Winston Churchill issued warnings about the Soviet Union as near the beginning as 1946 when he claimed that an “Iron Curtain” had fallen from corner to corner Eastern Europe to clarify the Soviet Union’s take hold of for command in the region. The term was used all the way through the Cold War. The most important main outcome of the Cold War involved the extraordinary exertion of British and American pilots to maintain West Berlin supplied after the Soviet government stopped all outside ground traffic. Between June 1948 and September 1949, pilots made 277,000 flights into West Berlin, carrying more than two million tons of products including coal for fuel. The conclusion of the Cold War also saw the fall of the Soviet Union, which had united the countries of eastern and central Europe and much of northern Asia under communist rule. The break-up of the union changed the face of Europe and kept mapmakers busy as over twenty new countries emerged or reemerged over the next numerous years. The Cold War was incredibly costly over its four decades, costing the U.S. eight trillion dollars in military expenditures and over 100,000 lives in Korea and Vietnam. Although the exact figures for the Soviet Union are unidentified, they spent a superior percentage of their sickening national product on the war, maybe as much as 60 percent.
