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BBQ 22 COLD WAR

BBQ 22 COLD WAR

BBQ 22 COLD WAR

BBQ 22 COLD WAR

BBQ 22 COLD WAR

BBQ 22 COLD WAR

Cuban Missile Crisis - 1962

The Cuban Missile Crisis is an example of a diplomatic success during the Cold War. In October of 1962, an intense stand-off occurred between the Soviet Union and the United States over nuclear missiles the USSR had secretly placed in Cuba. These missiles were just 90 miles of the coast of Florida. Furthermore, these missiles in Cuba had the ability to hit every major US city except Seattle. Over the course of 12 tense days in October, both the US and USSR took the world to the brink and then, at the last moment, sensibly away from all out nuclear war by diplomatically resolving their differences and in doing so conducting perhaps the most brilliant diplomacy in human history.

The Cuban Missile Crisis began when the US discovered Soviet Missiles in Cuba by using the high altitude spy plane known as the U-2. Next, the US revealed the missiles in Cuba to the world by displaying the U-2 photos at the UN Security Council. At this point, the situation really heated up. Both the US and USSR refused to back down and further threatened each other. This diplomatic and military strategy is called brinkmanship. It is the strategy of threatening the enemy in hope of them backing down from a tense situation. Yet, brinkmanship was not working, but rather leading up to a nuclear holocaust. The US was threatening to attack Cuba and remove the new communist leader, Fidel Castro, from power. Not only did the USSR place missiles in Cuba to assist their communist comrade Castro, but, also in hopes of getting the US and NATO missiles removed from Turkey that were pointed at the Soviet Union. President Kennedy claimed US could not take missiles from Turkey because they belonged not only to the US, but to it’s European alliance, NATO. Since the US refused to removed the missiles in Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused to remove Soviet Missiles from Cuba, and continue to send ships to Cuba. Kennedy threatened to stop or sink any ship headed to Cuba since by now, the US Navy had already established a blockade around Cuba. Soviet nuclear submarines were in the area and brinkmanship hit its peak when a U-2 plane got shot down over Cuba. All out war was surely soon to follow. It was a Saturday night and Kennedy sent all his advisors home, told them to go home to their families and return on the morning to make the big decision to bomb or invade Cuba.

Yet, before the morning arrived, Kennedy tried one last diplomatic move. He sent his brother, then US Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy to the Soviet embassy in Washington D.C to try to strike a diplomatic solution with the USSR Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Understanding the limited time and intensity of this situation, these two men struck a deal that would later be approved by the leaders of their respected nation. The USSR would agree to remove its missiles from Cuba and in return the US would remove its NATO missiles from Turkey. However, the US would remove the missiles in Turkey only if the Soviet Union did NOT let this be publically known. In other words, the US didn’t want to let down its NATO allies in Europe. Furthering the diplomatic agreement, for Soviet silence about the removal of NATO missiles from Turkey, the US promised to leave Fidel Castro in power and NOT attack Cuba. It was a bold diplomatic agreement at a moment of highly probable nuclear war as the alternative.

​

While today leaders still take their nations shamelessly to war and will claim that there are no other options but war, the diplomatic success of the Cuban Missile Crisis was and will always be an example to all of humanity, both today and tomorrow, that war is NOT the only option and conflict can be resolved through diplomacy. Or to put it plainly, talking can work. Hopefully, humanity will forever recall the Cuban Missile Crisis and demand their future leaders channel such heroic diplomacy to handle world conflicts of tomorrow. Some might say the Cold War is not worth studying because nothing happened. They will say the Cold War is filled with heated moments and standoffs by which nothing ever occurs. No great battles ensue. There are no great tales for history teachers to propagate. No legendary generals to speak of and their brilliant moves on the battle field. Nor is their the tragic talk of millions of unknown soldiers lost in big battles with important dates. And for all this, some say skip the Cold War or episodes like the Cuban Missile Crisis. To do so would be a massively large lost opportunity. An opportunity to show humanity that humans can do the right thing. Humans can, after putting themselves in a terrible situation, get out of it and avoid tragedy. This is a most important lesson to remembered by all of humanity today and into the future.

DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS

Map

Chart

BBQ 22 COLD WAR

1) Cuban Missile Crisis

1) Cuban Missile Crisis?

1)

1)

1)

1)

COLD WAR LEADERS

Brezhnev

1964-1982

Stalin

1927-1953

Khrushchev

1956-1964

Gorbachev

1985-1991

- Last

Communist leader

- End of Cold War

- Glasnost

(Openness)

- Perestroika

(Economic Change)

- USSR breaks up

​

Big Eye Brows

More Hard-line Commi

Shoe at UN

​

​

​

Man of Steel

30 yr dictatorship, Gulag

USA Ally = WWII

Start of Cold War

Truman

1945-1953

Start of Cold War

Eisenhower

1953-1961

Kennedy

1961-1963

1945 1991

Farewell Speech

Military Industrial

Complex 1961

Reagan

1981-1989

Actor

​

​

Bush

1989-1993

Listen LBJ phone

chats on c-span.org

Peanut Farmer

Served on Nuclear

Submarine

Carter

1977-1981

Only Catholic

Youngest

Assassinated 63

Ford

1974-1977

Nixon

1969-1974

LBJ

1963-1969

Only to resign 74

Watergate Affair

Only not

elected

Brinkmanship

Berlin Wall 61

Cuban Missile Crisis

1962

Vietnam advisors

​

Vietnam 54 – 61

CIA rigs Iran

Mossedeq out

Shah in 53

“Red Scare”

Sputnik 57

“Open Skies”

U-2 Incident 60

US Civil Rights

Gulf of Tonkin 64

Tet Offensive 68

Mai Lai Massacre 69

​

Iron Curtain 46

Containment 46

Marshall Plan 47

Berlin Airlift 47

CIA 49

NATO 49

Korean War 50-53

CIA Director

1976

Iron Curtain 46

Containment 46

Marshall Plan 47

Berlin Blockade 47

Molotov Plan

Warsaw Pact 55

De-Stalinization 54?

Hungarian Revolt 56

Sputnik 57

Open Skies 60

U-2 Incident 60

Cuban Missile Crisis 62

Berlin Wall 61-89

Crushed Dissidents

Czechoslovakia 68

Détente 70s

SALT 70s

Stagnation (Ignored Economy crumbling) 70s

“Stability” 60-70s

Cold War Thaws 70s

Afghanistan Invasion 79

Détente

Vietnamization

Mai Lai Massacre 69

Cambodia Bombing

China Visit 72

Chile Sept 11, 1973

Watergate 74

- Pardoned

Nixon

- East Timor

starts

- Vietnam

ends 75

- Detente

- SALT

​

- Detente

• SALT
• Iran Hostage
• Afghanistan
• support

​

​

- Debt Spending

to topple Soviets

• No Détente
• Star Wars (SDI)
• Iran Contra Scandal
• “Tear down wall”
• INF Treaty to

reduce nukes

Berlin War 89

USSR Ends 91

Cold War End

​

Yeltsin

1991- 1999

- Defied

August Coup

- Stop Commi

comeback

- 1^st Democratic

President of Russia

- Capitalist Disaster

- Oligarchs Rule

-“Shock Therapy”

- Corruption

- Instability

​

Cuban Missile Crisis - 1962

The Cuban Missile Crisis is an example of a diplomatic success during the Cold War. In October of 1962, an intense stand-off occurred between the Soviet Union and the United States over nuclear missiles the USSR had secretly placed in Cuba. These missiles were just 90 miles of the coast of Florida. Furthermore, these missiles in Cuba had the ability to hit every major US city except Seattle. Over the course of 12 tense days in October, both the US and USSR took the world to the brink and then, at the last moment, sensibly away from all out nuclear war by diplomatically resolving their differences and in doing so conducting perhaps the most brilliant diplomacy in human history.

The Cuban Missile Crisis began when the US discovered Soviet Missiles in Cuba by using the high altitude spy plane known as the U-2. Next, the US revealed the missiles in Cuba to the world by displaying the U-2 photos at the UN Security Council. At this point, the situation really heated up. Both the US and USSR refused to back down and further threatened each other. This diplomatic and military strategy is called brinkmanship. It is the strategy of threatening the enemy in hope of them backing down from a tense situation. Yet, brinkmanship was not working, but rather leading up to a nuclear holocaust. The US was threatening to attack Cuba and remove the new communist leader, Fidel Castro, from power. Not only did the USSR place missiles in Cuba to assist their communist comrade Castro, but, also in hopes of getting the US and NATO missiles removed from Turkey that were pointed at the Soviet Union. President Kennedy claimed US could not take missiles from Turkey because they belonged not only to the US, but to it’s European alliance, NATO. Since the US refused to removed the missiles in Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused to remove Soviet Missiles from Cuba, and continue to send ships to Cuba. Kennedy threatened to stop or sink any ship headed to Cuba since by now, the US Navy had already established a blockade around Cuba. Soviet nuclear submarines were in the area and brinkmanship hit its peak when a U-2 plane got shot down over Cuba. All out war was surely soon to follow. It was a Saturday night and Kennedy sent all his advisors home, told them to go home to their families and return on the morning to make the big decision to bomb or invade Cuba.

Yet, before the morning arrived, Kennedy tried one last diplomatic move. He sent his brother, then US Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy to the Soviet embassy in Washington D.C to try to strike a diplomatic solution with the USSR Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Understanding the limited time and intensity of this situation, these two men struck a deal that would later be approved by the leaders of their respected nation. The USSR would agree to remove its missiles from Cuba and in return the US would remove its NATO missiles from Turkey. However, the US would remove the missiles in Turkey only if the Soviet Union did NOT let this be publically known. In other words, the US didn’t want to let down its NATO allies in Europe. Furthering the diplomatic agreement, for Soviet silence about the removal of NATO missiles from Turkey, the US promised to leave Fidel Castro in power and NOT attack Cuba. It was a bold diplomatic agreement at a moment of highly probable nuclear war as the alternative.

​

While today leaders still take their nations shamelessly to war and will claim that there are no other options but war, the diplomatic success of the Cuban Missile Crisis was and will always be an example to all of humanity, both today and tomorrow, that war is NOT the only option and conflict can be resolved through diplomacy. Or to put it plainly, talking can work. Hopefully, humanity will forever recall the Cuban Missile Crisis and demand their future leaders channel such heroic diplomacy to handle world conflicts of tomorrow. Some might say the Cold War is not worth studying because nothing happened. They will say the Cold War is filled with heated moments and standoffs by which nothing ever occurs. No great battles ensue. There are no great tales for history teachers to propagate. No legendary generals to speak of and their brilliant moves on the battle field. Nor is their the tragic talk of millions of unknown soldiers lost in big battles with important dates. And for all this, some say skip the Cold War or episodes like the Cuban Missile Crisis. To do so would be a massively large lost opportunity. An opportunity to show humanity that humans can do the right thing. Humans can, after putting themselves in a terrible situation, get out of it and avoid tragedy. This is a most important lesson to remembered by all of humanity today and into the future.

DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS

Map

Chart

ABLE ARCHER�September 26th, 1983: The day the world almost died

By TONY RENNELL

Last updated at 12:43 29 December 2007

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow.

It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute.

Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky.

He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement - anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching a nuclear attack.

​

This was the height of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. Both sides packed a formidable punch - hundreds of rockets and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of reducing the other to rubble.

It was a game of nerves, of bluff and counterbluff. Who would fire first? Would the other have the chance to retaliate?

The flying time of an inter-continental ballistic missile, from the U.S. to the USSR, and vice-versa, was around 12 minutes. If the Cold War were ever to go 'hot', seconds could make the difference between life and death.

​

Everything would hinge on snap decisions. For now, though, as far as Petrov was concerned, more hinged on just getting through another boring night in which nothing ever happened.

Except then, suddenly, it did. A warning light flashed up, screaming red letters on a white background - 'LAUNCH. LAUNCH'. Deafening sirens wailed. The computer was telling him that the U.S. had just gone to war.

The blood drained from his face. He broke out in a cold sweat. But he kept his nerve. The computer had detected missiles being fired but the hazy screens were showing nothing untoward at all, no tell-tale flash of an missile roaring out of its silo into the sky. Could this be a computer glitch rather than Armageddon?

Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait.

The warning light flashed again - a second missile was, apparently, in the air. And then a third. Now the computer had stepped up the warning: 'Missile attack imminent!'

But this did not make sense. The computer had supposedly detected three, no, now it was four, and then five rockets, but the numbers were still peculiarly small. It was a basic tenet of Cold War strategy that, if one side ever did make a preemptive strike, it would do so with a mass launch, an overwhelming force, not this dribble.

Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake.

​

What if it wasn't? What if the holocaust the world had feared ever since the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, was actually happening before his very eyes - and he was doing nothing about it?

He would soon know. For the next ten minutes, Petrov sweated, counting down the missile time to Moscow. But there was no bright flash, no explosion 150 times greater than Hiroshima. Instead, the sirens stopped blaring and the warning lights went off.

The alert on September 26th, 1983 had been a false one. Later, it was discovered that what the satellite's sensors had picked up and interpreted as missiles in flight was nothing more than high-altitude clouds.

Petrov's cool head had saved the world.

He got little thanks. He was relieved of his duties, sidelined, then quietly pensioned off. His experience that night was an extreme embarrassment to the Soviet Union.

Petrov may have prevented allout nuclear war but at the cost of exposing the inadequacies of Moscow's much vaunted earlywarning shield.

Instead of feeling relieved, his masters in the Kremlin were more afraid than ever. They sank into a state of paranoia, fearful that in Washington, Ronald Reagan was planning a first-strike that would wipe them off the face of the earth.

​

The year was 1983 and - as a history documentary in a primetime slot on Channel 4 next weekend vividly shows - the next six weeks would be the most dangerous the world has ever experienced.

That the U. S. and the Soviet Union had been on the brink of world war in 1962, when John Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev went head-to-head over missiles in Cuba, is well known. Those events were played out in public. The 1983 crisis went on behind closed doors, in a world of spies and secrets.

​

A quarter of a century later, the gnarled old veterans of the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret service, and their smoother counterparts from the CIA, the U.S. equivalent, have come out from the shadows to reveal the full story of what happened. And a chilling one it is. From their different perspectives, they knew the seriousness of the situation.

'We were ready for the Third World War,' said Captain Viktor Tkachenko, who commanded a Soviet missile base at the time. 'If the U.S. started it.'

Robert Gates - then the CIA's deputy director of intelligence, later its head and now defence secretary in George Bush's government - recalled: 'We may have been on the brink of war and not known it.'

That year, 1983, the rest of the world was getting on with its business, unaware of the disaster it could be facing.

​

Margaret Thatcher won a second term as Prime Minister but her heir-apparent, Cecil Parkinson, had to resign after admitting fathering his secretary's love child. Two young firebrand socialists, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were elected MPs for the first time.

Police were counting the dead bodies in serial killer Dennis Nilsen's North London flat, the Brinks-Mat bandits got away with £25million in gold bullion and 'Hitler's diary' was unearthed before being exposed as a forgery.

​

England's footballers failed to qualify for the European finals.

The song everyone was humming was Sting's Every Breath You Take - 'Every breath you take, every move you make, I'll be watching you.' It was unwittingly appropriate as that was precisely what, on the international stage, the Russians and Americans were doing.

On both sides there were new, more powerful and more efficient machines to deliver destruction. The Soviets had rolled out their SS-20s, missiles on mobile launch pads, easy to hide and almost impossible to detect.

Meanwhile, the Americans were moving Pershing II ballistic missiles into Western Europe, as a direct counter to a possible invasion by the armies of the Warsaw Pact (as the Soviet Union and its satellites behind the Iron Curtain were known).

They were also deploying ground-hugging cruise missiles, designed to get under radar defences without being detected.

Then Reagan, successor at the White House to Jimmy Carter, upped the ante in a provocative speech in which he denounced the Soviet Union as 'the Evil Empire'.

His belligerence rattled the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, a hardline communist and former head of the KGB whose naturally suspicious nature was made worse by serious illness. For much of the ensuing crisis he was in a hospital bed hooked to a dialysis machine.

His belief that Reagan was up to something was reinforced when the President announced the start of his 'Star Wars' project - a system costing trillions of dollars to defend the U.S. from enemy ICBMs ( Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) by shooting them down in space before they re-entered earth's atmosphere.

He saw this as an entirely defensive measure, but to the Russians it was aggressive in intent. They saw it as a threat to destroy their weapons one by one and leave the USSR defenceless.

Even more convinced of Washington's evil intentions, Andropov stepped up Operation RYAN, during which KGB agents around the world were instructed to send back any and every piece of information they could find that might add to the 'evidence' that the U.S. was planning a nuclear strike.

In the Soviet Union's London embassy, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer masquerading as a diplomat, was ordered to watch out for signs of the British secretly stockpiling food, petrol and blood plasma.

In the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters, every small detail was chalked up on a board, filling it with words until the mountain of 'evidence' appeared overwhelming. But the problem was, as a U.S. observer noted, that the KGB, while strong on gathering information, was hopeless in analysing it.

In reality, what it was compiling was the dodgiest of all dossiers, in which the 'circle of intelligence' remained a dangerously closed one. Not for the last time in matters of war, the foolhardiness of fitting facts to a preconceived agenda were exposed.

East-West tension increased when an unauthorised aircraft flew into Soviet air space in the Bering Sea, ignoring all radio communications. Su-14 intercept fighters were scrambled to shoot it down in the belief that it was a U.S. spy plane.

It turned out to be a civilian flight of Korean Airlines, KA-007, that had strayed off course en route from Alaska to Seoul.

All 269 passengers and crew died. Reagan denounced the 'evil Empire' again, and Moscow detected once again the drumbeats of war.

AND THEN came the event that nearly triggered catastrophe. On November 2, 1983, Nato - the U.S.-led alliance of western forces - began a routine ten-day exercise codenamed Operation Able Archer to test its military communications in the event of war.

The 'narrative' of the exercise was a Soviet invasion with conventional weapons, which the West would be unable to stop.

Its climax would be a simulated release of nuclear missiles. Command posts and nuclear bases were on full alert, but, as the Soviets were repeatedly told, no actual weapons were involved.

The words 'EXERCISE ONLY' screamed out from every message. But the Soviet leadership, with its eye on Reagan's supposed recklessness, chose not to believe them. Andropov, in his sick bed, and his Kremlin advisers were gripped not just by current paranoias but by past ones.

They were the World War II generation, forever conscious of how Hitler had fooled Stalin and launched his savage Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1940 under the pretext of an exercise.

In the war that followed, 25million Soviet citizens died and the Motherland came close to caving in. To allow history to repeat itself would be unforgivable.

Now, the Kremlin watched and listened in horror as the West went though this drill. Top priority 'flash telegrams' went to Gordievsky and others in KGB stations around the world demanding 'evidence' that this exercise was a disguise for a real nuclear first-strike.

In Washington, the effect that Able Archer was having on the Soviet leadership was completely missed. In fact, rather than winding up for a war, Reagan was doing the opposite.

At Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, he had recently had a private screening of a made-fortelevision film called The Day After, which was a fictional reconstruction of the aftermath of nuclear war.

The former Hollywood cowboy was more affected by this than by any military briefings he might have had. The film predicted 150 million dead. In his diary he wrote: 'It left me greatly depressed. We have to do all we can to see there is never a nuclear war.'

The old war horse was changing course and soon he would begin to make overtures to Moscow that would lead to his first visit there, a building up of relationships and an easing of East-West tensions.

He very nearly did not get the chance. As Able Archer wound up to its climax, so too did the Kremlin's paranoia. In the Nato exercise, Western forces were on the brink of firing a theoretical salvo of 350 nuclear missiles.

In the Soviet Union, the military went on to their equivalent of the U.S. defence forces' DefCon 1, the final warning of an imminent attack and the last stage before pressing the button for an all to real massive retaliation.

On airfields, Soviet nuclear bomber pilots sat in their cockpits, engines turning, waiting for orders to fly. Three hundred ICBMs were prepared for firing and 75 mobile SS-20s hurriedly moved to hidden locations.

Surface ships of the Soviet navy dashed for cover, anchoring beneath cliffs in the Baltic, while its submarines with their arsenals of nuclear missiles slipped beneath the Arctic ice and cleared decks for action.

WHAT saved the situation were two spies, one on each side. Gordievsky, the KGB man in London, was really a double agent working for British Intelligence. He warned MI5 and the CIA that Able Archer had put Soviet leaders in a dangerous frame of mind.

It was the first inkling the West had had that the exercise was being viewed with such panic, and the Americans responded instantly by down-grading it. Reagan then made a very visible journey out of the country as a signal to the Soviets that he was otherwise engaged.

Meanwhile, an East German spy, Topaz - real name Rainer Rupp - had infiltrated the Nato hierarchy at a high level and was privy to many of its secrets, was asked by Moscow urgently to confirm that the West was about to go to war.

Deeply embedded Topaz would know for sure, and all he had to do was dial a certain number on his telephone to confirm his master's fears. His finger stayed off the buttons. His message back was that Nato was planning no such thing.

Moscow took a step back from the brink its own fevered imagination had created. At the same time, Able Archer reached its end, the simulation over, the personnel involved stood down. The date was November 11 - Armistice Day.

Only later did the West grasp how close the world had come to apocalypse. Reagan and his advisers were shocked, and more impetus was put behind finding ways to end the arms race with the Soviet Union.

The near-miss of 1983 has long been known by historians of the Cold War. But this documentary will bring it to a wider audience.

Today, the West's relations with post-communist Russia and its aggressive leader, Vladimir Putin, are strained. Bombers and spy planes nudge rival air space, testing nerves, just as theydid in the early 1980s. The situation is ripe for misunderstandings.

Those events, 24 years ago, are also a reminder that, for all the concerns about global warning, mankind's greatest danger may still be its vast nuclear arsenals.

​

It has largely gone unnoticed that this year, with increasing fears of proliferation, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock up to five minutes to midnight, closer to nuclear catastrophe than at almost any time since the phoney war of 1983.

1983: The Brink Of Apocalypse is on Channel 4 on Saturday January 5, at

7.30pm.

��Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-505009/September-26th-1983-The-day-world-died.html#ixzz3cSXQrk84 �

Iron Curtain Speech 1946

Write Up

Iron Curtain Speech? 1946

Iron Curtain Speech? 1946

Truman Doctrine 1949

Write Up

Truman Doctrine 1949

Truman Doctrine 1949

Molotov Plan 1947

Write Up

Molotov Plan 1947

N.A.T.O

Write Up

N.A.T.O

Warsaw Pact 1955

Write Up

Warsaw Pact 1955

Berlin Blockade 1948

Write Up

Berlin Blockade 1948 (For Russians)

Berlin Blockade 1948 (For Americans)

Berlin Airlift 1948

Write Up

Berlin Airlift 1948 (For Americans)

Berlin Airlift 1948 (For Russians)

Berlin Wall 1961

Write Up

Berlin Wall 1961 (For Russian)

Berlin Wall 1961 (For America)

Soviet Bomb 1949

Write Up

Soviet Bomb 1949 (For Russia)

Marshall Plan 1947

Marshall Plan 1947

Hungarian Revolt 1956

Write Up

Hungarian Revolt 1956

Czech Revolt 1968

Write Up

Czech Revolt 1968

Wall Comes Down

Write Up

Wall Comes Down

Velvet Revolution

Write Up

Velvet Revolution

Romania Revolution

Write Up

Romania Revolution

Yugoslavia Disintegrate

Write Up

Yugoslavia Disintegrate

Soviet Dissolution

Write Up

Soviet Dissolution

Deliver Dead Turkey Ambassador

Write Up

Deliver Dead Turkey Ambassador

Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty

Write Up

Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty

Arms Race

Write Up

Arms Race

Poland Election 1988

Write Up

Poland Election 1988

“Stazi Out” 1989

Write Up

“Stazi Out” 1989

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Write Up

Iron Curtain Speech 1946

Truman Doctrine 1947

Molotov Plan 1947

N.A.T.O.

Warsaw Pact 1955

Berlin Blockade 1948

Berlin Airlift 1948

Berlin Wall 1961-1989

Soviet Bomb 1949

Marshall Plan 1947

The Marshall Plan is an example of a diplomatic success.  During the Cold War, World War II devastated many European countries economically.  On June 5, 1947, the secretary of state, George C. Marshall, went to the graduation at Harvard University and announced his plan to help rebuild Europe.  Once congress approved the proposal, the Marshall plan became official.  Although the plan consisted of certain circumstances, the Marshall Plan proved to be a diplomatic success because part of Europe received aid to recover from the effects of war, the US economy slightly prospered, and reaching out to help other nations created better relationships and avoided possible tension.

The plan was announced in 1947 but congress did not approve the fund until March 1948.  The key factor that caused their decision was the fear of communist expansion.  Therefore, the US congress approved to fund $17 billion in aid.  The Marshall Plan was created to help rebuild all of Europe.  However, the Soviet Union did not want to be included.  The Soviet Union became concerned with the possibility of U.S. domination economically and any Eastern European weapons or satellites.  Because of the uncertainty, the Marshall Plan applied mainly to Western Europe.  The following nations accepted and received the aid: Great Britain, Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, West Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, Austria, Turkey, and Italy.  However, the European nations were not the only ones who gained something positive from the Marshall Plan.  Being a capitalist nation, the U.S. would not simply give away money without a few circumstances.  The nations that gained the aid received U.S. dollars, which had to be spent only on U.S. products.  Therefore, the U.S. economy began to rise.

Despite being established 68 years ago, the Marshall Plan is still in effect to this day as a part of the U.S. foreign policy.  Some say that the plan is the reason for Europe’s fast recovery from the damage of WWII.  If such a case ever rises again, in which other nations need help, people should look to the Marshall Plan.  The plan essentially teaches people that fighting is not the only solution to nationwide issues.  Sometimes, providing a helping hand is the best way to receive positive recognition, create better relationships with others, and just as the U.S. experienced, being diplomatic and willing to “help” others will result in a win-win situation.   

​

Hungarian Revolt 1956

Czech Revolt 1968

Wall Comes Down

Velvet Revolution

Romania Revolution

Yugoslavia Disintegrate

Soviet Dissolution

Deliver Dead Turkey Ambassador

Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty

Arms Race

Poland Election 1988

“Stazi Out” 1989