What were the short and long term effects of World War II?
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World War II, in the short term, reduced the number of effective empires in the world to two: the US and the Soviet Union. The war bankrupted the British and occupied the French, with of course, Germany and Japan being completely defeated. The American economy boomed both during and after the war, as the jobs and wealth it created took us out of the Great Depression and heavily industrialized the country.
In the long term, the economy remained healthy in the US and the middle class greatly expanded, but the Cold War struggle between the two remaining superpowers would dominate world affairs for half a century, divide countries in Europe and Asia, launch civil wars in dozens of places around the world and begin a very expensive nuclear and conventional arms race. The atomic bomb invented during World War II could not be uninvented, and in the modern day nuclear proliferation is still a problematic leftover from World War II.
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