"The Korean War represented the gory culmination of seven years of Superpower probes of the other side’s aspirations, strength, and resolve. Each new test had not produced the provisional compromises that had sustained the Grand Alliance; instead the results were a deepening of their mutual suspicions, an elevation of their hostile rhetoric, and the reinforcement of their resolve to strengthen their respective camps. The near collisions in Berlin and in the Korean War had added a military dimension, and the escalating nuclear arms race lent an element of rigidity and terror to US-Soviet encounters. Moreover, the Korean War stymied both sides’ hopes of attaining a preponderance of power, whether in wealth, military might, or ideological truth. The birth of a second communist state in China was a major challenge to their aim of dividing the world. Given the scale of political and social upheaval in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could hope to impose its will everywhere on its own terms. Having gone almost to the atomic brink, the new leaders in Moscow and Washington in 1953 faced the challenge of building a less perilous, more orderly Cold War world that now extended beyond its original European borders."