The Cold War

135 flashcards by MentisLibrary

Forty years of rivalry fought everywhere except between the two superpowers directly. Covers the Berlin Airlift, Cuba, Vietnam and Afghanistan, the arms and space races, and the fast collapse of the eastern bloc between 1989 and 1991.

Who was Patrice Lumumba?
The first prime minister of independent Congo, deposed and killed in 1961
Who were the Cambridge Five?
British officials recruited as Soviet agents at university who passed secrets for decades
What was agreed at the Tehran Conference?
A second front in France, and Soviet entry against Japan after Germany fell
What was the percentages agreement?
Churchill and Stalin sketched postwar influence in the Balkans as percentages on a piece of paper
What was agreed at the Yalta Conference?
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed on the occupation zones of Germany, free elections in eastern Europe, and Soviet entry into the war against Japan
What happened at the Potsdam Conference?
Truman, Stalin and Churchill, later Attlee, set terms for occupied Germany amid growing distrust
How did the atomic bomb affect wartime diplomacy?
Truman learned of the successful test during the Potsdam Conference and mentioned it obliquely to Stalin
What was the Baruch Plan?
An American proposal to put atomic energy under international control, but only after the US kept its lead
What was the Greek Civil War's Cold War role?
Communist and government forces fought, and British withdrawal prompted American intervention
What was the long telegram?
George Kennan's 1946 dispatch from Moscow arguing that Soviet hostility was rooted in ideology and insecurity
What was the iron curtain speech?
Churchill's 1946 address in Fulton, Missouri warning that an iron curtain had descended across Europe
What was the Cold War?
The prolonged rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies, fought through politics, economics, propaganda, espionage and proxy conflicts rather than direct war
Where did the term cold war come from?
It was popularized by the American financier Bernard Baruch in 1947 and by the columnist Walter Lippmann
What was containment?
The American strategy of preventing the further spread of Soviet influence rather than trying to roll it back
What was Cominform?
The Soviet body created to coordinate European communist parties
What was the Truman Doctrine?
A pledge to support free peoples resisting subjugation, announced with aid to Greece and Turkey
What was the Marshall Plan?
A large American aid programme to rebuild western European economies
What was the Berlin Airlift?
The Allied operation supplying West Berlin entirely by air for almost a year
What was the Tito-Stalin split?
Yugoslavia broke with Moscow and was expelled from Cominform
What was the Czechoslovak coup of 1948?
Communists seized full control of a country that had been governing in coalition
What was the Berlin Blockade?
The Soviet closure of land and water routes into West Berlin
What was Comecon?
The Soviet-led economic organization for the eastern bloc
When were the two German states created?
In 1949, with the Federal Republic in the west in May and the German Democratic Republic in the east in October
What was CoCom?
A western committee restricting exports of advanced technology to the eastern bloc
What is NATO?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a western military alliance built on collective defense
What happened in 1949 that ended the American nuclear monopoly?
The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb
What happened in China in 1949?
The Chinese Communist Party won the civil war and proclaimed the People's Republic
What was NSC-68?
A 1950 American policy paper calling for a large permanent military buildup to counter the Soviet Union
What was the Korean War?
A war that began when North Korea invaded South Korea, drawing in a United Nations force led by the United States and later Chinese troops
Why could the United Nations authorize force in Korea?
The Soviet delegate was boycotting the Security Council over China's representation