“Five, four, three, two one – HAPPY NEW YEAR!” And it’s not just any old new year. It’s New Year’s Eve 2000, and a brand-new century has officially begun.
Confetti rains down as you – and the world – enter the 21st century.
By the year 2000, the world was less afraid of something scary happening due to the Cold War, like a nuclear weapons attack. The Cold War was a long 20th-century period of tension between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), or Soviet Union. Those tensions eased partly because the Soviet Union broke up into independent republics in 1991. That left the U.S. as the world’s only superpower. Even before then, most nations had signed the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This agreement helped stop the spread of nuclear weapons. In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. and Soviet Union made other agreements to reduce their weapons stockpiles. The Berlin Wall, built by communist East Germany in 1961 to isolate itself and its capital, East Berlin, from the democratic city of West Berlin, was torn down in 1989. Germany was reunited the following year.
