> So when Nikita Kruschev said "We will bury you", he was talking about playing in the sand?
Actually he was talking about Communist ideology outliving any of the currently extant governments. While it gets a lot of play from the McCarthy types, it really wasn't that inflammatory of a speech. The out of context quote gets used for hate mongering a lot. His own explanation of it was this:
"I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you,"
As for the original quote, it's basically true. The Cold War was a genuine competition, but part of the "rules" were that the home countries of the Soviet Union and the United States would not be invaded by either side. And both sides kept to those rules all the way through. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis was simply a posturing disagreement about whether the US missiles in Turkey and the Soviet missiles in Cuba constituted breaking those rules.
And I remind you: for all the tough talk, the resolution of the situation was that both sides took the offending missiles down and claimed victory at home. Then they made agreements about where they could stash missiles and kept to them until many years after the Soviet Union stopped existing.
Pepsi barons shoot Coke distributors in Columbia, but the head offices of Pepsico are in no danger of being attacked by Coca Cola Minute Men. This is the modern world, and major powers are civilized enough to have wars by rules.
