‘The balance of terror'. In October 1961, facing the risk of military escalation in Berlin, the cartoonist Abu portrays, in the British left-wing Sunday newspaper The Observer, a world that is prey to human folly.
On 10 and 11 May 1970, in an interview given to journalist Georges Suffert, Jean Monnet, former Commissioner-General of the French National Planning Board, describes the role played by the Cold War in the origins of the Schuman Plan.
In his memoirs, Jean Monnet describes the Cold War climate that prevailed between East and West in the late 1940s and emphasises the importance of finding answers to the question of Germany’s future.
In 1969, an aircraft from the British carrier HMS Eagle photographs a Soviet Kotlin class missile destroyer taking fuel from a Russian supply ship while shadowing the British carrier, which has come down from a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) exercise in the Aegean Sea. Throughout the Cold War, naval espionage and the shadowing of enemy ships are used by the two blocs to monitor and assess their respective military forces.
‘They are in control — and they just go round and round …’ On 17 January 1948, in a period of increasing hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union, the German cartoonist Ernst Maria Lang portrays the harrowing situation of post-war Europe, held hostage to the tensions between Moscow and Washington.
‘The wolf and the little goats. A fairytale yesterday — and today?’ In March 1948, referring to the Marshall Plan, German cartoonist Lang illustrates the solidarity binding the countries of Western Europe, which are uniting to protect convalescent Germany from the Soviet threat.
On 1 February 1949, against the backdrop of the intensification of the Cold War, British cartoonist David Low takes an ironic look at the role unwittingly played by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in uniting the European continent.