Words: 617
The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to client states, espionage, massive propaganda campaigns, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events (in particular the Olympics), and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The IIS and USSR became involved in political and military conflicts in the Third World countries of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. To alleviate the risk of a potential nuclear war, both sides sought relief of political tensions through dtenet in the asses.
In the 1 9805, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-asses, the new Soviet President Mikhail Geographer introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika (“reorganization”, 1 987) and glasnost (“openness”, ca. 1985). Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Central Europe, especially Poland. They reached a breaking point when Geographer refused to use Soviet troops to support the faltering government of East Germany in late 1989.
Within weeks all the satellite states broke free from Moscow in a peaceful wave of revolutions (with the exception of the Romania Revolution). The pressures escalated inside the Soviet Union, where Communism fell and the USSR was formally dissolved in late 1991. The United States remained as the world’s only superpower. Although the war ended, the aftermath of the cold war witnessed proliferation of small arms, segmentation of states (instability), civil wars especially in third world countries and upsurge Of international terrorism.
Small arms proliferation was compounded at the end of the Cold War when millions of suddenly surplus weapons were sold at steep discounts or given away as the world’s major military powers reduced stockpiles and/or modernized their forces. For example, Ukraine, which had huge reserves of arms and ammunition and had a large domestic military-industrial complex, had a stockpile of excess weapons of over 2. 5 million tons. It sold off large quantities of these arms for hard currency with very few questions.
A Ukrainian parliamentary committee investigating arms transfers in the country found that between 1 992 and 1998, $32 billion worth of armaments were either lost or stolen in Ukraine. For many countries it makes economic sense to sell their surplus weapons cache ply since it costs money to safety destroy old and excess arms and ammunition. This does not include the cost to international donors, however, who must shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to care for those displaced ND rebuild countries destroyed as a consequence of irresponsible arms transfers.
Used weapons are widely traded throughout conflict-ridden regions of the world. They are sold in large batches by arms brokers and circulated by small-scale businessmen taking advantage of regional differences in demand and supply. Assault rifles first transferred to Macaque and Angola in the asses and early asses were later traded to rebels operating in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the late asses and early 2000. Some of these same weapons may now be in the hands of combatants in C??et divorce.
In the wrong hands even relatively small numbers of these weapons can exact a staggering humanitarian cost. Enormous numbers of people can be killed by small groups of people. For example, in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo the prevalence of small armed groups and private militias-??often serving as proxies for a number of African states-??drives the ethnic killings and the concomitant displacement and deprivation there. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo more than 5 million people have died from the conflict, about 1. 4 million people remain internally displaced, and approximately 340,000