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The Sinews of Peace
More commonly known as Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech, The Sinews of Peace was given to a crowd of 40,000 at Westminster College in a small Missouri town called Fulton. The former British Prime Minister was accompanied by the American president Harry Truman. The speech was to tell the world that even though the war had ended, war could start any time soon, especially about how the Soviets “desired the fruits of war, and the indefinite expansion of the power and doctrines”. -
Berlin Blockade/Airlift
The Soviet Union started the Berlin Blockade, the USSR wanted to force western powers to allow USSR to supply Berlin with food, fuel and aid, giving the USSR control. The Western Allies organised the Berlin airlift;flights from West Germany to Berlin importing those items daily. The Australian Air Force was one of the aircrews that helped fly two hundred thousand flights in just a year. The Soviet blockade was lifted on the 12th of May 1949. -
NATO signing
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created by North America and Western European nations to form a military alliance against the USSR. American officials were wary of the possibility that Western European countries would negotiate with the USSR for dealing with security concerns. So America formed an European-American alliance to keep that from happening. -
Communist Mao Zedong becomes leader in China
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong announced that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had been created. This ended the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party which had broken out immediately after World War II. Because of China’s new communist government (and later the Korean War), they lost diplomatic ties with the United States for decades. -
Start of the Korean War
The Korean War began as a civil war amid North and South Korea. After WW2 the USA were responsible for accepting surrender of Korea below the 38th parallel, while the USSR took the north. The division was to be temporary; however the USSR blocked elections for a democratic government in the North. The leader of South Korea Syngman Rhee and the USSR supported leader of North Korea Kim Il Sung had different ideals. Later the democratic USA joined South Korea while communist China aided the North. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest time the world ever came to a nuclear war. However the leaders of the US and Soviet Union: JFK and Nikita Khrushchev wanted to stop this nuclear battle. They both agreed to evacuate Cuba and disassemble their weapons. -
Limited Nuclear Test Treaty
After over eight years of negative responses to negotiations, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Nuclear Test Treaty. This prohibited the testing underwater, in the atmosphere and in space. unfortunately it missed prohibiting it underground -
Space Race
Russia was the first to send a living organism into space (Sputnik with dog Laika), and also the first to send a human (Yuri Gagarin) into space. however, America succeeded in landing the first man on the moon, thus ending the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. -
Fall of Berlin Wall
The people of Germany once again were reunited after many people used sledgehammers, hammers and chisels to create many unofficial border crossings from East Germany to West Germany. The demotion of the wall was the first step towards the reunification of Germany. -
Soviet Union dissolves.
The last Leader of the Soviet Union: Gorbachev had leadership of a country with deep economic and political problems, to overcome this problem he allowed freedom of speech, this let the people talk about how they hated the government and wanted democracy. 11 of the 12 soviet rebublics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol which declared the Soviet Union cease of existence.
