/poor class/minorities/blacks/others would feel affection for the other team]. The Soviets tried the consumer economy, but we all know how it ended. Realpolitik also became a far deeper and multidimensional issue than earlier moments in history: we all love to bash the good ol' US&A for propping up dictators, yet the Soviets were no slouches in discarding scruples: North Korea and Rhodesia(Now Zimbabwe) are one of the few dictatorships ran by murderous fucksticks who wouldn't know Communism if it bit them in the nuts yet looked "red" for one reason or other, Somalia under the boot heel of same up-jumped thug that even changed sides mid-Cold War, and Ethiopia's murderous "Derg" regime strangling its only enlightened King and running the country to the ground. This wasn't even limited to the two big players; the British tolerated the Apartheid regime in South Africa because the debt accumulated from two world wars gave them very little leeway in fiscal politics and South Africa proved to be a very cheap source for resources the UK desperately needed and couldn't afford otherwise (same goes for the mostly diplomatically isolated Israelis, who did the same, if you ever wondered where the "Apartheid-State"-slogan took its inspiration from). West Germany defied the USA by reconciling with their Eastern Brethren and the Soviet Union during the tenure of Willy Brandt (to the point that <s>crook</s> Nixon seriously considered backing right-wing parties in Germany with CIA funds at several points), as did the French by having an On-Off-Relationship with NATO.