Your students are part of the first post-Cold War generation. They have no immediate sense of the anxieties that filled the 40 years following World War II. They did not wake up in the morning fearing nuclear war or imagining the Soviet Union to be "the bad guy." Therefore, one of the challenges in teaching this material is to bridge the "generation gap"—bring to life a sense of a world full of imminent danger that preoccupied your students' parents and grandparents.

Of course, one way to do this is to get your students to identify who today's bad guys are. If not the Soviet Union or the threat of nuclear war... what?