The United States During The Cold War

Now that after America and the Soviet Union where both partaking in the space race they both had suspicions about each other. Eisenhower, on the other hand, saw satellites as “pointless unless they provided something useful back on Earth” (DeGroot 5). “ A spy satellite, on the other hand, could provide accurate pictures of Soviet military capabilities, thus enabling the United States to spend its defense budget wisely, without wasting huge sums on challenging phantom forces” (DeGroot 5). America was worried about the Soviets spying on America because of security issues so America wanted to pursue on building themselves a satellite to “provide accurate pictures of Soviet military capabilities” (DeGroot 5). The only problem was that “ Flying over another nation’s territory without permission was, however, illegal under international law. What was not clear was whether the law applied to satellites” (DeGroot 5). America and the Soviets were in a battle to see which world power could be the best. The

The United States after the cold war was (“an era that ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 31, 1991”.) The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the Cold War period. (The collapse of Europe framed that confrontation). After World War II, the Soviet and American armies kept Europe busy. The post cold war had two phases that happen two years apart. The first one was from Dec 31, 1991. The second phrase lasted until September 11, 2001 (9/11) and until now. The initial phase of the post-Cold War world was built on two assumptions. (“The first assumption was that the United States was the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economics was the new focus. The second phase still revolved around the three Great Powers — the United States, China and Europe — but involved a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumed that pre-eminence included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters.”) After the Cold War, the United States was withdrawing from Afghanistan and having a second thought on the relationship between global preminence and global omnipotence. Things that happen in 1991 will never be the same again. The Gulf War was an international conflict that was caused by Iraq’s invasion by Kuwait on Aug 2, 1990. A response from the U.S was that the United States and its

Following the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japan and the closure of World War II, the United States of America and the Soviet Union entered a period of ideological conflict, the Cold War. The United States sought to preserve and protect democracy throughout the world while the Soviet Union established communist satellite states. During the Cold War, the United States government pushed for the expansion of the United States space program in an attempt to demonstrate power and innovation over the Russians, and in doing so, accelerated the process of space exploration and endangered the lives of their astronauts.

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This declaration, made by former President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, is part of the Truman Doctrine, and was the basis for U.S. involvement in Western Europe throughout the Cold War. Although the North Atlantic Treaty, and the resulting North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was established during the Cold War “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” NATO has persisted since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. This essay will seek to examine the U.S. decision to create and participate in NATO. It will begin by providing a history of NATO and the U.S. decision to participate in NATO before considering how this decision is both an instance of continuity and change in U.S. foreign policy since former President George Washington’s Farewell Address. The essay will conclude by considering the legacy of this decision and its impact on U.S. foreign policy. While this essay will consider the period of time leading up to the formation of NATO and will briefly touch on the present day, greatest consideration will be paid to the time period immediately preceding and following the formation of NATO in 1949.

In the fifties and sixties, television programs were full of the idea of going to space. On December 6, 1957 the Vanguard rocket, which America was waiting for to salve the national pride, was fired. It began to rise and then was sinking back down to Cape Canaveral. It was an erupting into a huge fireball, the pathetic crash was filmed on live television. People began to lose hope; the Russians were heading towards the heavens while they were still on the ground (Document

As Chief Diplomat, he approved of the Apollo-Soyuz Test that was conducted in July of 1975. This was the first joint U.S.-Soviet space flight. The flight was symbolic because of the policy of detente the two countries were pursuing and showed efforts of reconcile.

After WWII, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union began to increase. This period of time is referred to as the Cold War which “begins in 1945 with the Yalta conference and ends in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.” The United States and the Soviet Union both greatly distrusted the other and feared the nuclear power that they both had during this time. One incident that illustrates this distrust is commonly referred to as the U-2 incident of May 1, 19960, in which an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet controlled airspace and captured by the Soviets. This single incident is said to have been a “disastrous setback to the reduction of international tension.”

The first Lockheed U2 to took flight in 1955. These were used to fly over countries like the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and Cuba during the cold war. These planes were capable of taking detailed photos of the ground from as high as 70,000 feet. One of these was shot down in the 1960 by the USSR. This was an event of great embarrassment for Eisenhower and his administration. Eisenhower had first claimed it to be a weather plane that might have veered off course, but Khrushchev produced the U2 plane which was mostly intact and had captured the pilot, who had not taken his poison pill as expected by the CIA, historian Vince Houghton explains. This led to great hostility between the two nations. As of today, the US still flies about 50 U2s.

Change upended Europe many times in the latter half of the 20th Century. After World War II, with the rise of the United States and the USSR as the world’s foremost superpowers, Europe split between East and West. NATO allied Western Europe and the United States against the rise of communism. The Warsaw Pact allied Eastern Europe militarily. This effectively split Europe into two competing camps that ensured relative peace for the following decades. In 1989, however, that changed entirely. With the borders and limits between East and West erased, Europe had to embrace a new identity. They had to create a new definition for what it meant to be “European”. The West had previously developed models and institutions that united multiple states, and communism united the East. When the two intermingled politically, economically and socially, there were going to be growing pains. The East had to integrate into Western institutions because of the fall of communism. Easterners tended to move west to find work and a new, higher standard of living. This placed a significant burden on the West as a whole. Spurred by the mass migration of people from the East to the West, the West responded by hindering Eastern states’ ability to integrate fully with “European” institutions.

An American U-2 reconnaissance airplane was shot down over the Soviet Union. American Central Intelligence Agency had provided training for exiles. However, the United States failed to send military planes to protect the Soviet Union from the invasion. The Cuban’s missile crisis easily could have resulted in a nuclear war. American’s felt especially threatened, with those missiles just one hundred fifty kilometers from the Florida coast. A major change in the Cold War would take peace in nineteen eighty-five when Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union. The Cold War years were also the time of the “Space Race” - when the United States and the Soviet Union competed in space exploration (Jerilyn Watson).

The Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the Cold war's most dangerous crisis's. So, in 1962 mid-October an American spy plane spotted launch sites for Soviet nukes. The nukes were located to where they could reach the U.S.

On October 16 1962, I was made aware that the Soviet Union were building nuclear missile sites on the island of Cuba through photographs taken by an American U-2 spy plane.

The development of nuclear weapons helped to end World War II, but in turn created their own war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The development of modified military missiles such as the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM, by Americans and the Soviets, had an impact on the struggle of power of the Cold War. The importance of military involvement in the creation of modified missiles and engines were critical events of the Cold War. Additionally, the steps taken to get to space were a byproduct of this Arms Race and the Cold War. Because the United States and the Soviet Union feared what the other country would or could do with weapons of mass destruction and the thought of the opposing country being able to control

In October 1962, a United States U-2 plane took photographs of Cuba. The photographs showed

The launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957 was a scary prospect for the people in the United States. The question of whether or not the Russians were looking down on the United States frightened many Americans, particularly because of the Cold War. Although the satellite did little in space, only orbiting the Earth for six months before falling out of the sky, it did