Editing The Cold War (section)

==The appeal of the Cold War==
The appeal of the Cold War in fiction comes mostly from the spy game - literally a /tg/ game, mainly with [[Top Secret]] from early TSR, and also in other RPGs with infiltration scenarii (a specialty of [[Carl Lynwood Sargent]]) such as ''[[City of Skulls]]''. Since the end of the Cold War, the role of espionage has greatly fallen. If you want to do a work of fiction about spies and don't have a specific setting, it will generally involve the Cold War or at least former Cold War spies and/or expies.

More generally there's a bit of nostalgia for the west having a clear enemy to stand against and one that, if you weren't a spy, you'd generally see coming. The CIA director after the end of the Cold War told Congress "We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of." Now the main enemy is one half of politicians and most entertainment production try to ''prevent'' being demonized (regardless of what it does) or being fought seriously. This enemy can kill thousands of civilians in a night and, not being a state, you can't send an army after them in response. You might not even know who did it, even after lengthy and costly investigations, if they don't take credit for it.

There's also appeal in the general military conflict of the era, but this is mostly appeal of the Vietnam War as a setting and appeal of "what if all those cool toys NATO and the Soviets made actually saw use?".

Another important thing about the Cold War is the looming specter of nuclear annihilation. A world with two superpowers and their various allies and satellites, each of which had thousands of nuclear weapons, each one able to turn a city into a radioactive wasteland, the means to deploy them to any point on earth, ideologies which were at odds with each other and their own set of hawks and firebrands who always pushed their nation to be on the offensive against the other that any shift in the balance of power as a rallying cry to either press on if it was in their favor or not to be so craven next time if it shifted against them. The main thing holding them back from burning their enemies to cinders was the effective inevitability of retaliation and even then, there were those willing to gamble on edge-cases and a few maniacs which saw a cleansing fire as a good thing. The world sat in precarious balance and could easily fall over into atomic war. However a consequence of this is that the Right Person in the Right Time could save the world by stopping the Death Spiral before it happens, which actually happened (see Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov). Being the guys and gals who stops the cold war going hot is prime stakes. On the same note, there would be wackjobs (mad militarists who see nuking the other side into oblivion while a few people on their side survived [[Fallout|vaulted up]] in old mineshafts as a win, people that saw Nuclear War as the way to kick off the Biblical end of days, Neo-Nazis who'd gladly burn both the US and USSR, etc.) who for one reason or another would like to see the world go up in radioactive smoke, which makes for compelling villains.

Either way, the Cold War lends itself far more to intrigue, espionage and other such behind the scene plays than preceding eras. The battles of WWII could involve tens of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks, planes and cannons to seize some strategic goal or to smash one of several enemy columns that is part of a long brutal campaign. Battles where the victor would be grateful for only loosing a thousand troopers. In the Cold War, a few people with the right skills at the right time and place can accomplish great or terrible things. There's a reason why one of the most iconic heroes of Cold War pop culture was James Bond.