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Winston Churchill delivers “iron Curtain speech
former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemns the Soviet Union's policies in Europe and declares, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." -
Truman doctrine established
the British Embassy informed the U.S. State Department officials that Great Britain could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey. Truman asked for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey and established a doctrine. -
Marshall Plan is announced
Marshall’s plan was to provide economic assistance to the devastated nations of Europe after World War II. Truman hoped the plan would encourage both political and economic stability in Europe and help reduce Communism in Europe. -
berlin blockade begins
Soviet Union blocks all road and rail traffic to and from West Berlin. The blockade turned out to be a terrible diplomatic move by the Soviets. -
NATO ratified
the United States and all the other 11 nations establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, which was a mutual defense pact aimed at containing possible Soviet aggression against Western Europe. NATO stood as the main U.S.-led military alliance against the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the cold war. -
Mao Zedong, a communist, takes control of china
Mao Zedong announces that the new Chinese government will be "under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. The U.S. supported china but after many years Mao took over, and forced china into a communist government. -
senator Joe McCarthy begins communist witch hunt
Joe McCarthy accused more than 200 staff in the State Department of being members of the Communist Party. In a speech McCarthy revealed the names of the communist in the state department. -
Korean war begins
Armed forces from communist North Korea smash into South Korea, starting off the Korean war. The United States began to defend South Korea and fought a bloody and frustrating war for the next three years. -
Rosenberg executions
: Found guilty of relaying U.S. military secrets to the Soviets, the Rosenberg’s were the first U.S. civilians to be sentenced to death for espionage. The Rosenbergs were accused of persuading Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, to provide them with confidential U.S. military information gained from his involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. -
Warsaw Pact formed
The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. Included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. The treaty called on 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 invasion of hungry
It was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR's forces drove out the Nazis at the end of World War II and occupied Eastern Europe. This came a huge factor of the fall of the Soviet Union. -
Sputnik launched into orbit
Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite that took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. This scared the public because it showed that the Soviet Union had the technology to send anything they wanted into space. -
Cuba taken over by Fidel Castro
As the undisputed revolutionary leader, Castro became commander in chief of the armed forces in Cuba’s new provisional government, which had Manuel Urrutia, a moderate liberal, as its president. In February 1959 Castro became premier and thus head of the government. By the time Urrutia was forced to resign in July 1959, Castro had taken effective political power into his own hands. -
spy plane shot down over Soviet territory
An American U-2 spy plane is shot down while conducting espionage over the Soviet Union. The incident derailed an important summit meeting between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that was scheduled for later that month. -
Bay of pigs invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful attempt by United States-backed Cuban exiles to overthrow the government of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Increasing friction between the U.S. government and Castro's leftist regime led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to break off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961. Even before that, however, the Central Intelligence Agency had been training anti-revolutionary Cuban exiles for a possible invasion of the island. The invasion plan was appr -
Construction of Berlin Wall begins
In an effort to stem the tide of refugees attempting to leave East Berlin, the communist government of East Germany begins building the Berlin Wall to divide East and West Berlin. Construction of the wall caused a short-term crisis in U.S.-Soviet bloc relations, and the wall itself came to symbolize the Cold War. -
involvement in Vietnam increased
In 1962 the U.S. increased their number of troops in Vietnam with operations like Chopper and Ranch Hand. Operation Chopper occurred on January 12, 1962 and was the first combat action taken against the Vietcong, a communist guerilla group of North Vietnam. The U.S. took about 1,000 South Vietnamese by helicopter to a location near Saigon. Once there the South Vietnamese swept a National Liberation Front stronghold. Operation Ranch Hand was of a different type of mission. This was a preventative -
Cuban Missile Crisis
In 1962, the Soviet Union was desperately behind the United States in the arms race. Soviet missiles were only powerful enough to be launched against Europe but U.S. missiles were capable of striking the entire Soviet Union. In late April 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev conceived the idea of placing intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. A deployment in Cuba would double the Soviet strategic arsenal and provide a real deterrent to a potential U.S. attack against the Soviet Union. -
SALT I signed
Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Richard Nixon, meeting in Moscow, sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements. At the time, these agreements were the most far-reaching attempts to control nuclear weapons ever. -
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
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 anticommunist Muslim guerrillas during the Afghan war (1978–92) and remained in Afghanistan until mid-February 1989. -
Reagan proposes Strategic Defense Initiative
On March 23, 1983, President Reagan proposed the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an ambitious project that would construct a space-based anti-missile system. This program was immediately dubbed "Star Wars." -
Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev resolve to remove all nuclear missiles from Europe
In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF Treaty. This landmark agreement proposed to eliminate all intermediate and short-range ground-based missiles and launchers from Europe. -
Berlin Wall falls
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. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints. -
End of the Soviet Union, Cold War ends
In December of 1991, as the world watched in amazement, 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 II. Indeed, the breakup of the So