Strategies of the Cold War - Resource Guide

The Cold War is one of the strangest chapters in the long, bloody history of international conflict. For forty-five years it drove the politics and devoured the resources of the United States and the USSR. It twisted the fates of smaller nations sucked into the orbits of the superpowers and multiplied the violence of civil wars.

Ideological, political, and economic tensions from 1945 to 1989 between the USSR and Eastern Europe on the one hand and the USA and Western Europe on the other. The Cold War was fuelled by propaganda, undercover activity by intelligence agencies, and economic sanctions; and was intensified by signs of conflict anywhere in the world.

1917 Bolshevik success in Russian Revolution, and attempts by Western powers with ‘White’ Russian forces to defeat them, create background of mutual distrust and isolation of the USSR.

The Cold War is the name historians use for the mistrust and bad feeling between the communist USSR and its allies, and the USA and its allies after the end of World War II. This lasted until the late 1980s. During this time there was a very real danger of a nuclear war between these two groups of countries. However, although there were proxy wars, in which the friends of the USSR and USA fought each other, these two superpowers never went to war with each other.

Following the defeat of Germany, Berlin was administered jointly by Britain, the USA, France, and the USSR. In June 1948 the USSR withdrew from the combined board and blockaded the city. This document is a cabinet paper incorporating a report from General Robertson to the chiefs of staff, which summarizes the progress of the Berlin airlift.

Officially Republic of Cuba, republic...

1961, an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles, supported by the U.S. government...

October 1962 when Soviet rockets were installed in Cuba and US president John F Kennedy compelled Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, by military threats and negotiation, to remove them...

The Marshall Plan (also known as the European Recovery Program) became one of the two pillars supporting the containment policy. George F. Kennan, head of the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, first coined the concept in a famous article he wrote anonymously for a 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs.

(SDI), U.S. government program responsible for research and development of a space-based system to defend the nation from attack by strategic ballistic missiles (see guided missile). The program is now administered by the Missile Defense Agency (originally the Strategic Defense Initiative Office), a separate agency in the U.S. Dept. of Defense.