For the next 79 years, the world had existed in an uneasy truce. It was a time when the two principal nuclear superpowers, the United States and, initially, the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, faced each other with the weapons of global annihilation.

In the past two years, that face-off has become even more belligerent, as the war in Ukraine has brought these two super-powers to the brink of direct, and likely nuclear, confrontation.