-
Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The first bomb, called Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th. The second bomb, called Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. -
Iron Curatin Speech
Winston Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain Speech" in Missouri at Westminster College. Churchill used his now famous Iron Curtain term to describe what was happening in the world. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." -
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Oraganization was created following World War II between the United States and Western European countires. All the countires involved agreed to come to aid any member country that was under attack, and put up a front to any territorial expansion made by the USSR. -
Warsaw Pact enacted
Warsaw PactThe Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. The Warsaw Pact, so named because the treaty was signed in Warsaw, included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. -
Invasion of Bay of Pigs
In Cuba,1400 Cuban exiles launched what became a botched invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast. On April 17, the Cuban-exile invasion force, known as Brigade 2506, landed at beaches along the Bay of Pigs and immediately came under heavy fire. Cuban planes strafed the invaders, sank two escort ships, and destroyed half of the exile's air support. -
Building of the Berlin Wall
On the night of August 12-13, 1961, East German soldiers laid down more than 30 miles of barbed wire barrier through the heart of Berlin. The first concrete pilings went up on the Bernauer Strasse and at the Potsdamer Platz. Germaners could not cross over anymore. -
Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. After many long and difficult meetings, Kennedy decided to place a naval blockade, or a ring of ships, around Cuba. The aim of this "quarantine," as he called it, was to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies. The leaders of both superpowers recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and publicly agreed to a deal in which -
Gulf of Tonkin Incident
Gulf of TonkinPresident Lyndon B. Johnson decided to put military pressure on Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese government in Hanoi, which directed and provided military support for the Communists in the South. This caused a clash between the U.S. Naval Force and Democratic Republic of Vietnam. On the night of August 4th, The Maddox and Turner Joy claimed to be under attack by North Vietnamese ships. -
SALT I
SALT I is the common name for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement, also known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. SALT I froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels and provided for the addition of new submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers only after the same number of older intercontinental ballistic missile and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed both the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. -
SALT II
The completed SALT II agreement was signed by President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev in Vienna. The primary goal of SALT II was to replace the Interim Agreement with a long-term comprehensive Treaty providing broad limits on strategic offensive weapons systems. -
The Strategic Defensive Initiative
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars, was a program first initiated on March 23, 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. The intent of this program was to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system in order to prevent missile attacks from other countries, specifically the Soviet Union. -
The Invasion of Grenada
On October 23, a suicide bomber drove his truck into a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The bomb, which had produced the largest non-nuclear blast on record, exploded with the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT and killed 241 Marines. On October 25, U.S. Marines invaded Grenada, where they encountered unexpectedly heavy antiaircraft fire and ground resistance by the Cuban soldiers and laborers building the controversial airstrip. In two days they subdued the air and ground forces. -
The Iran-Contra Affair
While Iran and Iraq were at war, Iran made a secret request to buy weapons from the United States. President Reagan had become frustrated at his inability to secure the release of the seven American hostages being held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. Reagan made a deal to sell weapons to Iran to bring the hostages home. -
End of Berlin Wall
Soviet reforms and their state of bankruptcy have allowed Eastern Europe to rise up against the Communist governments. The Wall fell on 9 November 1989, but the Wall in its entirety was not torn down immediately. Starting that evening and in the days and weeks that followed, people came to the wall with sledgehammers or otherwise hammers and chisels to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts of it in the process and creating several unofficial border crossings. -
End of Cold War
In August of 1991, the Soviet Union began to collapse, and finally in December of 1991, Mikael Gorbachev who was still the highest Soviet official, officially recognized the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR was dissolved, ending the Cold War.
