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Red Scare
As the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. became known as the Red Scare. The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. The climate of fear and repression linked to the Red Scare finally began to ease by the late 1950s. -
Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference helped lead to the Cold War by giving the Soviet Union control over Eastern Europe. At the conference, the Soviet Union was given the right to control Eastern Europe.They were supposed to allow free elections in the countries of the area, but they were given control. This led to the Cold War because it made the West feel that the USSR was bent on expanding communism. -
Arms Race
An arms race denotes a rapid increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military power by rival states in peacetime. The buildup of arms was also a characteristic of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, though the development of nuclear weapons. -
Truman Doctrine
In a dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress, President Harry S. Truman asks for U.S. assistance for Greece and Turkey to forestall communist domination of the two nations. Historians have often cited Truman’s address, which came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, as the official declaration of the Cold War. -
Marshall Plan
Secretary of State George C. Marshall advanced the idea of a European self-help program to be financed by the United States. The Soviet Union, however, viewed the Marshall Plan as an attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of other states and refused to participate.The Marshall Plan allowed the United States to remake the European economy in the image of the American economy and reduced the influence and power of Communist parties in Western Europe. -
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of France, Great Britain and the United States to travel to their sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. Coming just three years after the end of World War II, the blockade was the first major clash of the Cold War and foreshadowed future conflict over the city of Berlin. -
Berlin Airlift
The western occupation zones in Berlin would remain under Western Allied control or whether the city would be absorbed into Soviet-controlled eastern Germany led to the first Berlin crisis of the Cold War. The crisis started on June 24, 1948, when Soviet forces blockaded rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas of Berlin. The United States and United Kingdom responded by airlifting food and fuel to Berlin from Allied airbases in western Germany. -
Harry Truman
In the aftermath of the war, the Truman administration had to contend with deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations and the start of the Cold War. The president adopted a policy of containment toward Soviet expansion and the spread of communism. In 1947, he introduced the Truman Doctrine to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in an effort to protect them from communist aggression. -
Formation of NATO
In 1949, the prospect of further Communist expansion prompted the United States and 11 other Western nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alignment of nearly every European nation into one of the two opposing camps formalized the political division of the European continent that had taken place since World War II. This alignment provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the Cold War. -
Joseph R. McCarthy
For many Americans, the most enduring symbol of this “Red Scare” was Republican Senator Joseph P. McCarthy of Wisconsin. In the hyper-suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War, insinuations of disloyalty were enough to convince many Americans that their government was packed with traitors and spies. McCarthy’s accusations were so intimidating that few people dared to speak out against him. -
Korean War
North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself -
Dwight D. Eisenhower
As supreme commander of Allied forces in Western Europe during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower led the massive invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe that began on D-Day. During his presidency, Eisenhower managed Cold War-era tensions with the Soviet Union under the looming threat of nuclear weapons, ended the war in Korea in 1953 and authorized a number of covert anti-communist operations by the CIA around the world. -
Joseph Staling Dies
In Stalin's view, only Soviet control of the nations of Eastern Europe could ensure that there would not be another repeat. Americans, however, viewed Stalin's power grab in Eastern Europe, which crushed millions of people's dreams of self-determination, as proof of Soviet aspirations for world domination, and began to take measures to contain Soviet influence. The Cold War was on. -
Nikita Khrushchev Comes to Power
Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. Though he largely pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, he instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis by placing nuclear weapons 90 miles from Florida. -
Vietnam War
The war began in 1954, after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Domino Theory
The domino theory, which governed much of U.S. foreign policy beginning in the early 1950s, held that a communist victory in one nation would quickly lead to a chain reaction of communist takeovers in neighboring states. In Southeast Asia, the United States government used the domino theory to justify its support of a non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist government of North Vietnam, and ultimately its increasing involvement in the long-running Vietnam War. -
Suez Crisis
On October 29, 1956, Israeli armed forces pushed into Egypt toward the Suez Canal after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) nationalized the canal in July of that same year, initiating the Suez Crisis. Supported by Soviet arms and money, and furious with the United States for reneging on a promise to provide funds for construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile River, Nasser ordered the Suez Canal seized and nationalized. -
Space Race
After World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers–the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union–against each other. The Space Race refers to the 20th century competition for supremacy in spaceflight capability. -
U-2 Incident
An international diplomatic crisis erupted in May 1960 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) shot down an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet air space and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. The U-2 spy plane incident raised tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets during the Cold War. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
In January 1961, the U.S. government severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and stepped up its preparations for an invasion. Some State Department and other advisors to the new American president, John F. Kennedy, maintained that Castro posed no real threat to America, but the new president believed that masterminding the Cuban leader’s removal would show Russia, China and skeptical Americans that he was serious about winning the Cold War. -
Berlin Wall
The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba. In a TV address, President Kennedy notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary. -
Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty
On August 5, 1963, representatives of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere. The treaty, which President John F. Kennedy signed less than three months before his assassination, was hailed as an important first step toward the control of nuclear weapons. -
Détente
During the course of the Cold War, tensions rose and fell many times. Détente is the name given to a period of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when President Richard M. Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in Moscow, May 1972. -
Margaret Thatcher
When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, many in the West had come to believe that the Cold War could not be won, that anti-Communism was morally wrong, and that the future lay in détente between the superpowers and the evolution of democracy into ever-deepening state socialism. By the time she left office, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Eastern Europe was liberated. A year later, the Soviet Union crumbled into the dustbin of history. Democracy and freedom were on the advance. -
Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
At the end of December 1979, the Soviet Union sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan and immediately assumed complete military and political control of Kabul and large portions of the country. This event began a brutal, decade-long attempt by Moscow to subdue the Afghan civil war and maintain a friendly and socialist government on its border. It was a watershed event of the Cold War, marking the only time the Soviet Union invaded a country outside the Eastern Block. -
INF Treaty
The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. -
German Reunification
In East Germany, conservative parties supporting reunification won the elections, and the new government and the force of events proceeded to dismantle the state. Two months following reunification, all-German elections took place and Helmut Kohl became the first chancellor of the reunified Germany. Although this action came more than a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for many observers the reunification of Germany effectively marked the end of the Cold War. -
Mikhail Gorbachev Comes to Power
Gorbachev continued to rise in ranks until 1989, when he was elected as the Executive President of the Soviet Union. His presidency was at the height of the Cold War and he believed the war was the product of mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
U.S.S.R. Breakup
Its collapse was hailed by the west as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and evidence of the superiority of capitalism over socialism. The United States rejoiced as its formidable enemy was brought to its knees, thereby ending the Cold War which had hovered over these two superpowers since the end of World War II.
