3&4 Flashcards
HUAC
(House Un-american Activities Committee) - One of the most famous agencies that investigated possible communist influence both inside and outside the US government. First made the headlines when it began to investigate Communist influence in the movie industry.
H-bomb
(Hydrogen Bomb) - A very destructive thermonuclear weapon, estimated it to have about the force of 1 million tons of TNT
Dwight Eisenhower
President when both the US and Soviet Union had the H-bomb
John Foster Dulles
Eisenhower’s secretary, he was very anti-Communist, proposed that the US could prevent communism by promising to use all its force against any aggressor nation
Brinkmanship
The willingness of the US under President Eisenhower to go to the edge of all-out war. Dulles proposed that the United States could prevent the spread of communism by promising to use all of its force, including nuclear weapons, against any aggressor nation.
CIA
(Central Intelligence Agency) - The CIA used spies to gather information abroad. The CIA also began to carry out covert, or secret, operations to weaken or overthrow governments unfriendly to the United States.
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact linked the Soviet Union with seven Eastern European countries. After western germany was introduced to the NATO pact the Russians got jealous and decided to create their own pact with other tightly bound European countries and created the Warsaw pact.
The Suez War
In 1955, Great Britain and the United States agreed to help Egypt finance a dam at Aswan. Egypt’s head, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, tried to manipulate the Soviets and Americans for aid. In 1956, Dulles withdrew a loan offer, leading to Egypt nationalizing the Suez Canal and causing outrage. The UN intervened, persuading Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw, but allowing Egypt to maintain control of the canal.
Eisenhower Doctrine
United States would defend the Middle East against an attack by any communist country.
Nikita Khrushchev
Leader of the Soviet Union a couple years after the death of Stalin. He believed that communism would take over the world but could triumph peacefully
U-2 incident
CIA began making secret flights over Soviet territory. The plane used was the U-2. The U-2 passed over the Soviet Union and took detailed photographs of troop movement and missile sites.
Hollywood Ten
The Hollywood Ten was a group of 10 film industry members that refused to testify to an anti-communist committee hearing during the Second Red Scare era. These men decided not to cooperate because they believed that these hearings were unconstitutional. Because the Hollywood ten refused to answer questions they were sent to jail.
Blacklist
Hollywood executives created a black list which included a list of people whom they condemned for having a communist background.
Alger Hiss
In 1948, a former Communist spy accused Alger Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union. To support his charges, Chambers produced microfilm of government documents that he claimed had been typed on Hiss’s typewriter. Too many years had passed for government prosecutors to charge Hiss with espionage, but a jury convicted him of perjury for lying about passing the documents and sent him to jail.
Ethel and Julius Rosenburg
Klaus Fuchs admitted giving the Soviet Union information about America’s atomic bomb. The information probably enabled Soviet scientists to develop their own atomic bomb years earlier than they would have. Implicated in the Fuchs case were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, minor activists in the American Communist Party. When asked if they were Communists, the Rosenbergs denied the charges against them and pleaded the Fifth Amendment, choosing not to incriminate themselves. They claimed they were being persecuted both for being Jewish and for holding radical beliefs. The Rosenbergs were found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death.
Joseph McCarthy
The most famous anti - Communist activist. McCarthy was known as being an ineffective legislator. He realized that he would need a winning issue to be reelected so McCarthy charged that Communists were overtaking the government.
McCarthyism
Taking advantage of people’s concerns about communism, McCarthy made one unsupported accusation after another. These attacks on suspected Communists in the early 1950s became known as McCarthyism. Since that time, McCarthyism has referred to the unfair tactic of accusing people of disloyalty without providing evidence.
Venona Project
Gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB.
Francis Gary Powers
An american pilot who was captured by the Soviets during a CIA mission flying over the Soviet Union.
