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Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. Im Steve Ember. Imagine a time machine. Youve just climbed into it for the purpose of visiting the United States – in the nineteen-fifties.What would you expect to find? In the nineteen fifties, America was a nation whose population was growing as never before. It was a nation where the popular culture of television was both reflecting and influencing its lifestyle.But it was also a nation that believed it was on the edge of nuclear war.Americans were happy to put World War Two behind them. The war ended in nineteen forty-five. People were hopeful. They thought the world would be peaceful for a while.By nineteen fifty, however, political tensions were high again. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies in World War Two. But, after the war, they became enemies in what came to be known as the Cold War. Communists took control of one eastern European nation after another. The Soviet Union led by Josef Stalin strengthened its armed forces. However, the United States thought America alone possessed the most powerful weapon of all -- the atomic bomb. But in nineteen forty-nine, a United States Air Force plane discovered strange conditions in the atmosphere. What was causing them? The answer came quickly: the Soviet Union had tested its own atomic bomb. The nuclear race was on. The two nations competed to build weapons of mass destruction. A doomsday clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned of a growing danger of nuclear destruction. Members of that group were afraid of what science had produced, and even more afraid of what it could produce. By nineteen forty-nine, the time on the doomsday clock was three minutes to midnight. In nineteen fifty, North Korea invaded South Korea. The Korean war increased efforts in the United States to develop a weapon even more deadly than the atomic bomb. That weapon was the hydrogen bomb.The Soviets were also working to develo