Military history

The Cold War: History in an Hour

The Cold War: History in an Hour

From the end of World War Two to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia and America eyed each other with suspicion and hostility as the world lived in the shadow of the Cold War. As post-war Europe was rebuilt, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin struggled to maintain peace among the former Eastern and Western Allies. Two ideologies, two political systems, two cultures, two superpowers became entrenched in a fight for dominance, each firm in the belief that history would prove them right.

The End of the Second World War: Apocalypse

The Beginning of the Cold War: The Freeze

Three Speeches: ‘An iron curtain has descended’

The Marshall Plan: ‘Communism cannot be stopped in Europe’

Berlin: ‘You should not and cannot abandon this city and this people’

The Bomb: ‘MAD’

The Korean War: Hot War

US Anti-Communism: ‘Reds Under the Bed.’

Stalin’s Final Years: ‘I’m finished, I don’t even trust myself’

Khrushchev: ‘Different roads to socialism’

Space Wars: ‘Flopnik’

The Berlin Wall: ‘Berlin is the testicles of the West’

The Cuban Missile Crisis: ‘We’ll all meet together in Hell’

The Vietnam War: Unwinnable

Rebellion: 1968

Nixon: ‘Vietnamization’

China, the USA and the Soviet Union: ‘Ping-pong diplomacy’

The Decline of Détente: ‘Lennonism, not Leninism’

Afghanistan: ‘The Soviet Vietnam’

The Polish Pope and Solidarity: ‘The last nails in the coffin of communism’

The Ex-Actor: ‘Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root’

Gorbachev: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

1989: ‘Time to yield power’

The End of the Soviet Union: ‘The threat of a world war is no more’

Appendix 1: Key Players

Appendix 2: Timeline of the Cold War

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