In China, civil war loomed and the task of regaining even the marginal living-standards of the prewar era was gravely threatened. The newly empowered military establishment wanted funds to preserve the massive-forces the United States had assembled in the course of the war, forces that could now be used to deter would-be aggressors. A number of American-officials had begun thinking of the Soviet Union as the next enemy well before the end of the war. By the end of 1948, the United States and the Soviet Union were obviously no longer allies or friends. Walter Lippmann's term, Cold War, seemed apt. Both nations had ended their processes of demobilization and had begun military preparedness programs. The Communist-conquest of China, the Alger Hiss case, and the Soviet nuclear explosion fed disparate but overlapping forces in the United States.