The document summarizes major events in the Cold War between 1945-1962, including: 1) The USSR took control of Eastern Europe after WWII and established communist satellite states, while over 15 million people fled westward. 2) The Yalta and Potsdam conferences divided Germany and Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. 3) The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan aimed to contain communist expansion in Europe through aid and economic integration. 4) The USSR developed nuclear weapons and tensions escalated during crises like the Berlin Blockade, Korean War, and Cuban Missile Crisis.

2. 1945: Soviets took Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and
East Germany in WWII.

3. 1945-9: 15 million people fled west while USSR plundered
$14 billion of industrial materials and established
communist satellite states.

4. Feb. 1945: Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met at Yalta Conference in USSR to
discuss post-war plans

5. May 8 1945: V-E Day; Germany divided into four occupation zones; USSR
occupied Eastern Europe and East Germany

6. July 1945: Truman, Churchill/Atlee, and Stalin met in Potsdam Conference in
Germany. Truman objected to pro-Soviet governments installed in Eastern
Europe without free elections

7. Aug. 1945: US used atomic bombs (A-bomb) on Japan; USSR invaded Japanese-
occupied Manchuria; Japan surrendered

8. Sept. 1945: Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam to
be an independent state; Korea divided at the
38th Parallel into an American-backed South
and Soviet-backed North

9. Feb. 1946: American diplomat in Moscow George Kennan
released the “Long Telegram” warning that the USSR
viewed peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West as
impossible

10. Mar. 1946: Churchill declared that an
“Iron Curtain” had descended across Europe

11. March 1947: Truman Doctrine gave US aid to fight communist expansion in
Greece and Turkey pursuing a policy of containment.

12. June 1948: US began Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe; Berlin Airlift
bypassed communist blockade

13. Radio Free Europe broadcasted
to communist Eastern bloc.

14. Apr. 1949: US-led NATO formed

15. Sept. 1949: Soviets detonated first nuclear device

16. Oct. 1949: Mao Zedong captured Beijing and established communist People’s
Republic of China

17. Feb. 1950: Red Scare in US led by Senator Joseph McCarthy

18. June 1950: Korean War began; the
United Nations defended South Korea
from a communist North Korean invasion
led by Kim Il Sung backed by China and
USSR.
The war stalemated at the 38th Parallel.

20. Apr. 1951: France, West
Germany, Italy, Belgium,
Netherlands, and Luxembourg
formed European Coal and
Steel Community (ECSC) to
integrate heavy industry. ECSC
became the European
Economic Community (EEC, or
Common Market) in 1957, then
the European Union (EU) of 12
states in 1992, later expanded
to 28 members by 2013.

22. Nov. 1952: US tested first hydrogen bomb (H-bomb)

23. March 1953: Stalin died

24. July 1953: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for selling atomic secrets to the
Soviet Union; Korean War ended in armistice with pre-war 38th Parallel border
restored with demilitarized zone (DMZ)

25. Aug. 1953: USSR tested first H-bomb

27. MAD: Mutually Assured
Destruction
New US Policy: Sec State
John Foster Dulles,
brinkmanship

28. May 1954: French defeated by Viet Minh
at Dien Bien Phu

29. May 1955: USSR-led Warsaw Pact
formed

30. Oct. 1956: Hungary called for free elections and appealed to US for help against
USSR; Soviets crushed Hungarian Uprising while America looked on

31. Nov. 1956: Egyptian President Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt was denounced by the US, USSR,
and UN. Massive decline of British global prestige and power.

32. Jan. 1957: Eisenhower Doctrine committed US aid to stop communist
expansion in Middle East

33. Oct. 1957: USSR launched Sputnik I

34. Jan. 1958: China began the disastrous
Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) which led
to 18-55 million dead.

35. Oct. 1958: US feared a “missile gap”; NASA formed

36. Jan. 1959: Fidel Castro led the communist
Cuban Revolution

37. July 1959: US VP Richard Nixon visited USSR and engaged Soviet premier
Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate

38. May 1960: American U-2 spy plane shot down over USSR

39. Apr. 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became first man to orbit Earth;
US CIA-backed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba failed

40. May 1961: John F. Kennedy committed US to moonshot – to put a man on the
Moon by the end of the decade

41. Aug. 1961: Berlin Wall erected to stop flood of 3.5 million refugees defecting
from the communist East to the free West

42. Sept. 1961: India, Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia began the
Non-Aligned Movement to preserve Cold War neutrality in the Third World

43. Feb. 1962: John Glenn became first American astronaut to orbit Earth

44. Oct. 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis; US pursued brinksmanship diplomacy and
quarantined Cuba with a naval blockade in response to placement of Soviet
nuclear missiles in Cuba. World War III was narrowly averted.