cold war
... of 1947, the United States put together a huge aid program called the Marshal plan, to rebuild Western European economies. In the summer of 1948, because of the Western governments' plans for West Germany, the Soviets wanted to separate the governments from their sectors in Berlin through a land blockade. The Western governments organized the Berlin airlift, which was a massive airlift of supplies to West Berlin, going around the Soviet blockade. In 1948 Soviet-backed Communists in Czechoslovakia created the formation of a new, Communist-dominated government, which led to Communist control in all of Eastern Europe and the complete creation of the Soviet bloc. In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established, because of the spread of communism in Europe that led to negotiations between Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, that led to the North Atlantic Treaty. In 1955, West Germany was recognized as an independent nation and was allowed to rearm and join NATO. Because of this, a group of Eastern European Communist nations led by the USSR formed the Warsaw Pact, to battle the NATO alliance. In 1961, the Soviet government built the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany. The first armed conflict of the Cold War was the Korean War. American led United Nations forces fought against North Korea and China. The Vietnam War, which began in 1959, was between the Communist North Vietnamese and the Nationalist South Vietnamese. In 1965, the United States sent troops into Vietnam to fight with the South Vietnamese. The Vietnam War lasted until 1975. In 1962 the most serious Cold War dispute between the United States and the USSR took place. The United States government found out that the Soviets were going to deploy nuclear missiles in Communist Cuba. Khrushchev ended up surrendering to the demands of the United States president John F. Kennedy. From the Cuban Missile Crisis both the United States and the USSR learned that they shouldn’t risk nuclear war for political objectives, because it was too dangerous, and was the last time during the Cold War that either side would take that risk again. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there was one last Cold War conflict between the United States and the USSR. The leaders of the two nations, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, held a series of meetings. Then, in 1987, they bot...