The year was 1946. World War II had ended only a few months earlier, and already the stage was set for another global conflict. The United States and the Soviet Union, already allies in the war against Hitler's Third Reich, were now engaged in a standoff over which belief system would prevail among the slowly recovering nations of Europe. The Soviet Union wasted no time in forming an Eastern Bloc, a group of satellite nations controlled by puppet governments, whose main purpose was to provide some sort of buffer between Russian soil and other European nations, sealing off their new territory behind strictly controlled borders. what was called “The Iron Curtain”. The USSR had no intention of stopping its expansion, not hiding its desire to conquer all the remaining territory. The United States responded by forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, in an effort to contain the spread of communism. Within a few years the world had suddenly polarized into two distinct groups. When the USSR detonated its first nuclear weapon in 1949, the confrontation between East and West reached new heights. Suddenly it became a matter of survival for the entire world. What had been conceived as a war centered on the divided state of Germany suddenly fractured into many smaller conflicts around the world, each as important as the last. The United States needed to see what was behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in all the other hot spots that had suddenly exploded, so it could estimate the enemy's strength, observe its progress in nuclear weapons, examine its culture and literally hundreds of other questions that could only be answered by one method: Aircraft… center of paper… any jet aircraft today. The Blackbird remains a true American symbol, a testament to the power of the imagination. And in many people's imaginations, the Habu continues to fly. “Though I fly through the valley of death, I will fear no evil. Because I'm at 80,000 feet and I'm climbing. - At the entrance to the old SR-71 operating base (Kadena, Japan) Works Cited Johnson, Clarence L. Kelly: More Than My Share Of It All. 1 ed. Washington DC, Washington DC, United States: Smithsonian Institution, 1985. Print.Rich, Ben R. Skunk Works. 1st ed. New York City, New York, United States: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. Print.Kucher, Paul R. “Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.” SR-71 online. 1998. Network. 11 September 2011. .Roadrunners Internationale. Thornton D. Barnes. Network. September 11. 2011. .