The article examines the influence of the Cold War on the general dynamics of the international relations in the second half of the20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on the reasons of the stability of this form of the conflict interaction between the US and USSR/Russia. Although the historiography extensively deals with the Cold War, the authors emphasizes that a number of issues concerning its fundamental characteristics remain insuffi ciently elucidated. Among them are the criteria for classifying any conflict or event as a manifestation of the Cold War. The article indicates the ways to find answers to some important questions concerning the Cold War, reviews its wide-spread historiographic concepts, and analyzes in its context such fundamental concepts of international relations as “sovereignty” and “security”. The authors offer the reasons for the continuation of the Cold War after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the bloc confrontation. Special attention is paid to the different phases of the Cold War, its transformations and the reasons that led to them. The research also answers the question of what factors influenced the intensity of the Cold War, intensified its heat and at the same time prevented its escalation into a full-scale “hot war” by a wide range of weapons of mass destruction. The authors express their point of view on whether the Cold War should be considered as a dangerous anomaly that threatens the development of the world community, or on the contrary, this global confrontation allowed to transform the conflict tensions between the world’s largest military powers into a relative strategic stability. The article highlights the issues in the history of the Cold War that require further study or conceptual clarifi cation. Particular attention is paid to the currently widespread approach of considering the most signifi cant confrontations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in terms of the Cold War.

The military aspect of the U.S. space projects between 1957 and 1963 has hitherto been the subject of only cursory consideration in the Russian scientifi c community. In the context of the rivalry with the USSR in the exploration of near-Earth space, large-scale U.S. military-space projects were driven by numerous objectives, one of which was to establish a military presence in space and, ideally, to achieve undisputed American military superiority in near-Earth space. From the outset of the “space race”, initiatives were devised and executed to develop vehicles for reconnaissance activities, concurrently with programs for novel space-based armaments capable of targeting the USSR from near-Earth space. Moreover, proposals by the American military and scientists indicated the commencement of “military exploration” of the Moon. These proposals encompassed the establishment of an artifi cial habitat for human habitation, along with the construction of a military base on the Moon’s surface (or subterranean), equipped with launch pads for missiles armed with nuclear warheads. The prevailing assumption at the time was that these missiles would ensure the destruction of the primary adversary, even in the event of the U.S. mainland being targeted, following the initiation of a nuclear exchange. A further area of early-stage military-space research involved the development of means to combat enemy satellites, with the use of nuclear weapons being a distinct possibility. The overarching objective of military space programs was twofold: firstly, to ensure scientific and technical superiority in open space research, and secondly, to demonstrate this to the global community. A direct correlation was observed between advancements in near-Earth space exploration and the global perception of the two superpowers as rival world leaders during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is important to note that neither of the two superpowers achieved an obvious “victory” in the space arms race during the period under consideration; however, the general vector of space exploration was set at that time.