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Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Airlift could be called the first battle of the Cold War. It was when western countries delivered much-needed food and supplies to the city of Berlin through the air because all other routes were blocked by the Soviet Union. -
Creation of NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. -
Korean War
The Korean War was a proxy war for the Cold War. The West—the United Kingdom and the U.S., supported by the United Nations—supported South Korea, while communist China and the Soviet Union supported North Korea. The Korean War ended three years later, with millions of casualties. -
Creation of Warsaw Pact
Formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance, the Warsaw Pact was created on 14 May 1955, immediately after the accession of West Germany to the Alliance. -
Vietnam War
More than 3 million people including over 58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. The Vietnam War was a long conflict in Southeast Asia. It began in 1954 after the country of Vietnam was split into two parts, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam wanted to reunite the country under Communism, and its political and economic system. South Vietnam fought to keep this from happening. -
Sputnik
The USSR rocketed to the lead in the Cold War's "Space Race" with the launch of Sputnik, a basketball-sized satellite that became the first manmade object to orbit the Earth. the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. -
Construction of Berlin Wall
the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban missile crisis was a major confrontation in 1962 that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Cuba. -
Moon Landing
The moon landing reestablished the US, which had initially led the Cold War with the development of nuclear weapons, as the leading technological superpower. It was a lead that would continue to grow over the coming decades until the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 -
Destruction of Berlin 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.