Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 is the latest in a series of Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) temporary exhibitions that boldly proclaim the importance of design. Earlier this year we had China Design Now and in 2006 there was Modernism: Designing a New World.

The thesis of Cold War Modern is a sound one: that the world's two superpowers largely avoided direct military conflict during the Cold War and instead used art, architecture and design to proclaim the merits of their political systems and their visions of a modern society.

The exhibition is loosely chronological and is divided into eight sections, covering themes such as the arts, revolution and space exploration.

It kicks off with a scene-setting section called Anxiety and Hope in the Aftermath of War, which opens with a number of questions: "Should postwar societies be organised as free-market democracies, or should they be organised by strong governments for the benefit of ordinary people? Was the world to become more Americanised or more Sovietised?"

Answering these questions is not helped by the fact that most of the objects visitors see in the first few displays are from the west. There is a chair by Charles and Ray Eames from the US, a Vespa from Italy and a Messerschmitt cabin scooter from West Germany, but little from the Soviet Union during the same period.

But the exhibition soon gets into its stride with a display called Berlin Visions, which says that "before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, Berliners could move between the two sectors and compare life in two different worlds". The two projects used to make this comparison are the Stalinallee workers' palace in East Berlin and the Interbrau in West Berlin.

The Interbrau was an international exhibition of modernist buildings that opened in 1957 as a response by the West German authorities to claims that socialism could best provide for the working classes.

The Stalinallee workers' palace in the east featured an 80-metre wide boulevard and its adaptation of 19th-century German neo-classical architecture is in stark contrast to the modernism of the Interbrau, whose architects included Walter Gropius, the former director of the Bauhaus, who was resident in the US by this time. A series of straight comparisons between East and West would get tiresome, but this section provides a revealing contrast between the competing systems.

Close by, another display looks at design and defence research, and features the first example of the excellent use of audiovisuals. The voice-over for a film about the virtues of the Sage defence monitoring system in the US says: "The offensive weapons of tomorrow are here today… You are listening to the heartbeart of the Sage computer, constantly monitoring, testing, pulsating, controlling."

This propaganda double-speak can be heard some distance away and gives a feeling of the paranoia associated with the cold war and the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon. The odd bleeps, squeaks and groans in another film, created by Le Corbusier for a 1958 exposition in Brussels, add to this.

There is a nice change of pace the third section of the exhibition, The Competition to be Modern, which looks at the period after the death of Stalin in 1953 when relations between east and west improved a little.

The jaunty music that accompanies the Eames film, Glimpses of America, is a good accompaniment to the nearby text, which quotes US vice-president Richard Nixon's challenge to Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev: "Would it not be better to compete in the relative merits of washing machines than in the strength of rockets?" Nixon was speaking at the American National Exhibition In Moscow in 1959, for which the Eames film was the centrepiece.

With lots of Eames and Le Corbusier contributions, the exhibition obviously relies heavily on the usual heavyweights of 20th-century design. But the show does use a wide range of objects - including posters, clothes, photographs - to counter any predictability.

These include a Le Corbusier-designed tapestry depicting a familial embrace. It is apparently a "peaceful motif for a new society", but I would kill to have it on my wall at home.

And it's not just unfamiliar items by familiar designers that provide the surprises. The work of the Yugoslavian design movement Exat 51 gives a revealing counterpoint to the prevailing socialist realism that dominated art and design in the eastern bloc. Yugoslavia broke ranks with the Soviet Union in 1948, and its aim to find its own path to socialism is reflected in the work of Exat 51 members.

The pavilion they created for the Brussels World Exposition in 1958 looks far closer to the modernist architecture being practised in the west at the time.

Artworks inspired or directly linked to the cold war are interspersed throughout the exhibition and they complement the design objectswell. Nevertheless, it's a big exhibition and fatigue does set in towards the end as the threads that tie the 300 objects to the big theme inevitably loosen a little bit.

When I visited, some people were fairly racing through the penultimate section, which looks at the visionary architects on both sides of the cold war who were concerned at the effects of militarism and consumerism and were developing more idealistic ways of living.

The last area, Fragile Planet, encourages visitors to think about how the cold war, with its space race and nuclear threat, has changed the way we think about the world. It says that many of the key questions of the cold war, such as how to imagine modern lives outside the conditions set by the marketplace, are relevant today. With economies seemingly collapsing around the world, this seems timely.

But capitalism is not dead yet, and, as if to prove this, you emerge into a V&A retail area where you can purchase bits of the cold war. I didn't see the Le Corbusier tapestry and resisted buying a t-shirt featuring a design by the innovative UK architects Archigram.

But I did leave the exhibition with some fresh perspectives on the cold war and a few insights into some of the less familiar movements in post-1945 design.