Timeline

 

The Cold War was one of the longest wars America had seen lasting more than four decades. The Cold War began on February 4, 1945 with the Yalta Conference. Shortly after the conference on April 12, 1945 Franklin Roosevelt died from a stroke, which passed the leadership of the nation on to Harry Truman. The United States moved quickly in the war, Truman gave permission for the first atomic bomb, August 6, 1945, to be used in war. A couple of days later he gave permission for the second atomic bomb to be used. This was the last time the United States used the atomic bomb. After years of fighting twelve countries got together to form NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) on April 4, 1949. The United States helps form NATO to secure its supremacy in the world affairs. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union endeavored to demonstrate their power. The space race served as an opportunity for the two nations to showcase their scientific and technological capabilities. The first space flights planned were in the form of unmanned satellite launches. The Soviet Union threw down the gauntlet when on October 4, 1957, Sputnik I was launched into space as the first orbiting satellite. A month later, on November 3, the Soviet Union set another record when it

launched Sputnik II with the first living creature in space: a dog named Laika. On April 12, 1963, the United States took the upper hand, by having the first human being in space. Yuri Alekseyvich Gagarin became the first human in space when he completed one orbit in a 108-minute space flight aboard Vostok I.  During that same year President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The United States made another great accomplishment with the July 1969 Apollo Moon landing, which we were the first to do. As four decades of fighting takes place, a great defeat begins to take place as communist rule falls in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania and the Soviet empire ends in 1989. When Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Russia the Soviet Union began to fall. It met its final resting place in August of 1991.

 

 

Works Cited

Jones, Jacqueline., et al. Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United

States. New York: Pearson Education, 2008.

 

US History Timeline: Cold War. University of Washington: Department of History. 14 April

2009 <http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF8&p=timeline+of+cold+ war&fr=slv8-

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