Cold War Timeline

  • Yalta Conference

    Yalta Conference
    The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference, held 4–11 February 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe.
  • Potsdam Conference

    Potsdam Conference
    The Potsdam Conference was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan postwar peace while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  • Creation of the United Nations

    Creation of the United Nations
    Four months after the San Francisco Conference ended, the United Nations officially began, on 24 October 1945, when it came into existence after China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a majority of other signatories had ratified its Charter.
  • Truman Doctrine

    Truman Doctrine
    On March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman presented this address before a joint session of Congress. His message, known as the Truman Doctrine, asked Congress for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Turkey and Greece.
  • Berlin Blockade

    Berlin Blockade
    The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of the United States, Great Britain, and France to travel to their respective sectors of the city of Berlin, which lay entirely inside Russian-occupied East Germany.
  • Creation of NATO

    Creation of NATO
    The foundations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were officially laid down on April 4th,1949 with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, more popularly known as the Washington Treaty. The Washington Treaty or North Atlantic Treaty forms the basis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO
  • Korean War

    Korean War
    Korean War, the conflict between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) in which at least 2.5 million persons lost their lives. The war reached international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, supplied and advised by the Soviet Union, invaded the South.
  • Creation of the Iron Curtain/ Warsaw Pact

    Creation of the Iron Curtain/ Warsaw Pact
    The Warsaw Treaty Organization (also known as the Warsaw Pact) was a political and military alliance established on May 14, 1955, between the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries. The Soviet Union formed this alliance as a counterbalance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a collective security alliance concluded between the United States, Canada, and Western European nations in 1949.
  • Space Race

    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. Beginning in the late 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology.
  • Vietnam War

    Vietnam War
    The Vietnam War was a long, costly, and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. 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.
  • Bay of Pigs Invasion

    Bay of Pigs Invasion
    The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles, covertly financed and directed by the United States. It was aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro's communist government.
  • Cuban Missile Crisis

    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, just 90 miles from U.S. shores.
  • Soviet-Afghan War

    Soviet-Afghan War
    Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 by troops from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union intervened in support of the Afghan communist government in its conflict with anti-communist Muslim guerrillas during the Afghan War (1978–92) and remained in Afghanistan until mid-February 1989.
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall

    Fall of the 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.
  • Fall of the Soviet Union

    Fall of the Soviet Union
    The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the process of internal disintegration within the Soviet Union which resulted in the end of the country's and its federal government's existence as a sovereign state, thereby resulting in its constituent republics gaining full independence on 26 December 1991.