U.S. Defense Secretary Honors Former U.S. Marine

PRLog (Press Release) - Dec. 18, 2012 - Washington, D.C. – Johnny Depp’s close friend, Earl Reginald Stevenson, was awarded the Cold War Certificate of Recognition by the U.S. Secretary of Defense for his tour of duty in the US Marines during the Cold War.

Stevenson is a former U.S. Marine, a commissioned Colonel, and is a direct descendant of John Stevenson, one of the first settlers at Jamestown, Virginia.

The Cold War, often dated from 1945–1991, was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western world, dominated by the United States with NATO and other allies; versus powers in the Eastern world, dominated by the Soviet Union with its Warsaw Pact and other allies. The Soviet Union held satellite states especially in the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe as well as in Asia.[1] The United States held client states especially in Central and South America, and Asia.[2] This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. A neutral faction arose with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia, this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led East.

The Cold War was so named as it never featured direct military action, since both East and West possessed nuclear weapons, and because their use would probably guarantee their mutual assured destruction. However both repeatedly engaged in indirect confrontations through proxy wars. The cycles of relative calm would be followed by high tension which could have led to war. The most tense involved the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983), and the “Able Archer” NATO military exercises (1983). The conflict was instead expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to client states, espionage, massive propaganda campaigns, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The US and USSR fought proxy wars of various types: in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and helped foster communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies; some the US attempted to roll back through subversion and warfare, with mixed results. To alleviate the risk of a potential nuclear war, both sides sought détente in the 1970s to relieve political tensions.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). This opened the country and its satellite states to a mostly peaceful wave of revolutions which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy, and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare.

Stevenson is a well-known friend of actor Johnny Depp, the late David Carradine, Jan-Michael Vincent, Walking Tall's Bo Svenson, Bo Hopkins, former FEMA Director and Undersecretary of Homeland Security Michael D. Brown.

Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/12045294/1