-
Period: to
Cold War Timeline
-
Truman Doctrine
U.S. President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947 declared immediate economic and military aid to the governments of Greece, threatened by communist insurrection, and Turkey, under pressure from Soviet expansion in the Mediterranean area.The Truman Doctrine marked the point at which America's foreign policy toward the Soviet Union shifted from one of friendship, to one of containment. He asked for 400,000,000 dollars. -
Signing of the United States Executive Order 9835
Truman established a federal employee loyalty program in 1947,
checking the backgrounds of all new and existing federal
employees. It was designed to root out communist influence in the U.S. federal government. -
National Security Act
Signed into law by President Harry S. Truman; reorganized the structure of the U.S. armed forces following World War II, created the office of Secretary of Defense to oversee the military establishment, established the National Security Council, provided for the coordination of the military with other departments and agencies of the government concerned with national security, and for presidential and congressional oversight with respect to matters of national intelligence. -
Berlin Airlift + Blockade
In June of 1948, the Russians closed all highways, railroads and canals from Germany into Berlin because they wanted Berlin all to themselves. They hoped that this would drive other nations out of Berlin, as it would be impossible to get any supplies. The United States retaliated with the Berlin Airlift, a 327 day operation which consisted of the United States and allies flying food and supplies(over 2.3 million tons of cargo) into Berlin. -
Brussels Treaty
Agreement signed by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, creating a collective defense alliance. It led to the formation of NATO and the Western European Union. A goal of the treaty was to show that western European states could cooperate, thus encouraging the United States to play a role in the security of western Europe. -
The Marshall Plan
April 3, 1948 was the day that President Truman signed this plan into action. It was proposed by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947. The goal of this plan was to provide aid to Western European nations after the devastation caused by World War II. Nations involved in this plan would design recovery programs and would receive financial aid from the U.S. Seventeen Western European nations joined and received a total of $13 billion in aid. -
NATO is formed
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is established by 12 Western nations: the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Iceland, Canada, and Portugal. The military alliance, which provided for a collective self-defense against Soviet aggression, greatly increased American influence in Europe. -
USSR detonates its first atomic bomb
At a remote test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name “First Lightning.” 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. The atomic explosion destroyed those structures and incinerated the animals. -
Establishment of the Communist Party of China
At the opening of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Peking, Mao Zedong announces that the new Chinese government will be “under the leadership of the Communist Party of China.” He denounced those who opposed the communist government as “imperialistic and domestic reactionaries.” In the future, China would seek the friendship of “the Soviet Union and the new democratic countries.” -
Hydrogen Bomb
U.S. President Harry S. Truman publicly announces his decision to support the development of the hydrogen bomb. -
Korean War Begins
On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces surprised the South Korean army, and quickly headed toward the capital city of Seoul. The United States responded by pushing a resolution through the U.N.’s Security Council calling for military assistance to South Korea. This resolution, which passed because the Soviets
were not there to veto it, called on member states to
defend South Korea and restore peace, thus beginning
the Korean War. -
McCarran internal Security Act passed
Congress passed this act over the veto of President Harry Truman. It created a Subversive Activities Control Board which could order an organization it determined to be Communist to register with the Justice Department and submit information. It made it a felony to take any steps that might contribute to the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in the U.S., and authorized the President in an emergency to arrest and detain persons believed might engage in espionage or sabotage. -
Rosenbergs convicted of espionage
In one of the most sensational trials in American history, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. -
Establishment of the Federal Civil Defense Administration
Resulting from concern about Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, in addition to the knowledge that the Russians had successfully tested their own atomic bomb, Congress passed the Federal Civil Defense Act in 1950. President Harry Truman approved the legislation declaring that civil defense, “designed to protect life and property in the United States in case of enemy assault,” soon would become an essential element of national security. -
Truman signs Mutual Security Act
President Harry S. Truman signs the Mutual Security Act, announcing to the world, and its communist powers in particular, that the U.S. was prepared to provide military aid to “free peoples.” The signing of the act came after the Soviet Union exploded their second nuclear weapon in a test on October 3. The Mutual Security Act was modeled on the Marshall Plan, a post-World War II economic aid plan that had helped European nations rebuild after the war. -
Operation Hurricane
One aim of building a British bomb was to maintain the United Kingdom’s influence in the world: a world in which the United States had the only such arsenal and the Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe with the continent’s largest army. This was the first test of a British atomic device. A plutonium implosion device was detonated in the lagoon in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia. Britain became the third nuclear power after the United States and the Soviet Union. -
Ivy Mike
It was on the eve of Halloween 1952 in the United States when 9,000 kilometres away, American scientists tested the first hydrogen bomb on the Marshall Islands. With an explosive yield of 10.4 megatons, the Ivy Mike (M for megaton) test had around 700 times the explosive power of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima seven years earlier, killing 160,000 people. Ivy Mike set the infamous record of the largest explosion until then and would be the fourth largest U.S. nuclear test ever conducted. -
Dwight Eisenhower Elected President
In 1952 Eisenhower retired from active service and returned to Abilene to announce his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination. On November 4, 1952, after winning the election by a landslide, Eisenhower was elected the United States' 34th president. Eisenhower made reducing Cold War tensions through military negotiation a main focus of his administration. -
Death of Stalin
Joseph Stalin, the second leader of the Soviet Union, died on 5 March 1953 at the Kuntsevo Dacha aged 74 after suffering a stroke. He was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev. -
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Executed
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death in the electric chair- their dual execution marked the dramatic finale of the most controversial espionage case of the Cold War. -
Armistice ends the Korean War
After three years of a bloody and frustrating war, the United States, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and South Korea agree to an armistice, bringing the Korean War to an end. The armistice ended America’s first experiment with the Cold War concept of “limited war.” -
Geneva Conference
The Geneva Conference focused primarily on resolving the war between French forces and those of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by the nationalist-communist Ho Chi Minh. -
SEATO Formed
In September of 1954, the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO. The purpose of the organization was to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region. Although called the “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization,” only two Southeast Asian countries became members; Philippines and Thailand joined. -
USS Nautilus commissioned
The USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, is commissioned by the U.S. Navy. The Nautilus was constructed under the direction of U.S. Navy Captain Hyman G. Rickover, a brilliant Russian-born engineer who joined the U.S. atomic program in 1946. In 1947, he was put in charge of the navy’s nuclear-propulsion program and began work on an atomic submarine. -
Formation of the Warsaw Pact
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. -
Baghdad Pact
The Baghdad Pact was a defensive organization for promoting shared political, military and economic goals founded in 1955 by Turkey, Iraq, Great Britain, Pakistan and Iran. It was intended to counter the threat of Soviet expansion into vital Middle East oil-producing regions. -
Start of 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 U.S. 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. Opposition to the war in the United States bitterly divided Americans -
South Vietnam Insurgency
With American military advisory assistance, Premier Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam gained control of the army... When Diem refused to hold general elections in 1956 as promised, North Vietnam directed Viet Cong rebels to begin a campaign of guerrilla warfare and terrorism to overthrow South Vietnam's regime. [Diem's] US-trained army proved generally ineffective against the tactics of the Viet Cong, who established the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. -
Stalin Denounced by Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous speech on 'The Personality Cult and its Consequences' in a closed session on February 25th, 1956. This marked the beginning of De-Stalinization -
Hungarian Revolution
Uprising in Hungary following a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in which he attacked the period of Joseph Stalin’s rule. A rising tide of unrest and discontent in Hungary broke out into active fighting. Rebels won the first phase of the revolution, and Imre Nagy became premier, agreeing to establish a multiparty system. On November 4 the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the revolution, and Nagy was executed for treason in 1958. -
Eisenhower Doctrine
In response to the increasingly tense situation in the Middle East, President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) delivered a proposal to a joint session of the U.S. Congress calling for a new and more proactive American policy in the region. The Eisenhower Doctrine, as the proposal soon came to be known, established the Middle East as a Cold War (1945-91) battlefield. -
Sputnik I Launched
Soviet Union launched the earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The successful launch came as a shock to experts and citizens in the United States, who had hoped that the United States would accomplish this scientific advancement first. The fact that the Soviets were successful fed fears that the U.S. military had generally fallen behind in developing new technology. As a result, the launch of Sputnik served to intensify the arms race and raise Cold War tensions. -
Sputnik 2 Launched
The Soviets launched Sputnik II, a half-ton satellite that carried a female dog, Laika(first animal), into orbit, Although Sputnik I shocked and irritated Americans, it did not particularly frighten them. Assured by the President and the media, they believed a U.S. satellite would have been first if Eisenhower had permitted the use of classified military rockets. They were still confident that U.S. technology was far ahead of that of the USSR. -
Great Leap Forward
Campaign undertaken by the Chinese communists to organize its vast population, especially in large-scale rural communes, to meet China’s industrial and agricultural problems. The Chinese hoped to develop labor-intensive methods of industrialization, which would emphasize manpower rather than machines and capital expenditure. It was hoped the country could bypass the slow, more typical process of industrialization through gradual accumulation of capital and purchase of heavy machinery. -
Explorer 1 Lauched
Explorer 1 became the first successfully launched satellite by the United States when it was sent to space on January 31, 1958. A quick response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1, Explorer 1's success marked the beginning of the U.S. Space Age. -
NASA formed
The U.S. Congress passes legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space. NASA was created in response to the Soviet Union’s October 4, 1957 launch of its first satellite, Sputnik I. -
Fidel Castro takes over
A young Cuban nationalist named Fidel Castro drove his guerilla army into Havana and overthrew General Fulgencio Batista, the nation’s American-backed president. For the next two years, officials at the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency attempted to push Castro from power. -
Kitchen Debate
During the grand opening ceremony of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev engage in a heated debate about capitalism and communism in the middle of a model kitchen set up for the fair. The “kitchen debate” was front-page news in the United States the next day. For a few moments, the diplomatic gloves had come off and America and the Soviet Union had verbally jousted over which system was superior–communism or capitalism. -
Explorer 6 Launched into Space
NASA’s Explorer 6 spheroidal satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral. The satellite was created to study trapped radiation of various energies, galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetism, radio propagation in upper atmosphere, and the flux of micrometeorites. Explorer 6 also tested a scanning device developed for photographing the Earth’s cloud cover. It would eventually transmit the first pictures of Earth from orbit. -
U-2 Spy Incident
The U-2 Spy Incident occurred in May of 1960 when the USSR shot down an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet air space and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Confronted with the evidence of his nation’s espionage, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to admit to the Soviets that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been flying spy missions over the USSR for several years. The Soviets convicted Powers on espionage charges and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. -
Sino-Soviet Split
At the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution, middle-class leftist activists were able to rally some members of the small urban proletariat to their cause, in accordance with this theory. As a result, Soviet advisers urged the Chinese to follow the same path. China, however, did not yet have an urban factory worker class, thus rejecting this advice and basing the revolution on rural peasants instead. -
John. F Kennedy Elected President
John F. Kennedy becomes the youngest man ever to be elected president of the United States, narrowly beating Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. Kennedy promised to reinvigorate America’s foreign policy, relying on a flexible response to changing situations and exploring options ignored by the staid and conservative Eisenhower administration -
First Man in Space
Yuri Gagarin was the first person to fly in space. His flight lasted 108 minutes as he circled the Earth for a little more than one orbit in the Soviet Union's Vostok spacecraft. Following the flight, Gagarin became a cultural hero in the Soviet Union. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
A group of Cuban exiles began an invasion at an isolated spot known as the Bay of Pigs. Almost immediately, the invasion was a disaster. The CIA had wanted to keep it a secret for as long as possible, but a radio station on the beach broadcast every detail of the operation to listeners across Cuba. Before long, Castro’s troops had pinned the invaders on the beach, and the exiles surrendered after less than a day of fighting; 114 were killed and over 1,100 were taken prisoner. -
Berlin Wall built
The Communist government of the German Democratic Republic began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state,
