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Berlin Blockade and Airleft
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. The Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. -
Korean War
The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following a series of clashes along the border. Korea had been split into two sovereign states. Both governments claimed to be the sole legitimate government of all Korea, and neither accepted the border as permanent. -
Space Race
The Space Race refers to the 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, for dominance in spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations that occurred following World War II, aided by captured German missile technology and personnel from the Aggregate program. -
U-2 Reconnaiassance plane
On 1 May 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory. The single-seat aircraft, flown by pilot Francis Gary Powers, was hit by an S-75 Divina surface-to-air missile and crashed near Sverdlovsk. -
Bay of Pigs
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on 17 April 1961. In 1961 the United States sent trained Cuban exiles to Cuba to try and overthrow Fidel Castro's government. They failed miserably. The invasion is considered part of the Cold War because the United States was trying to prevent communism from taking hold in the Americas. -
Reagan visits the Wall
On this day in 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down" the wall that divided Communist East Germany from the western enclave in Berlin. In August 1961, the East Germans, with strong support from Moscow, erected the wall to deter their citizens from leaving for the West. From 1949 until the wall's inception, some 2.5 million East Germans had fled their country in search of a better life. -
Cuban missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962, the Caribbean Crisis, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union initiated by American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey wit consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis stands as a singular event during the Cold War. -
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War superpowers, on the issue of arms control. The two rounds of talks and agreements were SALT I and SALT II. -
Soviet invade Afghanistan
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978-1980. 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. The Soviet - Afghan War lasted over nine years, from December 1979 to February 198. -
Reunited Germany
The German Reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic became part of the Federal Republic of Germany to form the reunited nation of Germany, and when Berlin reunited into a single city. Some of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War took place there.
