The Cold War
- 1945-1990 - US vs. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
- Communism - ran by the governments - vs. democracy - freedom and voting
- spying
- Lenin believe in true communism and after he died and Stalin took over the government and turned evil
- Causes of the cold war - Different political systems, The Red Scare of 1919, Stalin hated democracy, Distrust during WWII, Stalin breaking promises of free elections
- U.S. wanted an open market for goods to prevent another depression, promote democracy through the world, and to stop the spread of communism (Containment)
- Soviet Union encouraged friendly governments on its borders, spread communism
- Domino effect - Eisenhower - if one country gets communism then it will spread to out country
- Truman doctrine - we game supplies to help Greece and Turkey to help fend off the communists
- Marshall plan - Gave money to European to help them rebuild for trade and to prevent communism
- Brinkmanship - the U.S. has to be willing to go to the brink of war without actually going to war
- NATO - defensive alliance with western Europe
- Warsaw pack was the opposite version of NATO for Russia
- CIA and KGB were the spy agencies 1954 - 1991
- 1953 Stalin dies and Khrushchev came to power for 11 years
- Detente - 1970's easing of tensions lead by Nixon
- Gorbachev - comes to power in 1985 and took down the USSR
- Wanted people to have free speech and more democracy
- USSR's first atomic bomb was in 1949
- Russia, U.S, UK, France, China were the only countries allowed to have them.
- P\Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty they wanted to stop the making of nukes but didn't want to stop countries from using nuclear weapons for power.
- Missile defense system was made to protect us from nukes and we protect all of our allies but in 1972 we signed a treaty against this
- the salt treaty and many other treaties were made to ban, stop making or testing nukes
- the START treaty dismantles 80% of nuclear weapons
- the UN (United Nations) was a world wide peace keeping agency and can wage war
- Berlin crisis - Stalin blockaded the city so we couldn't give people food so we airlifted supplies in
- The seccont red scare was 1947-1957 and was started by the Rosenberg tried which were Russian spies
- McCarthy - said there are communists in the government, and was one of the most powerful people in the early 50's and said that the communists are in the military too and people stopped listening to him and he died in 1957 from alcohol abuse
- the HUAC committee they said that people that were believed to be communist film makers had to spend a year is prison and pay $1,000
- Spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers was shot down in USSR in 1960
- The Berlin wall was built in 1961 splitting the city in two and there was a death strip in between where you were shot if you were escaping and was taken down in 1990
- The bay of pigs invasion trained Cubans to invade Cuba because he didn't want to make it look like it was an American OP and they were defeated
- The Cuban missile crisis - 1962 the Cubans had nukes on their Island
- we agreed to remove our nukes from Turkey and never invade Cuba if the USSR took their missiles out of Cuba
- Soviets invade Afghanistan in 1979 to try to save the communist government and we funded Alqueda to try to fight Russia and ended up starting the terrorist group
- Reagan ran a strong anti communist platform and helped end the cold war
- The U.S. had close allies and the USSR didn't have any allies and China sided with the U.S. and the Russian economy was bad
- Korean Conflict - The Forgotten War
- We never officially declared war but it lasted 3 years
- after world war two Korea was split in two and there was suppose to be an election but it didn't happen so the country stayed split
- Kim II-Sung was the founder of Korea
- The north tried to take the country over and unite it as one country and they were successful at the first
- the UN sends troops to help Korea out and MacArthur was the leader and got fired after this war
- China invaded north Korea and pushed our troops back and we went back and fourth for a while
- over the last 2 years the fighting takes place on the boarder
- a cease-fire was signed on July 27th, 1953 near the 38th parallel
- Vietnam War
- 1950-1975
- Vietnam was a french colony and the Vietnamese were our friends during WWII
- the french were defeated by the Vietnamese and the French left the country
- Geneva Conference split Vietnam into 2 and there was suppose to be an election and it never happened
- 1957-1975 - Escalation - the US starting giving money to France, Then started giving advisers to help train Vietnamese, the Green Berets were going in and doing special ops, then we started sending troops there for defensive reasons, in 1964 we started sending troops for the offensive,
- golf of Tonkin - a US boat was attacked inside of the golf
- 1968 - Tet Offensive - the north Vietnamese attacked all the big cities and they attacked from the inside but we won
- US soldiers were killing women, children, and old people
- People tried to get out of serving in the war
- Nixon wanted to take our troops out of the war and the south fell after that
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