The Cold War was a unique conflict that dominated American life since 1945, costing Americans $4 trillion in defense expenditures, taking the lives of nearly 100,000 young men, ruining many careers during the McCarthy witch hunts, leading the nation into the horrors of Southeast Asian conflicts, and in the 1980s triggering the worst economic depression in forty years. It had no battles and no defeated forces, only survivors rather than victors, and peace never remained secure as the conflict flared, subsided, and flared again year after year. On both sides, the human desire for peace met a stubborn and intractable adversary in a geopolitical struggle for domination. Across four decades, it unfolded through a tangle of moves and countermoves, developments, strategies, and motives that influenced current policies in crucial ways. Dramatic events brought the world to the edge of war in Berlin, Budapest, Havana, Cairo, Peking, and Teheran, while the action moved from missile bases to ballot boxes, from chancelleries to lunar-landing sites, through historic confrontations and meetings involving Stalin, Churchill and FDR, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman, the Shah and the Ayatollah, Mao Tsetun, Sadat, and Brezhnev. Living under the nuclear threat affected the American people, and the tensions of the Cold War fundamentally changed the nature of the Presidency, the powers of Congress, and the traditional openness of society.