Cold war

Cold War Study Guide

You will take a Quest Thursday over the following information. 

Summarize how atomic weapons have changed the nature of war, altered the balance of power, and started the nuclear age.

•       United Nations – an international organization founded in 1945 to further the causes of peace, prosperity, and human rights because of these atomic weapons most nations wanted to be at peace .

•       Superpowers - a nation that is so powerful that it influences or controls less powerful states. The atomic weapons have changed the nature of war because these weapons made the U.S and Soviet Union the most powerful nations.

•       Nuclear arms race – this was countries competing with each other to see who had the best atomic bomb .

Analyze the policy of containment the United States followed during the Cold War in response to the spread of communism.

•       Fear of Communism – the fear of communism came from the idea of people being suspicious and people accusing each other of being a communism. This led to containment because the US didn’t want communism spread to America

•       The Policy of Containment- after World War II, the U.S. foreign policy practice of attempting to restrict the expansion of Soviet influence around the world

•       Iron Curtain – the ideological barrier that existed between Eastern and Western Europe from 1945 to 1990. He used it because its symbolism is a strong divide. Tis metaphor suggests that there was a divide between east and west.

•       Truman Doctrine - It was important for shaping the future of the U.S because if we support them, they don’t become communist.

•       Marshall Plan - Humanitarian offered funding to all European nations. The U.S leveraged its strong post war to aid Europe. Strategic: required purchase of U.S goods boosting American economy.  Reinforced containment policy. Why they were given aid: To show them that they were nice people , to show other nations that our country is better.

Explain how the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism reflected Cold War fears in American society.

•       Red Scare - McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s.

•       FELP - to calm public anxiety, President Truman established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program in 1947. It required government employees to take loyalty oaths

•       HUAC - formed in 1938, a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives that investigated subversive organizations in the United States until 1975

•       McCarthyism - the practice of publicly accusing people of subversive activities without evidence to back up the charges; named for Senator Joseph McCarthy, who began such a practice in the early 1950s as part of the search for communists in the United States during the early Cold War

Analyze how the Cold War and conflicts in Korea influenced domestic and international politics between the end of World War II and 1991.

•       NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organization: as part of the Cold War, a military alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Italy, Britain, Denmark, Norway, and Portugal—and expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955—to establish collective security against the Soviet Union

•       Warsaw Pact - as part of the Cold War and in response to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an agreement signed in 1955 by the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania to establish a military alliance for mutual defense

•       Fall of China - The "fall of China" in 1949 refers to the communist takeover of mainland China

•       Korean War - a war fought on the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953 after troops from communist North Korea, armed with Soviet weapons, invaded democratic South Korea, prompting the United States and the United Nations to send forces to support South Korea and fight to unify the Korean Peninsula into one democratic nation, which in turn prompted China to join the war on North Korea's side; at war's end, the peninsula remained divided into two nations