"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." So said Winston Churchill in 1946. About to begin was Britain's most expensive and turbulent periods of military history. The story of Britain's Cold War deals with all aspects of the chilling time when Britain could have been obliterated so easily by the unleashing of Russian nuclear weapons. The Cold War was like no other conflict yet experienced. More than a struggle between two superpowers, it was a war of ideologies, the capitalist West and the communist East. The Cold War leached its way into every facet of British life to the extent that it was not really considered a war at all. But a war it was.

The period was punctuated by an arms race which pushed the world to the edge of destruction, as both East and West amassed arsenals of nuclear weapons far beyond what would be needed to destroy, quite literally, everything.