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Eisenhower
American general and the 34th president of the united states. as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary force, he launched the invasion of Normandy and oversaw the final defeat of Germany -
John F Kennedy
A democratic party political leader of the twentieth century; he was president from 1961 to 1963. his election began a period of great optimism in the US -
Yuri Gagarin
A Russian Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961 -
Truman Doctrine
the principle that the US should give support to continue or people threatened by the Soviet forces or communist insurrection. First expressed in 1947 by US president Truman in a speech to Congress seeking aid for Greece and Turkey, the doctrine was seen by the communists as an open declaration of the Cold War -
Marshall Plan
A program by which the US gave large amounts of economic aid to European countries to help them rebuild after the devastation of WW2. It was proposed by the US secretary of state, general George C. Marshall -
COMECON
The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was an economic organization from 1949 to 1991 under the leadership of the Soviet Union that comprised the countries of the Eastern bloc -
NATO
North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European states based on the North Atlantic treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949 -
Warsaw Pact
A military alliance of communist nations in eastern Europe. Organized in 1955 in answer to NATO, the Warsaw Pact included Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East German, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union -
Perestokia
Was a political movement for reformation with the communist party of the soviet union during the 1980s, widely associated with soviet union leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policy reform -
U2
The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the cold war on may 1 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, when a US U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet aircpace -
Bay of Pigs
The location of a failed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in1961. the invaders, numbering about fourteen hundred, had left after the Cuban revolution and returned to overthrow the new Cuban leader Fidel Castro -
Berlin Wall Built
Constructed by the German democratic republic, starting on 13 august 1961, the wall completely cut off west berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until it was opened in November 1989 -
Cuban Missle Crisis
A confirmation between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 over the presence of missile sites in Cuba; one of the "hottest" periods of the cold war -
Detente
name given to a period of improved relations between the US and the Soviet Union that began tentatively in 1971 and took decisive form when president Richard Nixon visited the secretary-general of the Soviet Communist party -
Vietnamization
Vietnamization of the war was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, quip, and train south Vietnam's forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops/." -
Glasnost
The Russian word glasnost, translated as "openness," refers to the soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues. the policy was instituted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s began the democratization of the soviet union -
Berling Wall Torn Down
on November 9, 1989, as the cold war began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlins communist party announced a change in his city's that relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders -
Sputnik
History changed October 4, 157, when the former soviet union successfully launched sputnik 1. The worlds first artificial satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth on its elliptical path
