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Tension Building

  • Iron Curtain

    Iron Curtain
    During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain is a political metaphor used to describe the political boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
  • Yalta/Potsdam Conferences

    Yalta/Potsdam Conferences
    The conference resulted in the Potsdam Declaration, regarding the surrender of Japan, and the Potsdam Agreement, regarding the Soviet annexation of former Polish territory east of the Curzon Line.
  • Long Telegram

    Long Telegram
    The Long Telegram was an 8,000 word long telegram written by George Kennan on February 1946. The Long Telegram did two things. The first thing that it did was address the threat of the Soviet Union's foreign policy. The second thing that it introduced the "containment" policy.
  • Novikov Telegram

    Novikov Telegram
    The Soviet ambassador to the USA, Nikolai Novikov, warned that the USA had emerged from World War Two economically strong and bent on world domination.
  • Berlin Airlift

    Berlin Airlift
    East German police and military units sealed off all arteries leading to West Berlin. The communists pulled up train tracks and roads, erected barriers topped with barbed wire.
  • Berlin Wall

    Berlin Wall
    The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic.
  • Cuban Missile Crisis

    Cuban Missile Crisis
    A 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
  • Chernobyl

    Chernobyl
    The Chernobyl disaster began on 26 April 1986 with the explosion of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR.
  • Berlin Wall

    Berlin Wall
    The Peaceful Revolution, marked the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain.