Cold War Conflicts

The Korean War

1950

Started in the 1950’s, the Korean War was a conflict when Northern Korean People's Army invaded South Korea in a coordinated general attack at several strategic points along the 38th parallel, the line dividing communist North Korea from the non-communist Republic of Korea in the south.

Space Race

1955

After World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers–the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union–against each other. Beginning in the late 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology, its military firepower and–by extension–its political-economic system.

The Red Scare

1955

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Communists were often referred to as “Reds” for their allegiance to the red Soviet flag. The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society.

Berlín Crisis

1961

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he demanded that the Western powers pull their forces out of West Berlin within six months. This ultimatum sparked a three year crisis over the future of the city of Berlin that culminated in 1961 with the building of the Berlin Wall. The division of Germany and its capital city of Berlin among the four victors of the Second World War was frozen in time by the onset of the Cold War despite the postwar agreements to unify the zones.

Cuban Missle Crisis

1962

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.

Vietnam War

1964

The fight between the United States and South Vietnam on one hand and North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, strongly backed by the Soviet Union and mainland China, on the other, ended with the victory of the North Vietnamese in 1975.

Soviet-Afghanistan War

1979

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. This event began a brutal, decade-long attempt by Moscow to subdue the Afghan civil war and maintain a friendly and socialist government on its border.