Cold War Vocabulary Flashcards
Laissez-Faire
A policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering.
Communist
Government has control of the economy and makes decisions for the people.
Democracy
A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War.
Reparations
The making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent.
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989.
Containment
Containment is a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States. It is loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire which was later used to describe the geopolitical containment of the Soviet Union in the 1940s.
Berlin Airlift
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies’ railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control.
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Pact was a collective defence treaty established by the Soviet Union and seven other Soviet satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania (Albania withdrew in 1968).
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 European and North American countries.
Brinkmanship
The art or practice of pursuing a dangerous policy to the limits of safety before stopping, especially in politics.
Sputnik
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957.
Arms Race
A competition between nations for superiority in the development and accumulation of weapons, especially between the US and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Domino Theory’
The theory that a political event in one country will cause similar events in neighboring countries, like a falling domino causing an entire row of upended dominoes to fall.
Iron Curtain
A notional barrier separating the former Soviet bloc and the West prior to the decline of communism that followed the political events in eastern Europe in 1989.
Totalitarianism
A system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
Capitalism
An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Space Race
The Space Race was an informal 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), to achieve firsts in spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II.
In 1949 the United States and European countries worked together to form an alliance for protection against Communist aggression called N.A.T.O. What does N.A.T.O stand for?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Who was the dictator that controlled the Soviet Union?
Joseph Stalin
Which event signaled the end of the Cold War?
Berlin wall coming down
A system where the government owns the factories and other natural resources AND controls the production of goods is known as what.
Communism
The Allied victory in World War II led to the emergence of TWO global superpowers. What were those TWO superpowers?
USA AND Soviet Union
