Knudsen compares the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) to a robin announcing the thaw of winter. Beginning with negotiations in 1969, SALT resulted in an agreement to limit the number of ballistic missiles held by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Concerned with the expansion of communism, the United States continued to pursue a policy of containment. Many believed that the Soviet Union existence threatened the safety and freedoms of mankind.
Despite the suppression of religion in the Warsaw Pact countries, Catholicism in Poland not only survived but thrived as many Poles saw their religion as a way to oppose communism.
The Prague Spring, a series of political and economic reforms that attempted to create "communism with a human face." Many feared that like a weed the Soviets would kill off any reforms before they had time to blossom.
On the evening of August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, to put an end to the Prague Spring. With the Soviets in charge of the country, they overturned the earlier reforms with a period of "normalization." McGovern equates this…