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Roosevelt met with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta to work out the future of Germany and Poland. The Allies divided Germany into four occupation zones. The United Nations is founded and it replaced the League of Nations.
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Roosevelt died just two weeks before the UN's first meeting. He diead while vacationing at Warm Springs, Georgia. VP Harry S. Truman suddenly found himself President.
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Truman's first meeting with Stalin. They continued to debate the issues that had divided them at Yalta, including the future of Germany and Poland. Truman had told Stalin that the U.S. has a weapon of extraordinary force (the atom bomb). Stalin already knew about it through his Soviet spies.
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Churchill called on Americans to help keep Stalin from enclosing any more nations behind the "iron curtain" of Communist domination and oppression.
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The Truman Doctrine promises support to nations resisting Communist aggression.
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One of the first conflicts of the Cold War, according to some analysts it represents the first example of a postwar Western interference in the internal politics of a foreign country, and for others, marked the first serious test of the theory of the so-called Churchill-Stalin percentages agreement.
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Secretary of State George Marshall outlines plans for a comprehensive program of economic assistance for the war-ravaged countries of Western Europe. It would become known throughout the world as the Marshall Plan.
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The Czechs desperately tried to hold on to their democratic multiparty political system. The Communist candidate wont 40% of the vote in free elections in 1946, but Communist repression in neighboring nations hurt the popularity of the Czech Communists. Czechoslovakia was a Soviet satellite nation.
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NATO is formed to defend Europe against the Communists.
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Communists win control of China. Mao Zedong, a communist, takes over China.
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Senator Joe McCarthy claimed he had a list of 205 people who were members of the State Department that were known to be members of the American Communist Party.
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N. Korea invades S. Korea, starting the Korean War. The UN votes to send aids to South Korea.
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The Federal Civil Defense Administration is established.
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The United States successfully detonated "Mike," the world's first hydrogen bomb, on the Elugelab Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. The 10.4-megaton thermonuclear device instantly vaporized an entire island and left behind a crater more than a mile wide.
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The Rosenbergs are executed for spying for the Soviets.
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When peace talks stalled, Eisenhower's threat to use atomic weapons got the talks going again. Finally, a truce was signed in 1953, leaving Korea divided at almost exactly the same place as before the war, near the 38th parallel.
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The Soviets test a hydrogen bomb.
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The KGB was the security agency of the Soviet Union government which was involved in nearly all aspects of life in the Soviet Union
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The CIA helped overthrow the government of Guatemala on the grounds that its leaders were sympathetic to radical causes. The CIA takeover restored the property of an American corporation, the United Fruit Company, which had been seized by the Guatemalan government. Such actions fueled a Soviet perception that America was escalating the Cold War.
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The 17th parallel division between North and South Vietnam was the result of a Chinese proposal at the Geneva Confernce of 1954 which ended the French war in Vietnam. China did not want a strong, unified Vietnam on its southern border and easily convinced the great powers to go along with their proposal. Ho Chi Minh was virtually helpless. He had won the war but lost the peace. He did obtain the promise of an election to reunify Vietnam which he was confident he could win. President Eisenhower s
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The Warsaw Pact is formed. It acts as the Communist military counterpart to NATO. Founded in Eastern Europe and includes East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union.
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The President proclaims the Eisenhower Doctrine, promising to use force to defend Middle Eastern countries against Communist aggression.
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The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik satellite. The first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.
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Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the US in 1959. The trip was going well , by all accounts, until police denied Khrushchev access to Disneyland due to security concerns. The New York Times headline screamed “Premier Annoyed by Ban On a Visit to Disneyland.” Khrushchev did not suffer this indignity quietly, railing, “But just now I was told that I could not go to Disneyland."
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The Soviet military again demonstrated its arms capabilities by using a guided missile to shoot down an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory. Because these planes flew more than 15 miles high, American officials had assumed they were invulnerable to attack. The U-2 incident shattered America's confidence, and made Americans willing to expend considerable resources to catch up to-and surpass- the Soviet Union.
