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the principle that the US should give support to countries or peoples threatened by Soviet forces or Communist insurrection. First expressed in 1947 by US President Truman in a speech to Congress seeking aid for Greece and Turkey, the doctrine was seen by the Communists as an open declaration of the Cold War. -
Marshall Plan is announced setting a precedent for helping countries combat, poverty, disease and malnutrition. -
U.S. meet 19 Latin American countries and created a security zone around the hemisphere -
Czechoslovakia, until then the last democracy in Eastern Europe, became a Communist country, triggering more than 40 long years of totalitarian rule. In effect, the Czechoslovak Communists did not take control. They were given control. -
agreement signed by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, creating a collective defense alliance. -
Truman signed United States Executive Order 9835, sometimes known as the "Loyalty Order", on March 21, 1948. The order established the first general loyalty program in the United States, designed to root out communist influence in the U.S. federal government. -
The United States and United Kingdom responded by airlifting food and fuel to Berlin from Allied airbases in western Germany. The crisis ended on May 12, 1949, when Soviet forces lifted the blockade on land access to western Berlin. -
President Truman and Secretary Acheson signed the Instrument of Accession, making the United States a founding member of NATO. -
The Soviet Atomic Bomb and the Cold War
exploded its own atomic bomb. The Soviets successfully tested their first nuclear device, called RDS-1 or “First Lightning." -
Truman supported the development of the hydrogen bomb because the Soviet Union had exploded a fission bomb earlier in the year. -
He is known for alleging that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. -
Korean War begins. Stalin supports North Korea who invade South Korea equipped with Soviet weapons. -
a battle of the Korean War, which took place from December 31, 1950, to January 7, 1951, -
The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) was organized by Democratic president Harry S. Truman -
U.S. president Harry S. Truman relieved General of the Army Douglas MacArthur of his commands after MacArthur made public statements that contradicted the administration's policies. -
On 18 February, Greece was formally welcomed as one of NATO's first new members since the creation of the Alliance in 1949, along with Turkey. His Majesty King Paul I, king of the Hellenes, signs the Instrument of accession for Greece in Athens on 11 February 1952. -
signed by Japan on September 8, 1951, comes into effect, and Japan signs the Treaty of Taipei, formally ending its period of occupation and isolation, and becoming a sovereign state. -
Britain contributed to the Manhattan Project by helping initiate the effort to build the first atomic bombs in the United States during World War II, and helped carry it through to completion in August 1945 by supplying crucial expertise. -
the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and the arms race began. Both countries continued building more and bigger bombs. In 1953, the United States tested a new and more powerful weapon: the hydrogen bomb. -
seven months after President Eisenhower's inauguration as the 34th President of the United States, an armistice was signed, ending organized combat operations and leaving the Korean Peninsula divided much as it had been since the close of World War II at the 38th parallel. -
In his Atoms for Peace speech before the United Nations General Assembly on December 8, 1953, President Eisenhower sought to solve this terrible problem by suggesting a means to transform the atom from a scourge into a benefit for mankind. -
Castle Bravo was the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Castle. -
the CIA successfully deposed of the democratically elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala. -
In Vietnam, the accords create two “regroupment” zones separated by a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) roughly along the 17th parallel, and restrict the activities of foreign military personnel in Southeast Asia. French forces must withdraw south of the DMZ and Communist forces north. -
the Baghdad Pact is founded by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom -
Formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, the Warsaw Pact was created on 14 May 1955, immediately after the accession of West Germany to the Alliance. -
The United States entered Vietnam with the principal purpose of preventing a communist takeover of the region -
About 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers of the Polish People's Army and the Internal Security Corps under the command of the Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky were ordered to suppress the demonstration and during the pacification fired at the protesting civilians. -
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, the joint British-French enterprise which had owned and operated the Suez Canal since its construction in 1869. -
Between 4 and 8 November 1956, Nikita S. Khrushchev ordered the Red Army to put down the Hungarian Uprising by force. Soviet troops attacked en masse and abolished the independent national government. Hungary was immediately subjected to merciless repression, and hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled to the West. -
a modified R-7 launched the first manned spacecraft, Vostok, which carried cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Refined versions of the R-7 are still in use today. A workhorse of the Soviet space program, the R-7 rocket has launched many missions. -
the Soviet Union launched the earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The successful launch came as a shock to experts and citizens in the United States, who had hoped that the United States would accomplish this scientific advancement first. -
The USSR rocketed to the lead in the Cold War's "Space Race" with the launch of Sputnik, a basketball-sized satellite that became the first manmade object to orbit the Earth. On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth -
Wernher von Braun, leader of the Army's Redstone Arsenal team which built the first stage Redstone rocket that launched Explorer 1. Explorer 1 was the first U.S. satellite and the first satellite to carry science instruments -
The first Atlas rocket launched with a Mercury capsule exploded. The first Mercury-Redstone launch only went about four inches off the ground. -
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he demanded that the Western powers of the United States, Great Britain and France pull their forces out of West Berlin within six months. -
The Cuban communist revolutionary and politician Fidel Castro took part in the Cuban Revolution from 1953 to 1959. Following on from his early life, Castro decided to fight for the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's military junta by founding a paramilitary organization, "The Movement". -
Nixon took Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev on a tour of the exhibit. There were multiple displays and consumer goods provided by more than 450 American companies. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a geodesic dome that housed scientific and technical experiments in a 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) facility. -
Recognition of the Soviets' violation of their friendship treaty abrogated its recognition of Mongolia's independence. It therefore vetoed its admission into the United Nations on 13 December 1955, claiming it—as Outer Mongolia—to be an integral part of China. -
The U-2 incident was a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that began with the shooting down of a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union in 1960 and that caused the collapse of a summit conference in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. -
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. In a closely contested election, Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy defeated the incumbent vice president Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee. -
After the establishment of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cuba became increasingly dependent on Soviet markets and military aid and was an ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. -
John F. Kennedy came out of the crisis in a much better position. His calm but firm stance in the negotiations was heralded as great statesmanship, though it is often forgotten that his bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion had helped lead to the missile crisis in the first place. -
In August 1961, East German premier Walter Ulbricht, after consultation with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, decided to close the border separating East and West Berlin. Ulbricht's chief motivation was to halt the 'brain drain': the growing emigration of educated and skilled workers from East Germany to the West. -
The decision was taken to build a Wall. Work began in the early hours of 13 August 1961. The Berlin Wall became the symbol of the Cold War and a tangible manifestation of the world's separation into two distinct ideological blocs. -
US involvement in Vietnam increased during the 1950s and 1960s, following the communist revolution in China and the rise of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. -
American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. -
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict. -
Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy agree to establish a hot line to use in a Cold War crisis. -
On August 5, 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. After Senate approval, the treaty that went into effect on October 10, 1963, banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water -
Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. -
Zhou Enlai visits the Soviet Union. -
It was tantamount to a declaration of war, but it was based on a lie. After decades of public skepticism and government secrecy, the truth finally came out: In the early 2000s, nearly 200 documents were declassified and released by the National Security Agency (NSA). They showed that there was no attack on August 4 -
China exploded an atom bomb at 1500 hours [China Time] on Oct. 16, 1964, and thereby conducted successfully its first nuclear test -
President Johnson
By 1965, President Johnson authorized US troops to begin military offensives and started the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. By 1968, the number of US forces surpassed 500,000. -
Bosch was toppled by a military coup just seven months into his term, and the Dominican Republic plunged into political turmoil. On April 28, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered troops into the Dominican Republic through “Operation Power Pack” to protect American lives and property in the Dominican Republic -
Johnson stationed 22,000 troops in South Vietnam to prop up the faltering anticommunist regime. -
On March 7,1966 French President Charles de Gaulle announced France's withdrawal from NATO's integrated military command, resulting in the relocation of NATO headquarters from Paris to Brussels.. France, under the leadership of President Charles de Gaulle, had been a founding member of NATO. -
to defoliate areas to reduce cover for enemy forces, to improve visibility on the perimeters of military installations, and for a short time to kill enemy crops. -
The Christmas bombings: A US airman recalls the Vietnam War's ...
The devastating losses were not all one way. At the same time, the United States Air Force sustained losses that today would seem unfathomable. Fifteen B-52s – the pride of America's fleet – were shot down, six in one day alone, and 33 airmen lost.