unit 8 Flashcards
Big Three
Stalin Churchill and Roosevelt (leaders of the Allied Powers of World War II)
Tehran Conference
Meeting among leaders of the United States Britain and the Soviet Union in 1943; agreed to the opening of a new front in France
Yalta Conference
Meeting of Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin; Russia agreed to declare war on Japan after the surrender of Germany and in return FDR and Churchill promised the USSR concession in Manchuria and the territories that it had lost in the Russo-Japanese War
Potsdam Conference
The final wartime meeting of the leaders of the United States Britain and the Soviet Union was held outside Berlin in July 1945; Truman Churchill and Stalin discussed the future of Europe but their failure to reach meaningful agreements (including the division of Germany) soon led to the onset of the Cold War
Harry Truman
Became president when FDR died; gave the order to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima Japan
Cold War
A conflict between the US and the Soviet Union; never directly confronted each other on the battlefield but deadly threats went on for years
Dwight Eisenhower
United States general who supervised the invasion of Normandy and the defeat of Nazi Germany; as president warned about nuclear build-up of US and Soviet Union
Self-determination
Concept that ethnicities have the right to govern themselves
Hydrogen bomb
A thermonuclear bomb which uses the fusion of isotopes of hydrogen; far more powerful than an atomic bomb
Military-industrial complex
Eisenhower first coined this phrase when he warned American against it in his last State of the Union address; he feared that the combined lobbying efforts of the armed services and industries that contracted with the military would lead to excessive Congressional spending
United Nations
An international organization formed after WWII to promote international peace security and cooperation
Iron Curtain
A political barrier that isolated the peoples of Eastern Europe after WWII restricting their ability to travel outside the region
Satellite countries
Eastern European countries that remained under the control of the Soviet Union during the Cold War era; most were drawn together militarily by the Warsaw Pact; later attempted political or cultural rebellion such as Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 faced invasion by Soviet forces
World revolution
Extreme leftist belief that communist values should be spread to all countries of the world to free the workers and poor from control by the capitalist systems and must be overthrown; unfair traditional governments should be replaced by unions and workers cooperatives
Containment
American policy of resisting further expansion of communism around the world
Truman Doctrine
A policy that stated the U.S. would support any nation threatened by Communism
Non-Aligned Movement
The group of nations that didn’t side with either the US or the USSR during the Cold War
Mutual assured destruction
Idea that both the US and the Soviet would face certain destruction in a nuclear war
Sputnik
First artificial satellite; launched by Moscow in 1957 and sparked U.S. fears of Soviet dominance in technology and outer space; led to the creation of NASA and the Space Race
Marshall Plan
A United States program of economic aid for the reconstruction of Europe; had stipulation of anti-communist pledge for nations who used the loans
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON)
An economic organization of Communist states meant to help rebuild Eastern Bloc countries from World War II destruction under Soviet auspices
Proxy War
A conflict in which the feuding powers use third parties as substitutes instead of fighting each other directly
Berlin Airlift
Joint effort by the US and Britain to fly food and supplies into West Berlin after the Soviet blocked off all ground routes into the city
Berlin Wall
Barrier set up in 1961 to separate East and West Berlin; the physical separation of capitalist and communist ideologies in Germany