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- February 4-11: Yalta Conference meeting of FDR, Churchill, Stalin - the 'Big Three'
- Soviet Union has control of Eastern Europe.
- The Cold War Begins
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March 5 : "Sinews of Peace" Iron Curtain Speech by Winston Churchill - "an "iron curtain" has descended on Europe"
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March 12 : Truman Doctrine - Truman declares active role in Greek Civil War
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- June : Marshall Plan is announced setting a precedent for helping countries combat poverty, disease and malnutrition
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- Soviets placed a blockade on the allied sector of Berlin to starve the population into Soviet support.
- The allied response was a unbelievably massive air supply- flying night and day to feed the city.
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On September 23, 1949, President Harry S. Truman shocked the world when he announced that the Soviet Union had conducted a successful test of an atomic weapon the month before. Although many scientists and some in the US intelligence community had predicted the Soviets would acquire this advanced technology shortly after the Americans, the general surprise nonetheless sparked a sense of panic in the United States.
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October 1 : Communist Mao Zedong takes control of China and establishes the People's Republic of China
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June 24: Korean War begins. Stalin supports North Korea who invade South Korea equipped with Soviet weapons
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- Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg, were American citizens executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
- In August 1950, a federal grand jury was convened to hear the Justice Department's case for indictments. The grand jury transcripts, made public in 2008
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July: Stalin Dies -Korean War ends
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Many in Cuba felt that Batista was selling his country into servitude to corrupt American business men and gangsters. So the very nationalistic views of Castro appealed to them. Cuba was hopelessly corrupt and many of the people were very poor. This opened the door for a leader like Castro. Once he got in, he made sure it was for a long long time. -Greed and corruption often proceed dictators.
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The Battle of Dien Bien Phuwas the climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War between the French Union's French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Viet Minh communist-nationalist revolutionaries. It was from the French view before the event, a set piece battle to draw out the enemy and destroy them with superior French firepower. The battle occurred between March and May 1954.
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CIA helps overthrow unfriendly regimes in Iran and Guatemala
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Khrushchev’s secret speech: in Russian history, denunciation of the deceased Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made by Nikita S. Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The speech was the nucleus of a far-reaching de-Stalinization campaign intended to destroy the image of the late dictator as an infallible leader and to revert official policy to an idealized Leninist model.
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first artificial Earth satellite. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on October 4th. It was visible all around the Earth and its radio pulses were detectable. The success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the "Space Race", a part of the larger Cold War. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific development.
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- November 3: Sputnik II launched - Laika died in space
- Second spacecraft launched into Earth orbit, and the first to carry a living animal, a dog named Laika. Sputnik 2 contained several compartments for radio transmitters, a telemetry system, a programming unit, a regeneration and temperature control system for the cabin, and scientific instruments. A separate sealed cabin contained the dog, Laika.
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The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower and during the leadership of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the airspace of the Soviet Union.
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April 17: "The Bay of Pigs" - A group of Cuban exiles, backed by the US, invades Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in a failed attempt to trigger an anti-Castro rebellion
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August 17 : Construction of Berlin Wall begins
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October 14 : A U-2 flying over western Cuba obtains photographs of missile sites
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October 28: Khrushchev announces over Radio Moscow that he has agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba In return the US agrees to the withdrawal of US nuclear missiles from Turkey ending the Cuban Missile Crisis
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USA–Russia; The most famous hotline between states is the Moscow–Washington hotline, which is also known as the "red telephone", although telephones have never been used in this capacity. This direct communications link was established on June 20, 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and utilized teletypewriter technology, later replaced by telecopier and then by electronic mail.
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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, Pub.L. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
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A hotline connection between Moscow and Beijing was used during the 1969 frontier confrontation between the two countries. The Chinese however refused the Russian peace attempts and ended the communications link. After a reconciliation between the former enemies, the hotline between China and Russia was revived in 1996.
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April : President Nixon extends Vietnam War to Cambodia
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February: President Richard Nixon visits China
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July : SALT I signed
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July : SALT II signed
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December: Soviet forces invade Afghanistan
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August: Polish shipyard workers strike Solidarity Union formed. Strike leader Lech Walesa is elected as the head of Solidarity
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Mikhail Gorbachev becomes leader of the Soviet Union initiating a campaign of openness called "glasnost" and restructuring called "perestroika"
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November : Berlin Wall is demolished and East Germany allows unrestricted migration to West Germany
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November : Berlin Wall is demolished and East Germany allows unrestricted migration to West Germany
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November : Berlin Wall is demolished and East Germany allows unrestricted migration to West Germany
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October 3 : Germany reunited
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