A Debate about Cold War must start with World War II.

World War II is considered a conflict that ranks, by any possible measure, as the most destructive war in human history. It's know that World War II brought an un paralleled levels of death, devastation and disorder. In Thomas G.Paterson Notes(1) he said " the conflagration of 1939-1945 was so wrenching, so total so profound, that a world was over tuned, not simply a human world of healthy and productive laborers, farmers, merchants, financiers, and intellectuals, not simply a secure world of close-knit families and communities, not simply a military world of Nazi storm troopers and Japanese Kamikazes, but all that and more, Bu unhinging as well the world of stable political, inherited wisdom, tradition, institutions, alliances, loyalties, commerce and classes" . resulting that the World War II created the condition that made great power conflict highly likely, If not inevitable. The world war II result was so devastating and destructive, approximately million people lost their lives as a direct result of the war, fully twothirds of them civilians. the losers of the war , the Axis states of Germany, Japan, and Italy, suffered more than 3 million civilian deaths; the conquerors, the Allies, suffered far more, at least 35 million civilian deaths. there was an astonishing 10 to 20% of the total populations of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia perished, and between 4% and 6 % of the total populations of Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Japan, and China. If the exact toll of this wrenching global conflagration continues to defy all efforts at statistical precision, the magnitude of the human losses it claimed surely remains as shockingly unfathomable two generations after World War II as it was in the conflict's immediate aftermath. At the end of WW II , much of the European continent was in ruins. Winston S. Churchill(2), in characteristically vivid prose, described postwar Europe as "a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate". Berlin was an utter wasteland, observed correspondent William Shirer(3), I dont think there has ever been such destruction on such a scale. In fact, many of the largest cities of central and eastern Europe suffered comparable levels of devastation; 90% of the buildings in Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg were gutted by Allied bombing, 70%

of those in the centre of Vienna. In Warsaw, reported John Hershey, the Germans had destroyed, systematically, street by street, alley by alley, house by house. Nothing is left except a mockery of architecture. Arthur Bliss Lane(4), upon entering that war-ravaged city in july 1945 wrote : "The sickening sweet odor of burned human flesh was a grim warning that we were entering a city of the dead". In France, fully onefifth of the nation's buildngs were damaged ot destroyed; In Greece, onequarter. Even the never occupied Great Britain suffered extensive damage, particularly from Nazi bombing, it ws estimated a lose of the total national wealth in the course of conflict. Soviet losses were the most sever of all : at least 25 million dead, another 25 million were homeless, 6 million buildings destroyed. The country's productive farmland and industrial plant were laid to waste. Across Europe.. was estimated 50 million of the war's survivors had been uprooted (homeless) by the war, some of them (16 million) euphemistically termed "displaced persons" by the victorious Allies. Conditions in postwar Asia were nearly as grim. Almost all of Japan's cities had been ravaged by relentless US bombing, with 40% of its urban areas completely destroyed. Tokyo, Japan's largest metropolis, was gutted by Allied firebombing that levelled more than half of its buildings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki met an even more dire fate as the twin atomic blasts that brought the Pacific War to a close left them obliterated. Approximately 9 million Japanese were homeless when their leaders finally surrendered. In China, a battleground for more than a decade, the industrial plant of Manchuria lay in shambles, the rich farmland of the Yellow River engulfed in floods. As many as 4 million Indonesians perished as a direct or indirect result of the conflict. One million Indians succumbed to war-induced famine in 1943, another million people in Indo-China two years later. Although much of Southeast Asia was spared the direct horrors of war visited upon Japan, China, and various Pacific islands, other parts, such as the Philippines and Burma, were not so fortunate. During the war's final stage, 80% of Manila's buildings were razed in savage fighting. Equally brutal combat in Burma, in the testimony of wartime leader Ba Maw(5), "had reduced an enormous part of the country to ruins". The vast swath of death and destruction precipitated by the war left not only much of Europe and Asia in ruins but the old international order as well. 'The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone', marveled US Assistant Secretary

of State Dean Acheson(6). Indeed, the Eurocentric international system that had dominated world affairs for the past 500 years had, virtually overnight, vanished. Two continent-sized military behemoths -already being dubbed superpowers -had risen in its stead, each intent upon forging a new order consonant with its particular needs and values. As the war moved into its final phase, even the most casual observer of world politics could see that the United States and the Soviet Union held most of the military, economic, and diplomatic cards. On one basic goal, those