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Yalta Conference
The "big three" (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin) all came together at Yalta in the USSR. They met to discuss strategy for the final stages of warfare. Together they agreed that Britain and the United States would provide bomber support for Soviet troops fighting along the eastern front. Regarding situations in Poland, all three men would realize that after the war Europe would remain divided. -
Potsdam Conference
Following the end of war and FDR's death, Harry Truman, new British prime minister Clement Atlee, and Stalin met at the Potsdam Conference in Germany from July 17 to August 2, 1945. Little was accomplished because America and the Soviet Union grew worse, but agreed to demilitarize Germany and agreed upon the concept of war crimes trials. This would divide Germany into four zones. -
First A Bomb Dropped On Japan
The first atomic bomb was dropped from a B-29, the Enola Gay onto the city of Hiroshima. It killed around 80,000 people instantly, and within the year another 60,000 would die from radiation. Because of the explosion, all communication was lost, until 16 hours later when the US would release a statement of what happened. -
V-J Day
The day on which the Allied forces declared victory over Japan. -
Iron Curtain Speech
in the small Missouri town of Fulton (population of 7,000), Churchill gave his now famous "Iron Curtain" speech to a crowd of 40,000. Churchill gave the very descriptive phrase that surprised the United States and Britain, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."Many people consider Churchill's "iron curtain speech" the beginning of the Cold War. -
Truman Doctrine announced
Kennan’s containment doctrine rapidly became the root of the dominant U.S. strategy for fighting Communism throughout the Cold War. Truman announced that the United States would support foreign governments resisting “armed minorities” or “outside pressures”—that is, Communist revolutionaries or the Soviet Union. He then convinced Congress to appropriate $400 million to prevent the fall of Greece and Turkey to Communist insurgents. -
Marshall Plan announced
George Marshall shared with the world in a speech at Harvard. Officially known as the European Recovery Program (ERP), the Marshall Plan was intended to rebuild the economies and spirits of western Europe, primarily. Marshall was convinced the key to restoration of political stability lay in the revitalization of national economies. Further he saw political stability in Western Europe as a key to blunting the advances of communism in that region. -
Berlin Airlift begins
The Allied powers decided to unite their different occupation zones of Germany into a single economic unit. In protest, the Soviet representative withdrew from the Allied Control Council. Coincident with the introduction of a new deutsche mark in West Berlin,which the Soviets regarded as a violation of agreements with the Allies, the Soviet occupation forces in eastern Germany began a blockade of all rail, road, and water communications between Berlin and the West. -
NATO treaty ratified
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, the Atlantic Alliance or the Western Alliance, is an international organisation1 for collective security established in 1949, in support of the North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington, DC. it was intended so that if the USSR and its allies launched an attack against any of the NATO members, it would be treated as if it was an attack on all member states. This marked a significant change for the US. -
End of Berlin Blockade
Came to an end when the Soviet Union lifts its 11-month blockade against West Berlin. The blockade had been broken by a massive U.S.-British airlift of vital supplies to West Berlin's two million citizens.and the Western powers no longer had a right to be there. West Berlin's food, fuel, and other necessities were cut off, so Britain and the US responded by initiating the largest airlift in history delivering goods. On May 12, 1949, the Soviets abandoned the blockade, West Germany was made. -
Soviets explode A-bomb
The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. It came as a great shock to the United States because they were not expecting the Soviet Union to possess nuclear weapon knowledge so soon. The impact that the possession of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union had upon the United States was that it caused Americans to question their own safety.
President Truman responded by reevaluating the United States position in the world and called for the United States to build up its weapons. -
Communist takeover in China
the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek had been fighting a long civil war against Communist rebels led by Mao Zedong, . The U.S. government under Roosevelt and Truman had backed the Nationalists with money and small arms shipments but overall had little influence on the war. Mao’s revolutionaries, however, finally managed to defeat government forces in 1949 and took control of mainland China. It suddenly put more than a quarter of the world’s population under Communist control. -
Beginning of McCarthyism
many in America were deeply suspicious of the Communist country. As the tensions of the Cold War deepened, fear of Communism reached its peak in the early 1950s. The U.S. Congress, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, conducted witch-hunts in search of Communist sympathizers. The accused had two options. They could refuse to testify and risk losing their jobs and friends. Or they could cooperate and accuse friends and colleagues of being Communists. -
Warsaw Pact
A collective defense treaty among eight communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in existence during the Cold War.The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the regional economic organization for the communist States of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was in part a Soviet military reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955, per the Paris Pacts of 1954 but was primarily motivated by Soviet to remain control. -
Geneva Summit
Included Pres Eisenhower of the United States, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain, Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin of the Soviet Union, and Prime Minister Edgar Faure of France.The purpose was to bring together world leaders to begin discussions on peace.[2] Although those discussions led down many different roads (arms negotiations, trade barriers, diplomacy, nuclear warfare, etc.), the talks were influenced by the common goal for increased global security. -
Suez War
Eisenhower actually supported the Communist-leaning Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis. When the negotiations collapsed, Nasser turned to the Soviet Union for help and then seized the British-controlled Suez Canal, which linked the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Great Britain and France asked Eisenhower for military assistance to retake the canal, but Eisenhower refused, forcing the two powers to join with Israel in 1956 to retake the canal themselves. -
Hungarian Uprising
Began as student demonstration, it was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. It was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR's forces drove out the Nazis at the end of World War II and occupied Eastern Europe. Despite the failure of the uprising, it was highly influential, and came to play a role in the downfall of the Soviet Union decades later. -
Launching of Sputnik
Soviet scientists shocked the world when they announced they had successfully launched the first man-made satellite. Although the satellites themselves posed no danger to the United States, Americans feared that the Soviet Union now had the ability to attack New York or Washington with nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. -
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed
They were American citizens executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.The trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951.The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War. -
U.S. U-2 plan shot down
United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the airspace of the Soviet Union. The United States government at first denied the plane's purpose and mission, but was forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produced its intact remains and surviving pilot, Francis Gary Powers, as well as photos of military bases in Russia taken by Powers. Incident was a great embarrassment to the United States, prompted a marked deterioration in its relations w S.U.
