Transcript COLD WAR - Ms. Holdsclaw

Day 2
In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb.
Both superpowers developed far more powerful
hydrogen bombs by the 1950s.
After the fall of China, North Korea, and
Eastern Europe, the US and USSR began
an arms race.
Each country built enough nuclear
weapons to kill 500,000,000 people in the
event of war, destroying all civilization
and laying waste to the entire planet.
The policy was called mutually assured
destruction.
In April 1949,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) was formed.
This military alliance,
which included Great Britain, France, other
Western European nations, and the United
States and Canada,
agreed to provide mutual help
if any one of them was attacked.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949)
1.
United States
9.
2.
Belgium
10. Netherlands
3.
Britain
11. Norway
4.
Canada
12. Portugal
5.
Denmark
6.
France
13. 1952: Greece &
Turkey
7.
Iceland
8.
Italy
Luxemburg
14. 1955: West Germany
15. 1983: Spain
In 1955, the Soviet Union and Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania formed the military alliance
called the Warsaw Pact.
Warsaw Pact (1955)
1. U. S. S. R.
5. East Germany
2. Albania
6. Hungary
3. Bulgaria
7. Poland
4. Czechoslovakia
8. Rumania
The United States then extended
its military alliances around the world.
By the mid-1950s, the United States was in military alliances with 42 nations.
Stalin died in 1953.
After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev
became the chief policy maker in the Soviet Union.
Under his leadership, de-Stalinization, or the process of eliminating some of
Stalin’s most ruthless policies, was put in place.
With Stalin gone, many Eastern European states tried to make reforms.
The Soviet Union, however, made it clear that it would not allow
its Eastern European satellites to become independent.
Revolts against communism in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia
were brutally crushed.
In August 1961, on the order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the East
German government began to build the Berlin Wall.
It was built to stop the flood of East Germans escaping to the greater
freedom and prosperity of West Berlin.
The Berlin Wall Goes Up (1961)
Checkpoint
Charlie
In 1957, the Soviets sent Sputnik I,
the first man-made space satellite, to
orbit the earth.
In 1961, the Soviet astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, became the
first man to orbit the Earth in space.
Americans feared there was a missile gap
between the Soviet Union and the United States.
In the 1950s, a movement in Cuba led by Fidel Castro aimed to
overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro’s revolutionaries captured Havana in 1959.
Many Cubans who disagreed with Castro fled to the US.
Relations between the US and Cuba quickly deteriorated as Castro
began to receive aid and arms from the Soviet Union.
In October 1960, the US declared a trade embargo prohibiting trade
with Cuba.
In January 1961, the US broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.
In April 1961, US President John
F. Kennedy supported an
attempt to overthrow Castro’s
government.
The attempted invasion at the
Bay of Pigs failed.
In 1962, Khrushchev began to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to counteract U.S. nuclear
weapons placed in Turkey, near the Soviet Union.
In October 1962, President Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba to stop Soviet
ships carrying more nuclear missiles from reaching Cuba.
Khrushchev agreed to send the ships back and remove nuclear missiles
in Cuba if Kennedy agreed not to invade Cuba.
Kennedy agreed. Six months later, the US removed its missiles from Turkey.
The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to very close to the brink of nuclear war.
The American Mercury program
succeeded in sending John Glenn to
space in 1962.
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo project allowed American Neil Armstrong to become the
first man to walk on the surface of the Moon.
After World War II, Communists in
Vietnam under leadership of Ho Chi
Minh fought for independence from
France with rebels called the Viet
Minh.
In 1945, Viet Minh rebels took control
of most of Vietnam.
The French, however, refused to accept the new government and
fought for control of the southern part of the country.
In 1954, France agreed to a peace settlement.
Vietnam was divided – the Communist north based in Hanoi and the
anti-Communist south based in Saigon.
But by early 1965, South Vietnamese Communist guerrillas known as the
Viet Cong were ready to seize control of the entire country.
U.S. policy makers applied the domino theory to Vietnam.
According to this theory, if South Vietnam fell to communism,
then other countries in Asia would fall like dominoes to communism.
In March 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson decided
to send American troops to South Vietnam to prevent a
Communist victory.
By the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War reached a stalemate – neither
side was able to make significant gains.
The atrocities of the war were broadcast nightly on television.
A massive anti-war movement grew in
the US as more American troops were
sent to Vietnam.
President Johnson decided not to run for re-election
because of public opinion against his handling of the war.
Former Republican vice-president Richard M. Nixon won the election with the
promise to end the war and reunite the American people.
In 1973, Nixon reached an
agreement with North
Vietnam that allowed the
US to withdraw its forces.
Within two years, Vietnam was forcibly reunited by Communist armies.
By the end of 1975,
Laos and Cambodia
also had Communist
regimes.
In Communist China, Mao
believed that only
permanent revolution, an
atmosphere on constant
revolutionary fervor, could
produce the final stage of
communism, a classless
society.
In 1966, Mao started the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution to
create a working class culture.
The Little Red Book, a collection of
Mao’s thoughts, provided knowledge
in all areas.
The Red Guards were formed to
eliminate the “Four Olds” – old ideas,
old culture, old customs, and old
habits.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon became the first US President to visit the
People’s Republic of China.
In 1979, China and the US established diplomatic ties.
By the 1970s, the Communist ruling class
of the Soviet Union had become corrupt.
The Soviet economy was weakened by the government’s bureaucracy that
discouraged efficiency and encouraged indifference.
Farmers and workers lacked incentive to work hard.
By 1980, the Soviet economy was seriously declining.
In 1985, the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev
was chosen to lead the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s basis of reform was perestroika, or restructuring, of
the Soviet economy and government.
His willingness to rethink Soviet domestic
and foreign policy led to a dramatic end to the Cold War.
In 1987 Gorbachev made an agreement with the United States - the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty –
to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
Gorbachev changed Soviet policy by stopping
military support to Communist governments in Eastern Europe.
This led to the overthrow of Communist regimes in these countries.
In 1988 unrest led many East Germans to flee their Communist country.
In 1989, mass demonstrations against the Communist regime broke out.