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a so-called Nuclear Audit. Since atomic weapons constituted the backbone of Cold War deterrence and absorbed the lion’s share of resources for military research, it was thought that the amount of money devoted to them would serve as a revealing index of the nation’s sacrifice. By that reckoning, the United States between 1940 and 1996 spent $5.8 trillion (in constant 1995 dollars) on nuclear weapons and infrastructure. How much is that? According to Brookings, a stack of a billion $1 bills would rise about eighty miles. A trillion would tower 79,000 miles. As for nearly 6 trillion—the stack would reach the moon, encircle it and reach roughly a quarter of the way back. Put another way, the researchers estimated, the amount would paper every state east of the Mississippi, with enough left over to cover half the American West, including Texas. Put yet another way, it exceeds the amount of all outstanding mortgages on all homes and buildings in the country. It is roughly half of U.S. GDP—the amount Americans spend every year on everythingfrom chewing gum and iPods to second homes in Vail. If you throw in military spending in the round—unfair, yes, but only partly since the Cold War inflated all defense spending, establishing a base that governs today—that total would balloon to $51.6 trillion, according to Brookings.
    How to even begin to count the human cost? The Korean War claimed the lives of 32,629 American soldiers and approximately 3 million Korean civilians. One of every ten Americans who served in Vietnam became a casualty: 58,148 died and 304,000 were wounded. An estimated 1.2 million Vietnamese were killed over seven years of fighting. Half a million people died in Angola’s twenty-seven-year civil war, waged among factions variously backed by the Soviets or the United States. The decade-long civil war in El Salvador, waged between Cold War proxies—leftist guerrillas versus a U.S.-backed military junta and its infamous “death squads”—claimed 75,000 dead. A similar conflict raged in neighboring Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, taking some 200,000 lives. Such numbers pale next to the 30 million Chinese who died in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or the million or so who perished in Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide, or the 30 million who died in Stalin’s wars and purges. These events, too, grew out of the Cold War and are part of its dark heritage.
    The symbol of all this was the Berlin Wall, the grim icon to half a century of human misery, oppression, struggle and hope.
    For most Germans, as for most others, 1989 came out of the blue. That winter, on the cusp of the year that would change the world, there seemed almost no impetus for change. Only the most romantic West Germans dreamed of a day when the Wall might fall. Certainly Chancellor Helmut Kohl did not, nor any of his advisers that I spoke to. Neither did his foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for all his talk of
Ostpolitik,
who, in an interview with
Newsweek
at the time, dismissed Thatcher’s and Reagan’s harder-line advisers as “people who stick to the old enemy images and act as if nothing has changed or could ever change.”
    Virtually no one even spoke (except rhetorically in the most hazy future tense) of
Wiedervereinigung,
or reunification. Politicians might steadfastly refuse to recognize Germany’s division, at least officially.Yet most Germans were perfectly at ease with it. Everywhere, there was a cocoonlike sense of self-sufficiency, a basic contentment with the idea of two Germanys and a resistance to the continued pretense that there was only one. West Germans described themselves as just that—West Germans, or “Europeans,” hardly German at all. Polls documented this sense of estrangement. In 1983, 43 percent of German students under the age of twenty-one described their titular East German brethren as
Ausländer,
or foreigners. In the summer of 1985,