Outline of the Cold War
End of the Cold War – While many observers state the 1989 Malta Summit was the end of the Cold War, it was December 1991 before the Presidents of the United States and the Soviet Union formally recognised the conflict's end, with the Soviet Union also being dissolved at that time. Some key events leading up to the end include:
The Ultimate Solution
At the end of Norden's book, as with Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" (1962), the "Cold War" between the Nazis and the Japanese seems ready to turn into World War III. In the power struggle over the legacy of the completely senile Hitler, a putsch overturns the (relatively) moderate faction of Albert Speer, known as "Axists" because they want to maintain the Axis agreements with Japan. Power is then seized by Reinhard Heydrich and the most fanatical "Contraxists", who are determined to destroy "the degenerate Yellow Race" even at the price of an all-out nuclear war in which Germany itself would be annihilated; this war is apparently incipient by the end of the text as the narrator mentions the NYPD coordinating an evacuation to the Catskills. Thus, having presented the reader with this world, and letting the few characters who tried to present even a token and ineffectual resistance all be killed off, Norden ends the book with the entire world about to end.