America, Russia, China, Cold War

     It has been 40 years since I first had someone try to explain to me that Russia and America had once been at war--which, by the way, is not true. At the time, I was in junior high school, and could not convince my fellow student that this was an error. The student had probably heard it from an adult. So, for the record--America and Russia have never been at war with one another. It took more than 30 years to have a student tell me the source of confusion--the "Cold War".
   The "Cold War" was not a war. Not one shot was fired by anyone. The "Cold War" refers to the severing of diplomatic relations between the United States of America, and what was then the Soviet Union, (officially the USSR, often called simply "Russia") after WWII.  There were no ambassadors from the United States to Russia, or from Russia to the United States. We weren't speaking to each other. We (America ) also weren't speaking to the People' s Republic of China, often called "Red China". We would only speak to the government of Taiwan ( also called Formosa), which claimed to be the legitimate government of China. What is today called China went unacknowledged by our government for many years--it just didn't exist.  America has never been at war with China, either.
      The Cold War--the refusal to speak to one another, or to have any dealings at all --made people worry that there would be a real war, maybe a nuclear war, as America, Russia, and China all seemed to spend a lot of their money on nuclear weapons. This ended, not with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but years before--when President Nixon visited both China and Russia while he was in office. Perhaps he'll be remembered for this one day, instead of for the scandals that caused his resignation.
      Remember--America  has fought two wars with England (Great Britain)--and we won them both. We have never fought a war with China or Russia.