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He informed Congress, "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." -
In a commencement address at Harvard University, announces a package of economic assistance to aid in European recovery. Though not "directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos," the Marshall Plan further divides Europe into two spheres of influence. -
It creates a civilian Secretary of Defense (the first was James Forrestal), a National Security Council, and a Central Intelligence Agency--but does not call for universal military training. -
Eduard Benes in Czechoslovakia gets overthrown, It was the last democratic nation in the Soviet bloc. -
The Soviets begin a blockade of the Western zones in occupied Berlin; the Allied powers would respond with an 11-month airlift to supply the beleaguered city. -
They responded by airlifting food and fuel to Berlin from Allied airbases in western Germany. -
The Treaty was signed in Washington D.C. on 4 April 1949 by 12 founding members. The Treaty derives its authority from Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which reaffirms the inherent right of independent states to individual or collective defence -
First Soviet Test. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan -
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The announcement ended the costly full-scale civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party -
Truman publicly announces his decision to support the development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II -
The war broke out on June 25, 1950 when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel, invading South Korea. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung launched the attack once he had received a promise of support from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. -
In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People's Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south -
Although PVA forces captured Seoul by the end of the battle, the Chinese invasion of South Korea galvanized the UN support for South Korea, while the idea of evacuation was soon abandoned by the UN Command -
Operation Ripper, also known as the Fourth Battle of Seoul, was a United Nations (UN) military operation conceived by the US Eighth Army, General Matthew Ridgway, during the Korean War -
By the end of March, they have reached the 38th Parallel and formed a defensive line across the Korean peninsula. -
Britain's first atomic bomb was detonated on 3 October 1952. The mud-laden cauliflower explosion. Britain developed its own atom bomb to remain a great power and avoid complete dependence on the United States, which was refusing to share atomic information. -
Nuclear weapon testing underground, though, not only continued but increased in numbers. A total of 928 nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, more than anywhere else. -
This report presents estimates of the effect of a surprise Soviet attack on the combat potential of the Strategic Air Command. It discusses the effectiveness and cost of several defensive measures and recommends implementation of a number of relatively low-cost measures. -
The Korean War was fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following clashes along the border and rebellions in South Korea -
Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Castle -
The KGB was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. -
In July 1954, the Geneva Agreements were signed. As part of the agreement, the French agreed to withdraw their troops from northern Vietnam. Vietnam would be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel, pending elections within two years to choose a president and reunite the country. -
The Warsaw Pact or Treaty of Warsaw, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. -
About 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers of the Polish People's Army and the Internal Security Corps under the command of the Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky were ordered to suppress the demonstration and during the pacification fired at the protesting civilians. -
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978–1980. At the end of December 1979, the Soviet Union sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan and immediately assumed complete military and political control of Kabul and large portions of the country. -
A spontaneous national uprising that began 12 days before in Hungary is viciously crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on November 4, 1956. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter-million Hungarians fled the country. -
From 1954 to 1957, Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolëv headed development of the R-7, the world's first ICBM. Successfully flight tested in August 1957, the R-7 missile was powerful enough to launch a nuclear warhead against the United States or to hurl a spacecraft into orbit -
On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. The satellite, an 85-kilogram (187-pound) metal sphere the size of a basketball, was launched on a huge rocket and orbited Earth at 29,000 kilometers per hour (18,000 miles per hour) for three months -
Laika, a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into low orbit on 3 November 1957. No capacity for her recovery and survival was planned, and she died of overheating or suffocation hours into the flight -
Explorer 1 was the first satellite launched by the United States in 1958 and was part of the U.S. participation in the International Geophysical Year. The mission followed the first two satellites the previous year; the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2, beginning the Cold War Space Race between the two nations -
The first Atlas rocket launched with a Mercury capsule exploded. The first Mercury-Redstone launch only went about four inches off the ground. From these flights, NASA learned how to fix the rockets and make them safer. Three other "astronauts" also helped make sure Mercury was safer -
On November 10, 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he demanded that the Western powers of the United States, Great Britain and France pull their forces out of West Berlin within six months. -
The Cuban communist revolutionary and politician Fidel Castro took part in the Cuban Revolution from 1953 to 1959. Following on from his early life, Castro decided to fight for the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's military junta by founding a paramilitary organization, "The Movement" -
In the Kitchen Debate, Khrushchev claimed that Nixon's grandchildren would live under communism and Nixon claimed that Khrushchev's grandchildren would live in freedom. -
On May 5, 1960, the Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. that an American spy plane had been shot down on May 1 over Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), referring to the flight as an “aggressive act” by the United States. The wreckage of Francis Gary Powers's U-2 reconnaissance plane -
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. In a closely contested election, Democratic United States Senator John F. Kennedy defeated the incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee -
With Cuba's proximity to the United States, Castro and his regime became an important Cold War ally for the Soviets. The relationship was for the most part economic, with the Soviet Union providing military, economic, and political assistance to Cuba. -
After the failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and while the Kennedy administration planned Operation Mongoose, in July 1962 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev reached a secret agreement with Cuban premier Fidel Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter -
Khrushchev, though not originally in favour of a wall, hoped to apply pressure to newly-elected United States president John F. Kennedy. The border was closed in the early hours of August 13th 1961 and the East German military immediately began construction of a wall dividing the city -
the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin -
Johnson's anxieties about U.S. credibility, combined with political instability in Saigon, China's resistance to negotiations, and Hanoi's refusal to remove troops from South Vietnam and stop aiding the National Liberation Front led him to escalate the U.S. military presence in Vietnam -
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, the Caribbean Crisis, or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, which escalated -
The Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963; ratified by the United States Senate on September 24, 1963; and entered into force on October 10, 1963. The treaty prohibited nuclear weapons tests "or any other nuclear explosion" in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater. -
John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. -
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred in August 1964. North Vietnamese warships purportedly attacked United States warships, the U.S.S. Maddox and the U.S.S. C. Turner Joy, on two separate occasions in the Gulf of Tonkin, a body of water neighboring modern-day Vietnam -
The atomic bomb was a part of China's "Two Bombs, One Satellite" program. It had a yield of 22 kilotons, comparable to the Soviet Union's first nuclear bomb RDS-1 in 1949 and the American Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 -
President Johnson ordered American troops to intervene in the Dominican Republic to maintain order and ensure that there would be no communist government established. -
Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the first American combat troops in Vietnam. On March 8, 1965, 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in Da Nang to protect the U.S. airbase there from Viet Cong attacks. -
Operation Linebacker II was an aerial bombing campaign conducted by U.S. Seventh Air Force -
during an address to a Senate sub-committee, Robert McNamara testified that pacification was not working and US bombing raids against North Vietnam had not achieved their objectives.
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