The most direct environmental impacts of the Cold War were caused by the massive military industry complexes of the two blocs dominated by Washington and Moscow. The supporting substructures of modern military machines include sustained mobilization of civilian populations and exploitation of natural resources. And beyond the borders of the two blocs, in the setting of East-West ideological competition, the competing superpowers devised broad economic and social development programs designed to convince formally neutral elites in the Third World that either communism or free enterprise carried the key to future prosperity and political control. The industrialization of nature accelerated enormously in the contested geographical zone of nonaligned countries and in the shadow zone between peacetime and conflict that characterized the Cold War era. The most massive projects for transforming nature to suit Cold War strategies were river basin development programs centering on high dams.

From the 1940s onward, hundreds of rivers throughout the world submitted to construction of high dams, with their attendant man-made reservoirs, irrigation networks, expansion of arable land, power grids, and industrial complexes. Entire populations were relocated or reorganized, as mountain watersheds were brought under logging regimes and soil-rich valleys were flooded or tuned to intensive market-oriented agriculture. Cold War geopolitical strategies were a driving motivation for the locations of a series of these dams. Indeed, much of the map of the world's dammed rivers reflects Cold War zones of competition, and the concentration of fiscal and industrial resources at many dam sites in remote locations cannot be fully explained outside the framework of Cold War rivalries.