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Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was the most important of the peace treaties that brought World War I to an end. The Treaty ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. British and American governments after 1945 tried to avoid many of the problems that had been brought up by the treaty, especially regarding reparations, the division of Germany and the Cold War enabled them generously to rebuild the western zones. -
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organisation as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. After the failure of the League of Nations, the establishment of the United Nations was the second attempt at creating a collective security system within only a few decades. Yet, during the Cold War collective security was going to fail once again, as most of the world was divided into two blocs. -
MAD
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy that says a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both countries. -
United Nations
The United Nations quickly became a Cold War battleground between communist and non-communist countries. Since both the United States and Soviet Union held vetoes, the Security Council could not act without their joint permission. -
Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg Trials was series of trials where the Allies prosecuted German military leaders, political officials, industrialists, and financiers for crimes they had committed during world war II which caused much tension during the Cold War between US and the Soviets. -
Yalta Conference
Tensions over European issues, like the fate of Poland foreshadowed the crumbling of the Grand Alliance that had developed between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union during World War II and hinted at the Cold War to come. Helped lead to the Cold War by giving the Soviet Union control over Eastern Europe, led to the Cold War because it made the West feel that the USSR was bent on expanding communism. -
General Assembly
The body of the United Nations, that states that each member nation is represented and has one vote.The number of resolutions passed by the General Assembly each year has climbed to more than 300, there have been sharp disagreements among members on several issues. The United Nations became a Cold War battleground between communist and non-communist countries. Both the United States and Soviet Union held vetoes, which didn't allow the Security Council to act. -
Iron Curtain Speech
Winston Churchill wrote this speech to inform Americans that there is a divide between Eastern and Western Europe. He spoke with concern by condemning the Soviet Union’s policies in Europe. This symbolizes the anger and constant competition between Democracy and Communism that set Eastern and Western Europe against each other. This speech was one of the most famous speeches during the Cold War period. The Cold War was caused by the tensions between governments. -
Baruch Plan
Proposal by the United States government, to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) during its first meeting. The failure of the plan to gain acceptance resulted in a dangerous nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. -
Truman Doctrine
President Harry S. Truman presented this address before a joint session of Congress. His message, known as the Truman Doctrine, asked Congress for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Turkey and Greece. The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy created to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. -
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Western Europe in which the United States gave over $13 billion in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of WWII. he Marshall Plan reduced the influence and power of Communist parties in Western Europe. This angered the Soviet Union and was seen as another anti-communist move by the USA, following the Truman Doctrine. This began to cause more tension between the countries including the Cold War. -
Berlin Airlift
The Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. The Berlin airlift was considered a symbol of the Cold War because the Berlin airlift represented the division between the soviet union and its allies amongst the communist nations and the united states and the capitalist - democratic west. -
Chinese Communist Revolution
Group of revolutionaries in southern China led a successful revolt against the Qing Dynasty, establishing in its place the Republic of China and ending the imperial system which connects to cold war by communism spreading throughout China. -
NATO Created
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a government military alliance between several North American and European states based on the signed North Atlantic Treaty. NATO's primary purpose was to unify and strengthen Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies that was going on during the Cold War. -
Joseph McCarthy Speech
This was the Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950. McCarthy was put in charge of the Committee on Government Operations that allowed him to launch even larger investigations of the alleged communistic people in the federal government. More than 2,000 government employees lost their jobs as a result of these investigations. This gives friction between the countries by the thought that communism has spread which gives more friction for the Cold War. -
Korean War
Tension came to a head in Korea. Overshadowed by WWII, the Korean War has often been called America's "forgotten war" even though, just like Vietnam, it was part of a larger Cold War struggle to extinguish communism. -
Warsaw Pact
The Soviet Union formed this alliance as a counterbalance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a collective security alliance concluded between the United States, Canada and Western European nations in 1949. The Warsaw Pact, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. -
U.S. Send Troops to Vietnam
President Johnson had gained the support of the congress to send troops to Vietnam. He claimed that those troops were meant to stop the spread of communism. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies while the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war which is considered a Cold War-era proxy war. -
Sputnik Launched
The Soviet Union launched the earth's first artificial satellite named Sputnik-1. As a result, the launch of Sputnik served to intensify the arms race and raise Cold War tensions. -
Fidel Castro Proclaims Communist Cuba
Cuba became a communist country through the revolution led by Fidel Castro. This got rid of racism and improved public health care. After the establishment of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Revolution, Cuba became increasingly dependent on Soviet markets and military aid and became an ally. A year later of the strained relations with the US and Cuba, Castro declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist. The announcement sealed the bitter Cold War friction between the nations. -
Nuclear Deterrent
Developed and deployed several types of delivery systems for attacking the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each built a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Soviet policy rested on the conviction that a nuclear war could be fought and won. The United States adopted nuclear deterrence, the credible threat of retaliation to forestall enemy attack. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba. The invasion is considered part of the Cold War because the United States was trying to prevent communism from taking hold in America. Fidel Castro helped to lead the Cuban Revolution in overthrowing the existing government of Cuba. -
Berlin Wall
Constructed by the GDR, the Wall completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until government officials opened it in November 1989. In an effort to stem the tide of refugees attempting to leave East 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. -
Building of Berlin Wall Begins
West Berlin was a geographical loophole where thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally surrounded West Berlin which took place during the early years of the cold war. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with possible Soviet missile deployment in Cuba. This was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War where tensions rose to closest nuclear war ever. -
Non-Proliferation Agreement
NPT, is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. In the context of the Cold War, the treaty was a major success for advocates of arms control because it set a precedent for international cooperation between nuclear and non-nuclear states to prevent proliferation. -
Apollo 11
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first two humans on the Moon. Mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the lunar module Eagle which was a result of the “space race” showing the better country. The U.S got to the moon first and won which raised their hopes in the Cold War. -
Russian Communist Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in Russia that led to the rise of the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution was during the final phase of World War I. It removed Russia from the war and brought the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), this replaced Russia's traditional monarchy with the world's first Communist state. These new roles for the country aspired political changes and different opinions which led to the Cold War. -
Kent State Shootings
Kent State University students protested the bombing of Cambodia which caused the United States military forces to clash with Ohio National Guardsmen on the University campus. The Guardsmen shot and killed four students on the campus. The Kent State Shootings became the focal point of a nation deeply divided by the Vietnam War which then affected the Cold War because it angered the US that the Soviets were helping their enemy. -
SALT I
Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Richard Nixon, sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements. At the time, these agreements were the most far-reaching attempts to control nuclear weapons ever. Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty and interim SALT agreement on May 26, 1972, in Moscow. For the first time during the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union had agreed to limit the number of nuclear missiles in their arsenals. -
Fall of Saigon
The Fall of Saigon was the capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the People's Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam which marked the end of the Vietnam War. This was part of a wider containment policy for the US, with the stated aim of stopping the spread of communism to South Vietnam, this came to the next major battlefield of the Cold War being Vietnam. -
Pope John Paul II
John Paul II is recognized as helping to end Communist rule in his native Poland and eventually all of Europe. The efforts of this anti-communist leader did not make the fall of the Soviet Union inevitable. However, these leaders did hasten the end of the Cold War and the fall of Soviet communism, particularly in Eastern Europe. -
Margaret Thatcher
West had come to believe that the Cold War could not and should not be won, that anti-Communism was morally wrong, and that the future lay in détente between the superpowers and the evolution of democracy into ever-deepening state socialism. By the time she left office, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Eastern Europe was liberated. A year later, the Soviet Union crumbled into the dustbin of history. Democracy and freedom were on the advance. -
SALT II
During a summit meeting in Vienna, President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT-II agreement dealing with limitations and guidelines for nuclear weapons. The treaty, which never formally went into effect, proved to be one of the most controversial U.S.-Soviet agreements of the Cold War. -
Soviets invade Afghanistan
The Soviet Union feared the loss of its communist proxy in Afghanistan so the they sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan and gained complete military and political control of Kabul and large portions of the country. This was the Soviet 40th Army that invaded Afghanistan in order to prop up the communist government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) right in the midst of the Cold War. -
Lech Walesa
Polish politician and labor activist. He co-founded and headed Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union. Helped bring down the Communist government in Poland, which influenced reforms against Communism throughout Eastern Europe. Led an anti-Communist organization, which fought for political, economic and civil rights to improve conditions. The collapse of Communism brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War, as democracy and prosperity rose in Poland. -
Deng Xiaoping
Chinese revolutionary and politician. He was the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China from 1978 until his retirement in 1989. Deng had once again become a leading figure in the party when the north ended up winning the civil war against the Kuomintang towards the end of the Cold War era. In the closing years of World War II, American military and diplomatic representatives in China recognized that civil war was likely to erupt between the Nationalist-controlled government -
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall has been broken down after the communist German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) decision to open borders between East and West Berlin. During the early years of the Cold War, West Berlin was a geographical loophole through which thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally encircled West Berlin. Destruction of wall marks end of Cold War for American public. -
START I
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was a bilateral treaty between the United States of America and the USSR on the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms. The talks, which began in 1982, spanned a period of three eventful decades that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the major crises of the early 21st century. -
START II
This was a bilateral treaty between the United States of America and Russia on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. It was signed by United States President George H. W.
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union—the Cold War superpowers—on the issue of arms control. The two rounds of talks and agreements were SALT I and SALT II.
