Transcript The Cold War

The Cold War
United States vs. Soviet Union
1945 - 1991
Intro
• Started with bad feelings from WWII
• U.S. was weary of communism and Stalin
• Soviet Union blamed U.S. for late entry into
WWII, which cost millions of Soviet lives
• Post war Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe
worried U.S. (USSR taking over the world)
Post War Europe
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Europe is split into two
Soviet Union claimed majority of Eastern Europe
U.S. and NATO rebuilt countries of Western Europe
U.S begins to feel that Soviet Union may try to take
over world
• President Harry Truman “It must be the policy of the
United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947,
“to support free peoples who are resisting attempted
subjugation…by outside pressures.”
The Cold War: The Atomic Age
• Containment strategy provided rationale for U.S. to start
their arms buildup (1949)
• U.S. officials encouraged building of the hydrogen bomb
• Soviet Union soon built their own
• The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall
Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could
be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an
island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the
power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American
and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into
the atmosphere.
The Cold War Extends to Space
• Space was the next challenge between the U.S. and
Soviet Union
• The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik (1957)
• 1958, U.S. launches its own satellite, Explorer 1
• President Eisenhower signed order to create NASA
(National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
• JFK made prediction that U.S. would be first on the
moon, and we were (Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, 1969)
The Cold War: The Red Scare
• 1947, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
• HUAC forced hundreds of Hollywood workers to testify against
each other
• Senator Joseph McCarthy was leader in movement to reveal
supposed Communists
• McCarthy accused and prosecuted federal employees of being
Communists
• People all across U.S. were effected
• Era becomes known as McCarthyism
The Cold War Abroad
• First military action of “CW” was the Korean
War
• Soviet backed North Korea invaded South
Korea (1950-1953), Truman orders U.S. troops
to take action.
• 1961, Kennedy ordered the Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba trying to overthrow Fidel
Castro
• Vietnam War (1965 – 1973)
The Close of the Cold War
• President Richard Nixon tried to calm tensions
• Nixon encouraged the UN to build diplomatic relations
with communist nations
• President Ronald Reagan challenged communism
• USSR premier Mikhail Gorbachev introduced
“glasnost”/”perestroika” – political
openness/economic reform
• 1991, Berlin Wall falls – Cold War Ends