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The Nuclear Race (MAD)
The Nuclear Race have not a date, but we can say that it begans after the Hiroshima bombing.
The United States didn’t tell the Soviet Union they planned to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, although they had told them they had created the bomb.
To help discourage Soviet communist expansion, the United States built more atomic weaponry. But in 1949, the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb, and the Cold War nuclear arms race was on. -
The Greek Civil War
The postwar tension between the Western and Communist worlds came to bloodshed in Greece in the savage civil war of 1946-49 between the Greek Communist Party (KKE), fresh from jockeying for power in the resistance movement against the German occupation, and the royalist government restored by plebiscite in 1946. Estimated to have taken more than 80,000 lives, it made some 700,000 people homeless. The civil war inflicted worse damage on Greece than the Second World War itself. -
The 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 sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. Suddenly, some 2.5 million civilians had no access to food, medicine, fuel, electricity and other basic goods. -
The 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. -
The Hungarian Uprising
The Hungarian Uprising, was a nationwide revolution against the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies. The problems in Hungary began in October 1956, when thousands of protesters took to the streets demanding a more democratic political system and freedom from Soviet oppression.
Hungary was crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on November 4, 1956. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter-million Hungarians fled the country. -
The Berlin Wall
The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War. -
The 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. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy notified Americans about the presence of the missiles. Following this news, many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war. -
The Invasion of Czechoslovakia
On the night of August 20, 1968, approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”-a brief period of liberalization in the communist country. Czechoslovakians protested the invasion with public demonstrations and other non-violent tactics, but they were no match for the Soviet tanks. The liberal reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubcek were repealed and “normalization” began under his successor Gustav Husak. -
The Invasion of Afghanistan
The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, under the pretext of upholding the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty of 1978, but Afghan army resisted. After many years, demoralized and with no victory in sight, Soviet forces started withdrawing in 1988. The long-term impact of the invasion and subsequent war was profound. First, the Soviets suffered the fall of the their empire in 1991. Secondly, the war created a breeding ground for terrorism and the rise of Osama bin Laden.
