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Atomic bomb
The atomic bomb, and nuclear bombs, are powerful weapons that use nuclear reactions as their source of explosive energy. Scientists first developed nuclear weapons technology during World War II. Atomic bombs have been used only twice in war—both times by the United States against Japan at the end of World War II. A period of nuclear proliferation followed that war, and during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union vied for supremacy in a global nuclear arms race. -
U.S. aid to Greece
The extension of military and economic aid to Greece in 1947 plunged the United States into deep involvement in Greek affairs before American public opinion had any understanding of the difficulties that would be encountered under a policy of supporting free nations against aggression in distant parts of the world. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War . It was first announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947 and further developed on July 12, 1948 when he pledged to contain threats to Greece and Turkey. -
Molotov Plan
The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $13 billion (nearly $110 billion in 2016 US dollars) in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948–12 May 1949) was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Soviets offered to drop the blockade if the Western Allies withdrew the newly introduced Deutsche mark from West Berlin. -
Communists win China
In 1945, the leaders of the Nationalist and Communist parties, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, met for a series of talks on the formation of a post-war government. Both agreed on the importance of democracy, a unified military, and equality for all Chinese political parties. -
NATO established
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European countries based on the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949. -
Buffer States of the USSR
Poland and other states between Germany and the Soviet Union have sometimes been described as buffer states, with reference both to when they were non-communist states before World War II, and to when they were communist states after World War II. -
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. It ended July 27, 1953 -
Cuban (Missile Crisis)
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, the Caribbean Crisis, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day (October 16-28 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war. Ended on Oct 28, 1962 -
Coup in Iran
The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United Kingdom (under the name "Operation Boot") and the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project or "Operation Ajax"). -
Coup in Guatemala
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954 -
Warsaw Pact formed
The Warsaw Pact, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defence treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. -
Beginning of troops in Vietnam
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia -
Hungary (Rebellion)
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 was a nationwide revolt against the communist government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. -
Sputnik
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was a 58 cm diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses -
Suez Canal Crisis
The Suez Crisis or the Second Arab–Israeli War also named the Tripartite Aggression and Operation Kadesh or Sinai War, was an invasion of Egypt in late 1956 by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France. -
Sandinistas rise up in Nicaragua
The Nicaraguan Revolution encompassed the rising opposition to the Somoza dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, the campaign led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to violently oust the dictatorship in 1978–79, the subsequent efforts of the FSLN to govern Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990 and the Contra War which was waged between the FSLN and the Contras from 1981-1990. -
China explodes atomic bomb
596, originally named by the US intelligence agencies Chic-1, is the codename of the People's Republic of China's first nuclear weapons test, detonated on October 16, 1964, at the Lop Nur test site. It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device made from weapons-grade uranium (U-235) enriched in a gaseous diffusion plant in Lanzhou. -
Coup in Chile
The 1973 Chilean coup d'état was a watershed event in both the history of Chile and the Cold War. Following an extended period of social unrest and political tension between the opposition-controlled Congress of Chile and the socialist President Salvador Allende, as well as economic warfare ordered by U.S. President Richard Nixon, Allende was overthrown by the armed forces and national police. -
Communist Angola
The People's Republic of Angola (Portuguese: República Popular de Angola) covers the period of Angolan history as a self-declared socialist state established in 1975 after it was granted independence from Portugal, akin to the situation in Mozambique. The newly founded nation enjoyed friendly relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the People's Republic of Mozambique. -
Soviets invade Afghanistan
The Soviet-Afghan War lasted over nine years, from December 1979 to February 1989. Insurgent groups are known collectively as the mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government, mostly in the rural countryside. The mujahideen groups were backed primarily by the United States and Pakistan, making it a Cold War proxy war. -
War in El Salvador
The Salvadoran Civil War was a conflict between the military-led government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, a coalition or "umbrella organization" of several left-wing groups. -
Evil Empire Speech
The phrase evil empire was first applied to the Soviet Union in 1983 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who took an aggressive, hard-line stance that favored matching and exceeding the Soviet Union's strategic and global military capabilities, in calling for a rollback strategy -
Star Wars (S.D.I.)
SDI was highly controversial throughout its history, and was criticized for threatening to destabilize the MAD-approach and to possibly re-ignite "an offensive arms race". SDI was derisively nicknamed by the media as "Star Wars", after the popular 1977 film by George Lucas. By the early 1990s, with the Cold War ending. -
The Iran Contra Affair
The Iran–Contra affair, also referred to as Irangate, Contragate or the Iran–Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall. On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin's Communist Party announced a change in his city's relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders. -
The Fall of the USSR
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag lowered for the last time over the Kremlin, thereafter replaced by the Russian tricolor. Earlier in the day, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his post as president of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state.
