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The Cold war
• An economic, political, diplomatic, military,
ideological and cultural struggle between
America and the USSR
• Began shortly after World War II and ended with
the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
• Eventually involved nearly every nation on Earth,
and completely dominated world affairs for more
than fifty years.
• Known for the development and deployment of
large numbers of nuclear weapons that
threatened the very survival of the human race
• The sheer destructiveness of those weapons
precluded their use and introduced a new level
of caution and restraint in great power relations.
• The Cold War created conditions for savage and
destabilising conflicts - Vietnam and Korean
Wars.
• But it also imposed strict limits on the conduct
and expansion of these wars and restrained the
outbreak of nationalist and ethnic conflicts
throughout the world.
• Bill Clinton, America's first president elected
after the end of the Cold War (and thus the first
to confront the outbreak of post-Cold War ethnic
violence), said half in jest in 1993: ‘I miss the
Cold War. [. . .] We had an intellectually coherent
thing. The American people knew what the rules
were’
Mutually Assured Destruction
(MAD): The nuclear policy first
enunciated by U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara in the
1960s. It held that the retaliatory—
or ‘second strike’—might of the
superpowers’ respective
thermonuclear arsenals prevented
either side from launching a
successful first strike.
Go to pg 137
• Locate each of the six “Hot Spot” on the
world Map.
• Create a map key that explains the
background of the cold war event and the
action and reaction.
• Put these descriptions in your own words.
Leaders and Places of the Cold
•
•
•
•
Dean Acheson (1893-1971): U.S. secretary of state
from 1949 to 1953. Acheson played a key role in the
formation of NATO and in the development of the
Truman Doctrine.
Afghanistan: A Central Asian nation that was invaded
by Soviet forces in December 1979 as part of Moscow's
effort to prop up a faltering client government. The
invasion both ended the era of détente and mired the
Red Army in a costly counterinsurgency campaign.
Berlin: A divided German city that lay 110 miles inside
East Germany. American and West European efforts to
retain control of West Berlin produced periodic crises
that ended with the construction of the Berlin Wall
Leonid Brezhnev (1906-82): Leader of the Soviet
Union from 1964 to 1982. Brezhnev responded
favorably to Nixon's call for détente, but also crushed
the Prague Spring and issued the Brezhnev Doctrine.
• Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969): Vietnamese Communist
guerrilla leader and head of North Vietnam from 1954
until his death.
• Lyndon Johnson (1908-73): President of the United
States from 1963 to 1969. Johnson made the fateful
1965 decision to commit American troops to offensive
operations in Vietnam.
• George Kennan (1904-): U.S. State Department official,
author of the ‘Long Telegram’, and father of the
containment doctrine.
• John F. Kennedy (1917-63): U.S. president from 1961
to 1963. A foreign-policy hawk, Kennedy pursued the
Cold War with vigour. He forcefully compelled
Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba,
escalated America's involvement in South Vietnam and
ordered a massive military buildup.
• Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971): Leader of the Soviet
Union from 1953 to 1964. Khrushchev’s failed effort to
bluff the West into believing that the USSR enjoyed
strategic parity helped precipitate the Cuban missile
crisis.
• Henry Kissinger (1923-): U.S. secretary of state (1973-77) and
national security adviser (1969-75). Kissinger helped orchestrate the
Nixon administration's shift to détente and played a key role in the
dramatic opening to China.
• Mao Zedong (1893-1976): Leader of the People’s Republic of
China from 1949 until his death. Mao was a staunch, ideological
opponent of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, but entered
into a modus vivendi with Nixon in 1972 in response to the
worsening Sino-Soviet Split.
• George Marshall (1880-1959): A five-star general during World War
II, U.S. secretary of state from 1947 to 1949, and secretary of
defense from 1950 to 1951. Marshall played an important part in
orchestrating America's effort to implement containment in the late
1940s.
• Joseph McCarthy (1908-57): A Republican senator from
Wisconsin, McCarthy briefly dominated national politics and gave
the McCarthy era its name. Taking advantage of the crisis
atmosphere created by the Korean conflict, McCarthy exploited the
communists-in-government issue more effectively than any other
figure.
• Richard Nixon (1913-94): President of the United States from 1969
to 1974. Nixon shrewdly offset America's post-Vietnam decline
through diplomatic initiatives such as the Nixon Doctrine,
rapprochement with China, and détente.
• Ronald Reagan (1911-): President of the United States from 1981
to 1989. A Cold War hawk, Reagan oversaw a $2 trillion military
buildup and proposed the construction of the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI).
• Joseph Stalin (1879-1953): Communist dictator of the Soviet Union
from 1927 to 1953, Stalin imposed a repressive regime on the
Russian people and extended Soviet control over Eastern Europe.
• Taiwan: The island bastion of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist
government following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil
War.
• Joseph Tito (1892-1980): Communist leader of Yugoslavia from
1945 until his death in 1980. Though a committed communist, Tito
pursued an independent, non-aligned foreign policy.
• Winston Churchill (1874-1965): British prime minister
from 1940 to 1945 and 1951 to 1955. In 1946, Churchill
warned that Moscow was enclosing Eastern Europe in
an ‘iron curtain’.
• Dien Bien Phu: A village in North Vietnam at which
French forces suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands
of Vietnamese guerrillas in May 1954.
• Harry Truman (1884-1972): U.S. president from 1945 to
1953 and principal presidential architect of containment.
Truman responded to Soviet aggression with the
Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. Later,
he ordered American forces to repel Kim Il Sung's
invasion of South Korea and authorised the
development of the hydrogen bomb.
• Lech Walesa (1943-): A ship worker, leader of the antiCommunist Solidarity, and first non-Communist
president of Poland since before World War II.
• Jimmy Carter (1924-): U.S. president from 1977 to 1981.
Though a Cold War moderate when he took office, Carter
authorised a massive military rearmament program and
boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow after the USSR's
intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979.
• Fidel Castro (1926-): Communist leader of Cuba since 1959.
• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): Founded by the National
Security Act of 1947, the CIA originated as a centralised
intelligence gathering organisation but soon expanded its
operations to include provocative and antidemocratic covert
operations.
• Kim Il Sung (1912-94): Communist leader of North Korea.
Kim began the Korean War in June 1950 with a massive
invasion of South Korea.
• Robert McNamara (1916-): During his tenure as U.S.
secretary of defense (1961-68), this former Ford executive
oversaw America's deepening involvement in Vietnam and
formally enunciated the policy of Mutually Assured
Destruction.
• John Foster Dulles (1888-1959): A moralistic and ardently anticommunist U.S. secretary of state (1953-59). Dulles called for the
‘liberation’ of Eastern Europe and promoted the policy of ‘massive
retaliation’.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969): Former commander of
American forces in Europe during World War II, head of NATO, and
president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Eisenhower
shifted American defence policy away from the maintenance of a
large conventional army and toward a reliance on nuclear weapons
through his ‘massive retaliation’ policy.
• Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-): Leader of the USSR from 1985
through 1991. Gorbachev's reform efforts and renunciation of the
Brezhnev Doctrine led to the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union
and to the end of the Cold War.
• Vaclav Havel (1936-): Leader of the Czech opposition movement in
1989 and the first non-Communist president of Czechoslovakia
since the 1940s.
• Alger Hiss (1904-96): A well-regarded U.S. State Department
official and alleged communist espionage agent. Hiss’s January
1950 perjury conviction (the statute of limitations prevented his
being tried on espionage charges) helped lend credence to the
growing Red Scare.
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