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The second Red Scare refers to the fear of communism that affected American politics, culture, and society during the beginning of the Cold War. -
The United Nations is an international organization created at the end of WW2 in the hope that it would prevent another world war like the one that just happened. -
The Berlin Blockade was an attempt by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of the USA, Great Britain and France to travel to their respective sectors of the city of Berlin, which lay entirely inside Russian-occupied East Germany. -
NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. The goal was to help European countries rebuild their economies, which was considered vital to the prevention of communist expansion across the continent. -
War between North and South Korea. It started when the communist North invaded the south. The US got involved to help the South. -
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt led by Fidel Castro against Batista, a U.S.-supported Cuban dictator, who ultimately lost his power. -
Literal race between America and the Soviet Union for who would be the first nation to put a human in space. All because they wanted to prove their superiority. -
The Vietnam War was a long conflict between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. More than 3 million people were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. -
The United States financially covered and directed this failed military landing on the coast of Cuba by Cuban exiles. The aim was to overthrow the Cuban communist government. -
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. That was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. -
On this day approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”—a brief period of liberalization in the communist country. -
It was a long armed conflict between Afghanistan rebels called the Mujahideen and the Soviet supported Afghanistan government. -
During a test of one of the reactor's system, there was a sudden explosion of power which caused the destruction of unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. That accident caused the release of massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. -
The citizens tore down the wall after it was declared that they were "free to cross the country's borders". This was a defining moment in the history of europe. -
On this day the Soviet Union stopped existing as a sovereign state. Its collapse was gradual and, some would say, even inevitable.