Essay On The 1960s

The 1960s was absolutely rife with incidents and events which could easily have erupted into WW3. The decade-spanning Vietnam War which in 1968 was intensified with the launch of the North 's Tet Offensive and an increasing amount of anti-war sentiment from the US Public; various African post-colonial independence movements throughout the decade; the 1961 Berlin Crisis that saw Soviet and American tanks face off across the East-West Berlin border; the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion against newly Soviet-aligned Cuba and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; the 1967 Arab-Israeli War; the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which, beginning in the late '60s, was starting to look more and more like a second civil war; the May 1968 Paris Crisis; the Polish uprisings and "Prague Spring" Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; all of which could have been the spark that started the great fire. …show more content…
In both countries, the development of these weapons coincided with an increasing determination for political and military independence from traditional allies; France would ultimately withdraw completely from NATO 's military command structure and expel all NATO forces from its soil, while China and the Soviet Union parted ways ultimately leading to a series of limited border skirmishes. Adding to the political quagmire that was being developed was the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, launched by Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Ghana, which sought a more 3rd World alternative to the East vs West dynamic of geopolitical realities of the period. All of these events can be conveniently summed up by the Doomsday Clock, which in 1968 experienced its largest single negative change, -5 seconds, of the entire Cold