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Yalta Conference
The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea conference and code named the Argonaut Conference, held from February 4 to 11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union for the purpose of discussing Germany and Europe's postwar reorganization. -
Potsdam conference
The Potsdam conference was held at Cecilienhof. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, represented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and, later, Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. -
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Hiroshima bombing and Nagasaki
During the final stage of World War II, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States had dropped the bombs with the consent of the United Kingdom as outlined in the Quebec Agreement. The two bombings killed at least 129,000 people (most of whom were civilians) and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. -
Molotov Plan
The Molotov Plan was the system created by the Soviet Union in 1947 in order to provide aid to rebuild the countries in Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned to the Soviet Union. -
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy created to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was first announced to Congress by President Harry S. Truman. -
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Treaty of Brussels
This treaty was signed between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The treaty was intended to provide Western Europe with a bulwark against the communist threat and to bring greater collective security. -
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 World War II. -
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Berlin Block Aid
The Berlin Block Aid was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European states based on the North Atlantic Treaty -
Soviet Creation of Nuclear weapons
The Soviets successfully tested their first nuclear device, called RDS-1 or "First Lightning" (codenamed "Joe-1" by the United States), at Semipalatinsk -
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Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North Korea (with the support of China and the Soviet Union) and South Korea (with the principal support of the United States) The fighting ended on 27 July 1953, when an armistice was signed. The agreement created the Korean Demilitarized Zone to separate North and South Korea, and allowed the return of prisoners. However, no peace treaty has been signed, and according to some sources the two Korea's are technically still at war. -
Stalin's Death
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian-born Soviet revolutionary and political leader. On 1 March 1953, Stalin's staff found him semi-conscious on the bedroom floor of his Volynskoe dacha, having urinated on himself. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. -
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Fidel Castro taking over
Fidel Castro was a Cuban communist revolutionary and politician he took part in the Cuban Revolution. Following on from his early life, Castro decided to fight for the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's military junta by founding a paramilitary organisation, "The Movement". -
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Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, was a collective defence treaty signed in Warsaw among the Soviet Union and seven Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. -
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Vietnam War
The Vietnam War also known as the Second Indochina War. and also known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. -
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Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution was a nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. Though leaderless when it first began, it was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR's forces drove Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of World War II. -
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NORAD
North American Aerospace Defense Command. The NORAD is a combined organization of the The United States and Canada. -
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Bay of pigs
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 -
Creation of the Berlin wall
On August 13, 1961, 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. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. -
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End of the Cuban missile crisis
The Cuban Missile crisis comes to a close as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agrees to remove Russian missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise from the United States to respect Cuba’s territorial sovereignty. This ended nearly two weeks of anxiety and tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that came close to provoking a nuclear conflict. -
Nuclear Arms Treaties
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT, is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. -
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The Soviet-Afghan war
The Soviet–Afghan War lasted over nine years. Insurgent groups known together as the mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a guerilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government, mostly in the rural countryside. The mujahideen groups were backed primarily by the United States and Pakistan, making it a Cold War proxy war. -
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Solidarity in Poland
Independent Self-governing Labour Union "Solidarity" is a Polish labour union that was founded on 17 September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa It was the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country that was not controlled by a communist party. Its membership reached 9.5 million members before its September 1981 Congress (when it reached 10 million). which constituted one third of the total working-age population of Poland. -
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Czechoslovakia revolution
The Velvet Revolution or Gentle Revolution was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia.Popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia combined students and older dissidents. The result was the end of 41 years of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia, and the subsequent dismantling of the planned economy and conversion to a parliamentary republic. -
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Berin Wall falling
Television coverage of citizens demolishing sections of the Wall on 9 November was soon followed by the East German regime announcing ten new border crossings, including the historically significant locations of Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brücke, and Bernauer Straße. -
End of the Cold war
On December 8, 1987, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed in Washington, eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons. The INF Treaty was the first arms-control pact to require an actual reduction in nuclear arsenals rather than merely restricting their proliferation.As the decade came to an end, much of the Eastern Bloc began to crumble. The Hungarian government took down the barbed wire on its border with Austria and the West. The Soviet Union did nothing in response.