Since 1945, the end of World War II, the globe had been torn in two: the capitalists of the United States of America & the Soviet Union. As the years passed, each nation attempted to out-spend, out-build, and out-nuke each other in a contest of national piggy banks. For each dollarU.S. budget spent on military technology, space rockets, or nuclear ingredients, the opposite nation had to keep up. This was one of the biggest factors that led to the collapse of the USSR, and thus, an undisputed American victory in the Cold War. By 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev began instituting modernization policies almost immediately, most importantly the policies of perestroika and glasnost to try and save the collapsing economy, but it wasn't enough and the USSR collapsed in 1991.