Cold War

From Srafopedia

The man Will talks with at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford tries to put the era of the Nuniatak dig in Alaska from which John Parry disappeared into a historical context by linking the mid-1980s to "the height of the cold war," "Star Wars," and Russians and Americans "building enormous radar installations all over the Arctic."

The term cold war, lowercased in both the US and UK His Dark Materials but typically uppercased in US histories, refers to the period following World War II (or late 1940's) and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While the US and Soviet Union never engaged in a full scale war, this period was dominated by mutual distrust and the proliferation of nuclear arms, which only heightened the tension between the two superpowers. The archaeologist seems to have forgotten that during the Cold War, America's adversaries weren't referred to as "Russians" but rather as "Soviets" since Russia at that time was simply part of the USSR.

SK "Trepanning"