The Cold War
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28 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Harry S Truman | Signed the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II; provided economic and military aid to any country threatened by communism or totalitarian ideology (i.e.; the Korean War) |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Former Allied Supreme Commander in World War II; stated that the United States would defend the Middle East against an attack by any communist country. |
| John F. Kennedy | Was President when the Soviet Union oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961; guided the nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis; called on the United States to be the first nation to land on the moon, igniting the Space Race. |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Advocated a "flexible response" policy toward Communism as evidence by American expansion in South Vietnam. |
| Richard Nixon | First U.S. President to visit communist China; promoted the policy of détente with communist countries; signed the first SALT treaty with the Soviet Union in 1972. |
| Ronald Reagan | Initially labeled the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire;" advocated for a missile defense system called "Star Wars;" negotiated with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to improve American-Soviet relations. |
| Joseph Stalin | Soviet Premier during World War II and the beginning of the Cold War; after the war, Stalin established pro-Soviet Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. |
| Nikita Khrushchev | Soviet Premier who oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall; ordered Soviet tanks into Hungary to put down pro-democracy movement; sent nuclear weapons to Cuba resulting in the Cuban Missile Crisis and ultimately his fall from power. |
| Leonid Brezhnev | Signed the historic SALT I Treaty with the United States, limiting each nations' nuclear weapons; supported intervention if communism was threatened; sent Soviet troops into Afghanistan in 1979, increasing the hostility between the Soviet Union and the United States. |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | The last premier of the Soviet Union; initiated the Soviet policies of glasnost and perestroika; negotiated with American President Ronald Reagan to improve American-Soviet relations. |
| Fidel Castro | Communist leader of Cuba. |
| Mao Zedong | Communist leader of China. |
| Ho Chi Minh | Communist leader of Vietnam. |
| North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) | A military alliance formed in 1949 by ten Western European countries, the United States, and Canada. |
| Warsaw Pact | A military alliance formed in 1955 by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. |
| United Nations | An international peacekeeping organization founded in 1945 to promote world peace, security, and economic development. |
| Marshall Plan | Government program under which the United States supplied economic aid to European nations to help them rebuild after World War II. |
| McCarthyism | The attacks, often unsubstantiated, by Senator Joe McCarthy and others on people suspected of being Communists in the early 1950s. |
| Satellite Nation | A country that is dominated politically and economically by another nation. |
| Mutually Assured Destruction | A doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender. |
| Containment | Containment: The American policy of the 1940s and 1950s that called for blocking the spread of Soviet influence around the world. |
| Flexible Response | A conventional notion of limited warfare to contain the spread of communism through conventional military forces—troops, ships, artillery—rather than through the use of nuclear weapons. |
| Iron Curtain | A phrase coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe an imaginary line that separated Communist countries in the Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe from countries in Western Europe. |
| Détente | Policy adopted by President Nixon that called for a willingness to negotiate and ease tensions between the United States and communist countries. |
| Cuban Missile Crisis | The 1962 confrontation between US and the Soviet Union over Soviet missiles in Cuba. |
| Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) | Treaty signed in 1972 between the United States and the Soviet Union that limited the nations' number of nuclear weapons. |
| Glasnost | The Russian word for "openness," this was a policy that allowed for the open discussion of social problems within the Soviet Union in the 1980s. |
| Perestroika | Economic and government reform in the Soviet Union during the 1980s which reduced government control of the economy and created steps towards establishing a democratic government. |
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