Essay about Cold War
COLD WAR VIDEO QUESTIONS 1. Stalin forced his people to give up food in order to fund the Cold War. He believed that giving up food; they can put all their necessities to promoting nuclear arms race. 2. Winston Churchill came up with the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was the use of tanks to cut off soviet controlled Europe (East communist) from the Western Europe controlled by democratic countries. 3. The Fair Deal was the term given to an ambitious set of proposals put forward by United States President Harry S. Truman to the United States Congress in his January 1949 State of the Union address.
The term, however, has also been used to describe the domestic reform agenda of the Truman Administration,[1] which governed the United States from 1945 to 1953. It marked a new stage in the history of Modern liberalism in the United States, but with the Conservative Coalition dominant in Congress, the major initiatives did not become law unless they had GOP support. As Neustadt concludes, the most important proposals were aid to education, universal health insurance, FEPC and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. They were all debated at length, then voted down.
Nevertheless, enough smaller and less controversial (but still important) items passed that liberals could claim some success. 4. The year 1949 was a pivotal year in the Cold War because it was the year that the first bomb that soviets tested finally caused a fear in the world for nucleic warfare. 5. The fall of China was important because it made the United Sates set up to have worldwide associations to reinforce finances and trade with China. 6. The Korea War ended when there was an armistice signed by North Korea, China, and the U. N. but not South Korea.
Korea was then split into two, the north and the south. The demilitarized zone became known as the 38th parallel. 7. The husband and wife (Rosenbergs) were accused to have passed A-bomb secrets to the soviet spies. They were eventually found guilty and were executed by electrical chair. 8. McCarthy claimed that he had a lift of people who were associated with the Soviet spies. He was constantly threatening the public by releasing the list. Eventually, a famous journalist called him out for his actions and McCarthy was put to shame and lost popularity in an instant. . Peaceful coexistence is competition without war, or a policy of peace between nations of widely differing political systems and ideologies, especially between Communist and non-Communist nations. In Hungary, Khrushchev reversed his policy of peaceful coexistence during the Hungarian revolt in 1956. The Soviet army crushed the Hungarian Revolution, which resulted in many casualties. 10. President Kennedy admitted to lack of missile gap unlike Eisenhower. He said that the US was way ahead of the Soviets in the developing missiles.
The US had the Soviet Union surrounded with missile sites and the Soviets wanted at least one site near the US. If they could get Cuba they would have their “one place”. A U2 planes discovered installation sites being built in Cuba by the soviets. Kennedy called together the National Security Council, DOD, etc. to discuss what to do with this. We came up with three options. 1) Invade Cuba-Bay of pigs was a failure. 2) Air Strike- was afraid if we did do that they would shoot our planes 3) leave it alone.
In 1963 the US and the Soviet Union signed a nuclear Test Ban Treaty which banned the testing of atomic weapons. A hotline was also set up between Moscow and Washington D. C. 11. The government of South Vietnam requested military advisors from the United States to help train the South Vietnamese army to fight against the North and the Viet Cong. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the North, was a communist and during the Cold War of the 1950s and 60s, the aim of the US government was containment of communist power and not to let it spread.
The Eisenhower administration provided South Vietnam with money and advisors to help stop the threat of a North Vietnamese takeover. The United States also was pledged by treaty (SEATO) to aid the member nations in Southeast Asia, if they were attacked by a foreign (communist) power. Following the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, President Lyndon B. Johnson also believed in containment and the domino theory. If one nation falls to communism, the next nation will fall, and the next, etc. It became the aim of the Johnson administration to prevent a communist takeover in Southeast Asia. 2. Detente was practical politics and the easing of tensions or strained relations especially between nations. 13. South America: Without the fear of communism prevailing in Latin America, the governments of these countries began to shift to their more-natural left-of-US-center center. Many states in South America restored voting and free campaigning in their governments. This has resulted in center-left politics from Chile and Brazil and far left politics from Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
Africa: had lost all of its luxury and lush Middle East: had managed to impose, confronted the peoples of the Middle East, like those of other regions liberated from superpower control or interference, with an awful choice. They could move, however slowly and reluctantly, to settle their disputes and live peacefully side by side, as happened in some parts of the world; or they could give free rein to their conflicts and hatreds, and fall into a descending spiral of strife, bloodshed and torment, as happened in others. 14.
Perestroika: was a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s (1986), widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning “openness”) policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is “restructuring”, referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system. Glasnost: was a policy that called for increased openness and transparency in government institutions and activities in the Soviet Union. The Soviet economy was slowly becoming stagnant, whilst military spending went through the roof.
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was seen as a threat to be countered, and the Soviets threw more money at the military. To counter this stagnation Gorbachev introduced the policies of Glasnost’ and Perestroika (Openness and Re-Structuring) hoping that people would be open about how to rebuild the communist system, and make it work better. All it did was allowed people to openly criticize the system – soon they were calling for it to be replaced. Communism was also simply not delivering the promised “workers aradise”, wages were stagnant, housing shoddy, cars a rarity, and, from the 1970s they could see the differences between their lifestyle and the West on TV – especially when the (uncensored) Olympics were on. 15. The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in talks from 1969 to 1972, during which they negotiated the first agreements to place limits and restraints on some of their central and most important armaments, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Interim Agreement on strategic offensive arms. Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II) – 1979.
The second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty increased limits on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and heavy bombers. Other limits were placed on multiple re-entry vehicles and bombers with intermediate-range missiles. SALT II was to remain in effect through 1985, but it was never ratified, and was then supplanted by the START negotiations. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) SALT I, the first series of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, extended from November 1969 to May 1972.
During that period the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated the first agreements to place limits and restraints on some of their central and most important armaments. In a Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, they moved to end an emerging competition in defensive systems that threatened to spur offensive competition to still greater heights. In an Interim Agreement on Certain Measures With Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, the two nations took the first steps to check the rivalry in their most powerful land- and submarine-based offensive nuclear weapons.
