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Yalta conference
One of the “big three” conferences discussing military strategy and the terms of peace. meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. The conference was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. -
Marshall plan
President Harry S. Truman signs the Economic Assistance Act, which authorized the creation of a program that would help the nations of Europe recover and rebuild after the devastation wrought by World War II. Commonly known as the Marshall Plan, it aimed to stabilize Europe economically and politically so that European nations would not be tempted by the appeal of communist parties. -
Iron Curtain speech
Nine months after Sir Winston Churchill failed to be reelected as Britain's Prime Minister, Churchill traveled by train with President Harry Truman to make a speech. In this speech, Churchill gave the very descriptive phrase that surprised the United States and Britain, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." -
Truman Doctrine
The British Embassy informed the U.S. State Department officials that Great Britain could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey. American policymakers had been monitoring Greece's crumbling economic and political conditions. -
Chinese Revolution
The Chinese leadership Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, and Chu Teh consolidated power quickly and moved to gain the confidence of the Chinese population, particularly by solving the economic problems that had worsened during the civil war: the civil war had generated low levels of gross domestic output, high rates of inflation, and high levels of urban unemployment. -
The Korean War
The Korean War started when roughly 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War -
Hydrogen bomb
The U.S. detonates the world's first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, on Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. The test gave the United States a short-lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Following the successful Soviet detonation of an atomic device in September 1949, the United States accelerated its program to develop the next stage in atomic weaponry, a thermonuclear bomb. -
Death of Stalin
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin dies of a stroke on March 5. On July 27, an armistice is signed ending the Korean War, with the border between North and South roughly the same as it had been in 1950. The willingness of China and North Korea to end the fighting was in part attributed to Stalin's death. -
Rosenberg spy case
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for espionage in Sing Sing Prison on 19 June 1953. They had been convicted of giving American atomic secrets to the Soviets during World War II. Though the government was convinced of their guilt, many people were not and the debate over their guilt or innocence did not stop with their deaths. -
Massive retaliation
massive Retaliation was an all-or-nothing strategy. It was the threat to turn the Soviet Union into a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours. By making nuclear war too destructive to fight, by making the distinction between victor and loser in such a conflict increasingly meaningless, the deterrent strategy aimed at eliminating war itself. Furthermore, and more concretely Massive Retaliation meant the possible deterrence of an all-out attack. -
Dien bien phu
the climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War between the French Union's French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Viet Minh communist-nationalist revolutionaries. The battle occurred between March and May 1954 and culminated in a comprehensive French defeat that influenced negotiations over the future of Indochina at Geneva. -
Guatemalan coup
Guatemalan coup d’état was the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. -
Castro takes power
Allen Dulles, head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, visited Cuba and complained about the danger posed by the Cuban communists. In early December, 1956, Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and the asthmatic Che Guevara and a few others survived a beachhead slaughter and made it into the Sierra Maestras Mountains on the eastern side of Cuba. A government report claimed that forty of the invading rebels had been killed, including Fidel Castro. -
Khrushchev’s “secret speech"
First Secretary of the Communist Party (1953-1964) and Premier of the Soviet Union (1958-1964) delivered the following speech to an unofficial, closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956. Although the contents of the speech were held confidential, it was soon leaked to outsiders. While he was careful to protect the spirit of Lenin, Khrushchev attacked the crimes committed by Stalin and his closest associates. -
Sputnik
when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a beach ball (58 cm.or 22.8 inches in diameter), weighed only 83.6 kg. or 183.9 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race. -
Bay of Pigs
Fidel Castro came to power in an armed revolt that overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The U.S. government distrusted Castro and was wary of his relationship with Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union. -
The U-2 incident
a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the airspace of the Soviet Union.
The United States government at first denied the plane's purpose and mission, but then was forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produced its intact remains and surviving pilot, Francis Gary Powers, as well as photos of military bases in Russia taken by Powers. -
Berlin wall
a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area that contained anti-vehicle trenches, "fakir beds" and other defenses. -
Berlin wall falls
The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between democracy and Communism during the Cold War. -
Cuban missle crisis
An American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem. -
Hot Line
a system that allows direct communication between the leaders of the United States and Russia. This hotline was established in 1963 and linked the White House via the National Military Command Center with the Kremlin. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
During the spring of 1964, military planners had developed a detailed design for major attacks on the North, but at that time President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers feared that the public would not support an expansion of the war. By summer, however, rebel forces had established control over nearly half of South Vietnam, and Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, was criticizing the Johnson administration for not pursuing the war more aggressively. -
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6 day war
The Six-Day War was initiated by General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli’s Defence Minister. The war was against Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Israel believed that it was only a matter of time before the three Arab states co-ordinated a massive attack on Israel. After the 1956 Suez Crisis, the United Nations had established a presence in the Middle East, especially at sensitive border areas. -
Prague spring
A period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected the First Secretary of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and all members of the Warsaw Pact, with the notable exception of Romania, invaded the country to halt the reforms. -
tet offensive
The operations are referred to as the Tet Offensive because there was a prior agreement to "cease fire" during the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations. Both North and South Vietnam announced on national radio broadcasts that there would be a two-day cease-fire during the holiday. Nonetheless, the Communists launched an attack that began during the early morning hours of 30 January 1968, the first day of Tet. -
Vietnamization
To "expand, equip, and train South Vietnam's forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops." as well as the support to South Vietnam, consistent with the policies of U.S. foreign military assistance organizations. -
Salt
Negotiations commenced in Helsinki, Finland, in November 1969. SALT I led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and an interim agreement between the two countries. Although SALT II resulted in an agreement in 1979, The United States eventually withdrew from SALT II in 1986. The treaties led to START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). -
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The six day war
The Six-Day War was initiated by General Moshe Dayan, the Israeli’s Defence Minister. The war was against Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Israel believed that it was only a matter of time before the three Arab states co-ordinated a massive attack on Israel. After the 1956 Suez Crisis, the United Nations had established a presence in the Middle East, especially at sensitive border areas. -
afghanistan soviet invasion
Afghanistan’s centrist government, headed by Pres. Mohammad Daud Khan, was overthrown by left-wing military officers led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Power was thereafter shared by two Marxist-Leninist political groups, the People’s (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party. -
German Reunification
The end of the unification process is officially referred to as German unity. The East German regime started to falter in May 1989, when the removal of Hungary's border fence opened a hole in the Iron Curtain. It caused an exodus of thousands of East Germans fleeing to West Germany and Austria via Hungary. The Peaceful Revolution, a series of protests by East Germans, led to the GDR's first free elections on 18 March 1990, -
Soviet Union collapses
This declaration acknowledged the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union following the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States. On the previous day, 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned, declaring his office extinct, and handed over the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.