VCE History Revolutions 2024 Unit 2 AOS 1: 'The Cold War' Exam Revision Dates

When and where was the Yalta Conference?

4th until the 11th of February 1945, in the Crimea.

Who was at the Yalta conference?

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.

When was the Marshall Plan created?

April 1948.

What was the Marshall Plan?

The Economic Recovery Act of 1948, signed by President Truman. The Soviets withdrew from the plan, and 17 European countries participated. A total of $13.6 billion was spent on the Marshall Plan.

When was the Truman Doctrine created?

April 1948.

What was the Truman Doctrine?

A Doctrine by President Truman, providing economic and military aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey to prevent them from falling under Soviet influence.

How much money did the US congress provide to Greece and Turkey?

$400 million.

What did President Truman say in his Truman Doctrine speech?

That the goal was to ‘help free people to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regims.’

What was the Iron Curtain quote?

‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.’

What did Stalin say about Churchill’s speech?

‘Mr Churchill begins to set war loose, […'] maintaining that only nations speaking the English language are fully valuable nations.’

When was the Berlin Airlift?

June 1948 until May 1949.

When was the Federal German Republic created, and when was the German Democratic Republic created?

May 1949, October 1949.

When was NATO created, and when was the Warsaw Pact created?

April 1949, May 1955.

What was NATO’s purpose?

‘To guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means.’

What did the members of the Warsaw Pact believe?

The 8 Warsaw Pact members believed that the militarisation of Western Germany ‘constitutes a threat to the national security of the peaceable states'.

What was the goal of the Warsaw Pact?

‘In the event of armed attack in Europe on one or more of the Parties to the Treaty, by any state or group of states, each of the Parties to the Treaty, […] shall immediately […] come to the assistance of the state or states attacked.’

What started and ended the Arms Race?

It began when the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb in 1949. It ended with the signing of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty.

What are the Arms Race statistics?

There were over 60,000 nuclear weapons in existence in the late 1980s. The United States possessed 23,000 of these and the Soviet Union 39,000. Mutually Assured Destruction was reached by the 1960s.

What was decided at the Yalta confrence?

How Germany would be divided. The Declaration of Liberated Europe was created, agreeing that the freed countries should be allowed free and fair elections. The UN’s formation began and the security council members were chosen.

What dates was the Korean War?

June 1950 until July 1953.

What was the Korean War?

Conflict between the Soviet backed North and the UN backed South.

What dates did the Berlin Wall stand?

August 1961 until November 1989.

Why was the Berlin Wall built?

Because from 1949 to 1961, as many as 2.6 million East Germans escaped to the West.

When was the Bay of Pigs Invasion?

The 17th to the 20th of April 1961.

When did the US halt trade with Cuba?

1960.

What was President Eisenhower’s Cuban Missile Crisis quote?

He would ‘not permit the establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western Hemisphere.’

When did Castro request Soviet support?

September 1961.

How many Americans could be killed by Cuba’s nuclear weapons in 6 minutes?

80 million.

When did Kruschev send letters to Kennedy and what did they say.

The 26th and 27th of October 1962. The first one promised to remove the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba. The second one stated that the Cuban missiles would only be withdrawn if the US withdrew theirs from Turkey.

What was the consequence of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1963.

What dates were the Vietnam War?

November 1955 until April 1975.

What caused the Vietnam War?

The 1954 Geneva Accords, which split Vietnam in two.

What did Reagan do?

Created the Stategic Defence Initiative (SDI), or ‘Star Wars’, aiming to create a space-based missile defence system.

What was the domestic pressure on the USA to withdraw from Vietnam?

58,000 US soldiers had died, as well as 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, and 2 million civilians. Over 20,000 Americans had marched in Washington. A popular chant was ‘Hey, Hey', LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’

Which years were detente?

1967 until 1979.

What occurred during Detente?

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), and the Anit-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Detente ended with the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

What was the Nixon Detente quote?

‘We are entering an era of negotiation’.

When was Reagan elected?

January 1981.

When was Gorbachev elected?

1985.

What did Gorbachev and Reagan sign?

The Intermediate range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987 in Washington.

What did Reagan describe the Soviet Union as?

‘The focus of evil in the modern world.’

When was Perestroika introduced?

1987.

Afghanistan withdrawal statistics.

15,000 Soviet soldiers had died, along with 70,000 Afghan soldiers and 3 million civilians.

What was the Perestroika quote?

‘We can’t go on living like this’.

What was the Glasnost quote?

‘We wanted to reform by launching a democratic process.’

When did the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan begin and end?

It began in December 1979, and ended in February 1989.

When did the Space Race begin?

1955.

What did the Soviet Union establish in 1949 to coordinate the economies of communist countries?

COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance)

Which doctrine justified the Soviet Union's right to intervene in other socialist countries to maintain communist rule?

The Brezhnev Doctrine.