Cold War Timeline

  • Cold War Begins

    The Cold War was a state of political and military tension after World War 2 between powers in the Western and Eastern Bloc.
  • Period: to

    The Cold War

  • The Marshall Plan

    The Marshall Plan was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave $13 billion in economic support to help rebuild Western Euopean economies after the end of World War 2.
  • The Berlin Airlift

    Russians -who wanted Berlin all for themselves- closed all hghways, railroads, and canals from western occupied Germany into western occupied Berlin.
  • Forming of NATO

    The prospect of Communism expansion prompted the United States and 11 other Western nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
  • Forming of Warsaw Pact

    The Soviet Union and its affiliated Communist nations in Eastern Europe founded a rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact.
  • Vietnam War

    The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era proxy war that occured in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.
  • Bay of Pigs

    The CIA launched a full-scale invasion on Cuba by 1,400 American-trained Cubans that fled their homes when Castro took over. But they were greatly outnumbered and surrendered after only less than 24 hours of fighting.
  • Creation of the Berlin Wall

    The Communist government of the German Democratic Republic began to build a barbed wire and concrete " Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin, in order to keep fascists out of Germany.
  • Cuban Missile Crisis

    Leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in November 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.s. shores.
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall

    Three decades after the creation of the Berlin Wall people were finally able to break down the wall. These people had seeral uprisings that slowly wore down the wall.
  • Dissolution of the USSR

    Representatives from 11 Soviet republics metmin the Kazakh city of Alma-Ata and announced that they would no longer be part of the Soviet Union.