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Buffer States of the USSR
A buffer state is a country finding itself situated between two potentially combatant nations. -
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Atomic Bomb
The Japanese were clearly losing the war in the Pacific; they started making request for a peace. Stalin told Truman at Potsdam of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. The atomic bomb changed Stalin's attitude. Truman dropped the atomic bombs because he wanted to end the war before the USSR could enter the war in the Pacific and claim the lands promised them at Yalta. -
Molotov Plan
The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. -
U.S. aid to Greece
American public opinion had any understanding of the difficulties that would be encountered under policy of supporting free nations against aggression in different parts of the world. -
U.S. aid to Turkey
In May 1947 the U.S. government granted Greece $300 million in military and economic aid. Turkey received $100 million. -
Truman Doctrine
Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, the European Recovery Program, channeled over $13 billion to finance the economic recovery of Europe between 1948 and 1951. The Marshall Plan successfully sparked economic recovery, meeting its objective of restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. -
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Airlift was a military operation by the United States, Great Britain and other western European nations to take food, fuel and other vital provisions into West Berlin. The Berlin airlift began after the Communist government of East Germany, which surrounded West Berlin, under the orders of Soviet Prime Minister Joseph Stalin, launched a blockade cutting off the land and canal supply routes to the western part of the city. -
NATO established
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is established by 12 Western nations: the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denamark, and etc. The military alliance, which provided for a collective self-defense against Soviet aggression, greatly increased American influence in Europe. -
USSR gets atomic bomb
The USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name "First Lighting". In order to measure the effects of the blast, the Soviet scientists constructed buildings, bridges, and other civilian structures in the vicinity of the bomb. They also placed animals in cages nearby so that they could test the effects of nuclear radiation on human-like mammals. -
Communists win China
During China's war with Japan, Chiang Kai-shek had moved his forces deep into the interior, leaving a political vacuum in the east to be filled by the Communists. And Communist forces confronted the enemy, the Japanese, beginning with the "Hundred Regiments Campaign" in North China. China lost 2.2 millions military mens. -
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Korean War
The world had hoped that the United Nations would insure peace. Five years after World War 2, Korea would shatter that illusion. Soviet leaders looked for regions where communism would find fertile conditions. Wherever they "liberated" a country or became its "trustee". -
Coup in Iran
Insecurity and chaos created after the Constitutional Revolution led to the rise of General Reza Khan, the commander of the elite Persian Cossack Brigade who seized power in a coup d'état in February 1921. -
Coup in Guatemala
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954. -
Warsaw Pact formed
The Warsaw Pact, the treaty was signed in Warsaw, included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. The treaty called the member states to come to the defense of any member attacked by an outside force and it set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. -
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Beginning of troops in Vietnam
The causes of the Vietnam War were derived from the symptoms, components and consequences of the Cold War. The causes of the Vietnam War revolve around the simple belief held by America that communism was threatening to expand all over south-east Asia. -
Suez Canal Crisis
he catalyst for the joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt was the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1956. The situation had been brewing for some time. -
Hungary (Rebellion)
Hungarian was declared neutrality and appealed to the United Nations for support, but Western powers were reluctant to risk a global confrontation. On November 4 the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the revolution, and Nagy was executed for treason in 1958. -
Sputnik
The Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 satellite took to the skies on Oct. 4, 1957, launching the space age and the Cold War space race. -
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. -
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Cuba Missile Crisis
Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed in Cuba. The Soviet premier assumed that the United States would take no steps to prevent the installation of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Missiles could hit much of the eastern United States within a few minutes if launched from Cuba. -
China explodes atomic bomb
The People’s Republic of China joins the rank of nations with atomic bomb capability, after a successful nuclear test on this day in 1964. China is the fifth member of this exclusive club, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. -
Coup in Chile
Coup in Chile was a watershed event in both the history of Chile and the Cold War. -
Communist Angola
After a protracted anti-colonial struggle, independence was achieved in 1975 as the Marxist-Leninist People's Republic of Angola, a one-party state supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba. -
End of troops in Vietnam
The Vietnam War officially ended on April 30, 1975 although direct U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973. The end of the Vietnam War began with secret peace talks led at first by Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and then by Henry Kissinger. -
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Soviets invade Afghanistan
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. The event began brutal, decade, long attempt by Moscow to subdue the Afghan civil war and maintain a friendly and socialist government on its border. -
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War in El Salvador
Salvadoran civil war never would have lasted so long without the support of the United States. El Salvador exhausted its resources fighting itself. -
Evil Empire Speech
The "Evil Empire" is a term which was used by the US president Ronald Reagan. The Soviet Empire, which consists of the "republics" of the Soviet Union and the "Council for Mutual Economic Assistance". -
Star Wars
Strategic Defense Initiative, was a program first initiated on March 23, 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. The purpose of this program was to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system in order to prevent missile attacks from other countries, specially the Soviet Union. -
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Iran Contra Affair
The Iran-Contra Affair was a secret U.S. government arms deal that freed some American hostages held in Lebanon but also funded armed conflict in Central America. -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was built to stop East Germans from defecting to the West. West Germans were able to visit East Germany by way of permit. There were 136 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall during its existence. It is believed that approximately 5,000 people made the escape from East Germany to the West successfully by crossing the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall made the Soviets and East Germans look bad. -
Fall of the USSR
The Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. 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 2.
