Two years after the end of World War II, a Cold War developed between Joseph Stalin's Soviet Russia and the Western powers under the untried leadership of Harry Truman, as America came to play a global role for the first time. The British Empire began its decline with the birth of the Indian and Pakistan republics, and in 1948 the state of Israel came into being, sparking the first Arab-Israeli war. Taking stock of a bewildering time, Jonathan Fenby examines these events as well as the Communist triumph in China, the coming of apartheid to South Africa, the division of Korea, and a host of technological breakthroughs that changed the world.