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In response to the Soviet blockade of land routes into West Berlin, the United States begins a massive airlift of food, water, and medicine to the citizens of the besieged city.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and several Western European nations to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. NATO was the first peacetime military alliance the United States entered into outside of the Western Hemisphere. -
North Korea attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950, igniting the Korean War. Cold War assumptions governed the immediate reaction of US leaders, who instantly concluded that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had ordered the invasion as the first step in his plan for world conquest. “Communism,” President Harry S.
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A mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. -
The USA was afraid that communism would spread to South Vietnam and then the rest of Asia.
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The Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. -
Leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores.
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The US landing on the moon. -
Anti-government protests in East Germany and the democratization of other eastern and central European states. Sections of the Berlin Wall were subsequently torn down by East German border guard crews and residents of a reunified Berlin.