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The Potsdam Conference in 1945, included Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced on July 26 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee), and U.S. President Harry Truman. This conference was to specifically negotiate on the possibilities for the end of the war.
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The Allies were able to agree on post-war Germany, however, deciding what will happen with the rest of Europe showed to be difficult. The British and American leaders constantly argued and the Soviets often disagreed.
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The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy whose stated purpose was to counter Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. Truman stated that the U.S would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.
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The Berlin Blockade was one of the major international crises of the Cold War. The Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access.
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The Allies would supply their area of Berlin from the air. Allied cargo planes would use open-air corridors over the Soviet occupation zone to deliver food, fuel, and other goods to the people who lived in the western part of the city.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO is a formal alliance between the territories of North American and Europe.
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The Arms Race began when there was news spread that the Soviets successfully created an atomic bomb. No one thought to think the Soviet Union was this far along in their nuclear development.
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The Korean War was a fight between North and South Korea. This war began when North Korea invaded South Korea.
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Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition. In 1957 a Soviet R-7 was launched, the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit. This launch came as a surprise, and not a good one, to most in America.
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During the May 1972 meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev, however, a monumental breakthrough was achieved. The SALT first, limited the number of antiballistic missile (ABM) sites each country could have. (ABMs were missiles designed to destroy incoming missiles.) Second, the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles was frozen at existing levels.
