Key Terms and Personalities Flashcards
DEFECTION
When a person/group of people leave one state for another, usually due to oppression. A feature of the COLD WAR - many East Germans fled to the West in the 1950s via Berlin. Led to the building of the wall in 1961.
EXCOMM
Executive Committee - the committee of advisers formed by Kennedy during the Cuban Missiles crisis to advise him. Made up of HAWKS and DOVES.
GRADUAL ESCALATION
The term used to describe Kennedy’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis - involving opting for a quarantine first, but building up US invasion forces in case the quarantine did not work.
DOMINO THEORY
- A concept put forward by President Eisenhower in the 1950s that justified the US policy of containment. It was the idea that if one country fell to communism, others would follow, like dominoes. A key reason why the USA became embroiled in the Vietnam War.
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Alliance.Formed in 1949.Western European and US military alliance.
VIET CONG
Communist soldiers in the South Vietnam.Military arm of the NLFFought essentially a guerrilla war of ambush, terrorism, and sabotage.Wanted Vietnam United under communist rule.
NUCLEAR DETTERENT
- During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each built a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Soviet policy rested on the conviction that a nuclear war could be fought and won. The United States adopted nuclear deterrence, the credible threat of retaliation to forestall enemy attack.
CONTAINMENT
- The US policy, as announced by President Truman an in March 1947. A policy aimed at preventing the spread of communism.
- This concept formed the basis of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War
MAD
- Mutually Assured Destruction - the idea developed in the 1950s, in the context of the nuclear arms race,
- A nuclear war would simply result in the destruction of all protagonists, if not the Earth!
COMINFORM
- Communist Information Bureau
- The Cominform’s activities consisted mainly of publishing propaganda to encourage international communist solidarity.
COMECON
- The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 1949–1991, was an economic organization under the leadership of the Soviet Union that comprised the countries of the Eastern Bloc along with a number of socialist states elsewhere in the world.
DENTENTE
- détente - a relaxing or easing, as of tension between rivals. Characterised by increased diplomatic, commercial, and cultural activity.Associated with the 1970s
COMMUNISM
- An ideology followed by the Soviet Union and other Eastern Europe States after Communism is a political and economic system in which the major productive resources in a society—such as mines, factories, and farms—are owned by the public or the state, and wealth is divided among citizens equally or according to individual need.Basic belief that the people are best served if the state controls all aspects of society. A form of socialism.
CAPITALISM
- An economic system that features private ownership of the means of production (such as factories, offices, and shipping enterprises) and in which market forces determine the way in which goods are produced and the means by which income and profit are distributed is called capitalism.Also known as. Free market economy.
BRINKMANSHIP
- Brinkmanship (also brinksmanship) is the practice of pushing dangerous events to the verge of—or to the brink of—disaster in order to achieve the most favourable outcome.Associated with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
