Why cold war started

The U. European affairs were conducted under an American "nuclear umbrella" that acted as a deterrent against any Soviet temptation to attack. Soviet Communism soon dominated Eastern Europe. The Cold War had begun.

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I n the summer of , hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies. By the time it was all over, more than three million acres had burned and at least 78 firefighters were dead. Kennedy made the bold public claim that the U. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well. In Hollywood , HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another.

More than people lost their jobs. Soon, other anticommunist politicians, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy , expanded this probe to include anyone who worked in the federal government.

Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad. Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option.

Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the Korean War dragged to a stalemate and ended in Konev of the Soviet Union. Other international disputes followed. In the early s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north.

However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a year conflict. Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon began to implement a new approach to international relations. To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in , began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

In , he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty SALT I , which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war. Although the two Great Powers never fought directly, they pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war on several occasions. Nuclear deterrence was the only effective means of preventing a military confrontation. The Cold War finally came to an end in with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Strengthened through the implementation of the Marshall Plan across Western Europe, member nations of NATO agreed to come to the defense of any member state that suffered an attack from any other power. The Cold War featured moments of increased tension, but stopped short of all-out warfare between the superpowers.

Conflicts connected to the Cold War, such as wars in Korea and Vietnam, proved devastating to military forces on both sides. These conflicts also disrupted the balance of power in several regions across the globe, the ramifications of which continues to influence military and national security policies to this day. The global standoff for dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union created in the aftermath of World War II affected all aspects of life in the postwar world.

The domination of military strength, technological advances, and the very structure of present day global politics exist as by-products of these Cold War conflicts.

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