260-292 vt terms Flashcards
was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following World War II
The Cold War
a war of ideas
ideological war
A war where two combatants fight by using lesser militarily powerful combatants (Viet Nam, Korea)
Proxy war
generally understood as the nuclear race between USA and USSR
Arms Race
the massive growth of the quantity of nuclear bombs on Earth
Nuclear Proliferation
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 28 European countries, 2 North American countries, and 1 Asian country. The organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty that was signed on 4 April 1949
NATO
an international organization founded in 1945 and committed to maintaining international peace and security; developing friendly relations among nations; promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights. Note: the UN is the child of the League of Nations, which was the idea of Woodrow Wilson. He ended up not joining the League of Nations due to poor national support for the organization.
The United Nations
a race between Russia and the US to the moon. Both nations wanted to use rockets to get the moon, but they were also using rocket technology as a delivery system for nuclear warheads. The Space Race was triggered by Sputnik
The Space Race
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles: Rockets that could travel across the large distances and accurately deliver warheads
ICBM’s
the UN founders made certain that the Security Council consists of five permanent members and six rotating elected members. The United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China—the members of the full Allied alliance in World War II—are the five permanent powers, and their unanimous vote is required on all substantive matters. The decisions of the Security Council are binding on all members.
The 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council
the Soviet state when it established the Communist International (Comintern), whose express purpose was to provide funds and strategies for colonized and marginalized people to overthrow capitalism through violent revolution
Comintern
also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until his death in 1976
Mao Zedong
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung is a book of statements from speeches and writings by Mao Zedong, the former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, published from 1964 to about 1976 and widely distributed during the Cultural Revolution
The Little Red Book
The Yalta Conference, also known as the Crimea Conference and codenamed Argonaut, held 4-11 February, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to discuss the postwar reorganization of Germany and Europe.
Conference at Yalta
Stalin’s intentions signaled the permanent Soviet domination of eastern Europe and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties coming to power in the democracies of western Europe. Their fears were realized in 1946 and 1947, when the Soviets helped bring communist governments to power in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. Communists had previously gained control in Albania and Yugoslavia in 1944 and 1945.
USSR expansion
U.S. policy instituted in 1947 by President Harry Truman in which the United States would follow an interventionist foreign policy to contain communism. The annunciation of the Truman Doctrine on 12 March 1947 crystallized the U.S. perception of a world divided between “free” and “enslaved” peoples. Articulated partly in response to crises in Greece and Turkey, where communist movements seemed to threaten democracy and U.S. strategic interests, the Truman Doctrine starkly drew the battle lines of the cold war. As President Harry Truman (1884–1972) explained to the U.S. Congress: “At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The United States then committed itself to an interventionist foreign policy, dedicated to the “containment” of communism, which meant preventing any further expansion of Soviet influence.
The Truman Doctrine
U.S. plan, officially called the European Recovery Program, that offered financial and other economic aid to all European states that had suffered from World War II, including Soviet bloc states.
The Marshall Plan
The Missiles of October: (1962): major confrontation that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
Warsaw Treaty Organization, a military alliance formed by Soviet bloc nations in 1955 in response to rearmament of West Germany and its inclusion in NATO.
Warsaw Pact
By 1961 the communist East German state was hemorrhaging from a steady drain of refugees who preferred life in capitalist West Germany. Between 1949 and 1961 nearly 3.5 million East Germans—many of them young and highly skilled—left their homeland, much to the embarrassment of East Germany’s communist leaders. In August 1961 the communists reinforced the border between East and West Germany, and also constructed a fortified wall that divided the city of Berlin. The wall, which began as a layer of barbed wire, quickly turned into a barrier several layers deep, with watchtowers, searchlights, antipersonnel mines, and border guards who had orders to shoot to kill. The Berlin Wall accomplished its purpose of stemming the flow of refugees, though at the cost of shaming a regime that seemed to be unpopular even among its own people.
The Berlin Wall
a vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy in the period 1950–54. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, although most did not in fact belong to the Communist Party.
Joe McCarthy… McCarthysim
A reduction in cold war tension between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1969 to 1975.
Detente
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule, and to later inspire movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.
Gandhi (Mohandas, Mahatma)
In the 1930s Indians had fought for, and won, numerous reforms from the British colonial government. The most significant of these reforms was the India Act of 1935, which laid out a structure for Indian home rule (control over internal affairs). But the India Act faced challenges in the form of increasing calls for independent yet separate Hindu and Muslim states, while the eruption of World War II suspended home rule altogether.
India’s Partitioned Independence
