Cold War Timeline 1945-1991

Cold War Timeline 1945-1991

May 8, 1945- VE Day

1972 July- SALT 1 signed

1985 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes leader of the Soviet Union

Victory in Europe Day was the public holiday celebrated on 8 May 1945 to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces.It thus marked the end of World War II in Europe.

Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Richard Nixon met in Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements. At the time, these agreements were the most far-reaching attempts to control nuclear weapons ever. The SALT agreements signed on May 27 addressed two major issues. First, they limited the number of antiballistic missile (ABM) sites each country could have to two. Second, the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles was frozen at existing levels. In August 1972, the U.S. Senate approved the agreements by an overwhelming vote. SALT-I, as it came to be known, was the foundation for all arms limitations talks that followed.

Capping his rapid rise through the Communist Party hierarchy, Mikhail Gorbachev is selected as the new general secretary and leader of the Soviet Union, following the death of Konstantin Chernenko the day before. Gorbachev oversaw a radical transformation of Soviet society and foreign policy during the next six years. Chernenko died after less than a year in office. With the rapid-fire deaths of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev had outlived his only serious competition, and he was selected to become the new leader of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985.

March 23, 1983- Strategic Defense Initiative

March 11, 1990- Lithuania declares independence

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars, was a program first initiated on March 23, 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. The intent of this program was to develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system in order to prevent missile attacks from other countries, specifically the Soviet Union. With the tension of the Cold War looming overhead, the Strategic Defense Initiative was the United States’ response to possible nuclear attacks from afar. Although the program seemed to have no negative consequences, there were concerns brought up about the program “contravening” the anti-ballistic missile of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks years before.

April 4, 1949- NATO

August 13, 1961-Berlin Wall

On March 11, 1990, Lithuania declared that it was an independent nation, the first of the Soviet republics to do so. It had, however, overestimated Gorbachev’s intentions. The Soviet leader was willing to let communist governments in its eastern European satellites fall to democratic movements, but this policy did not apply to the republics of the Soviet Union. The Soviet government responded harshly to the Lithuanian declaration of independence and issued an ultimatum: renounce independence or face the consequences. On March 17, the Lithuanians gave their answer, rejecting the Soviet demand and asking that “democratic nations” grant them diplomatic recognition.

In 1949, the prospect of further Communist expansion prompted the United States and 11 other Western nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The original membership of the NATO consisted of Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. NATO formed the backbone of the West’s military defensive wall against the USSR and its allies for the next 40 years, with its membership growing larger over the course of the Cold War era.

February 9, 1945- Stalin Hostile Speech

January 23, 1968- North Korea captured U.S.S. Pueblo

On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifashcistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989

On January 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence vessel, is engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast when it is intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but the North Koreans turned their guns on the lightly armed vessel and demanded its surrender. The Americans attempted to escape, and the North Koreans opened fire, wounding the commander and two others. With capture inevitable, the Americans stalled for time, destroying the classified information aboard while taking further fire. Several more crew members were wounded.

July 25 America's Test Baker

In the source material available to historians, Stalin is represented as expressing an expectation that the war would be the best opportunity to weaken both the Western nations and Nazi Germany, and make Germany suitable for "Sovietization". There is also expectation of eventual territorial expansion to the Baltic countries, Finland and Poland, with the approval of either the Western powers or Germany.

Historians who have studied these documents have suggested that if such a speech took place, which is usually considered plausible but not proven , then this view may have formed the basis for the Nazi-Soviet pact of non-aggression signed in 1939, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was signed just four days later on 23 August 1939.

On 25 July 1946, the United States conducted the first-ever underwater nuclear explosion. Test Baker, detonated at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, was the fifth of over 2,000 nuclear explosions conducted to date. Of these, only a few were underwater explosions, carried out mainly to assess the damage to ships and submarines. The majority of the tests - around three quarters - were conducted underground and the rest in the atmosphere, apart from a handful of nuclear tests in outer space, such as the 1962 Starfish Prime test.

1955- Warsaw Pact

June 5, 1947-Rio Pact

June 25, 1950- Korean War

The Soviet Union and its affiliated Communist nations in Eastern Europe founded a rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. The formation of the Warsaw Pact was in some ways a response to the creation of NATO, although it did not occur until six years after the Western alliance came into being. It was more directly inspired by the rearming of West Germany and its admission into NATO in 1955. Joining the USSR in the alliance were Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland and Romania. This lineup remained constant until the Cold War ended with the dismantling of all the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990.

The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (commonly known as the Rio Treaty or the Rio Pact) was an agreement signed in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro among many countries of the Americas. The central principle contained in its articles is that an attack against one is to be considered an attack against them all; this was known as the "hemispheric defense" doctrine. The treaty was initially created in 1947 and came into force in 1948, in accordance with Article 22 of the treaty. The Bahamas was the most recent country to sign and ratify it in 1982.

Fought from June 1950 to July 1953, the Korean War saw Communist North Korea invade its southern, democratic neighbor. South Korea was backed by the United Nations, with many of the troops furnished by the United States, and the Korean War saw the United States follow its policy of containment as it worked to block aggression and halt the spread of Communism.  As such, the Korean War may be seen as one of the many proxy wars fought during the Cold War. 

March 5, 1949- Sinews of Peace

September 2, 1945- Vietnam Independence

1975

1960

1945

1990

Hours after Japan’s surrender in World War II, Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh declares the independence of Vietnam from France. The proclamation paraphrased the U.S. Declaration of Independence in declaring, “All men are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable rights, life, liberty, and happiness!” and was cheered by an enormous crowd gathered in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square. It would be 30 years, however, before Ho’s dream of a united, communist Vietnam became reality.

Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" address of 5 March 1949, at Westminster College, used the term "iron curtain" in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "Iron Curtain" has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."- Churchill

Churchill's geographical description of the Iron Curtain was ambiguous as to which side of the Iron Curtain the Soviet occupation zones of Germany and Austria were on – Churchill described Berlin and Vienna, then divided into American, British, French and Soviet occupation zones but also surrounded by their countries' respective Soviet zones, as being "in... the Soviet sphere."

November 9, 1989- Fall of the Berlin Wall

July 1945- Potsdam Conference

July 1979- SALT 2 signed

November 22, 1963- JFK Assassination

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.

More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that is sometimes considered “the greatest street party in the history of the world.” People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall–they became known as “mauerspechte,” or “wall woodpeckers”—while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945.

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1991- End of Soviet Union and Cold War

The Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof from 17 July to 2 August 1945. Participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The three powers were represented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and, later, Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. The leaders arrived at various agreements on the German economy, punishment for war criminals, land boundaries and reparations. Although talks primarily centered on postwar Europe, the Big Three also issued a declaration demanding “unconditional surrender” from Japan.

The SALT-II agreement was the result of many nagging issues left over from the successful SALT-I treaty of 1972. Though the 1972 treaty limited a wide variety of nuclear weapons, many issues remained unresolved. Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union began almost immediately after SALT-I was ratified by both nations in 1972. In June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev met in Vienna and signed the SALT-II agreement. The treaty basically established numerical equality between the two nations in terms of nuclear weapons delivery systems. It also limited the number of MIRV missiles (missiles with multiple, independent nuclear warheads).

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was fatally shot in Dallas, Texas while riding in a motorcade in Dallas' Dealey Plaza, by Lee Harvey Oswald. He was traveling with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie, in a presidential motorcade. A ten-month investigation from November 1963 to September 1964 by the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald before he could stand trial. Kennedy's death marked the fourth (following Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and most recent assassination of an American President. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson became President upon Kennedy's death, when he took the constitutionally prescribed oath of office on board Air Force One at Dallas Love Field before departing for Washington, D.C.

The once-mighty Soviet Union had fallen, largely due to the great number of radical reforms that Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years as the leader of the USSR. However, Gorbachev was disappointed in the dissolution of his nation and resigned from his job on December 25. It was a peaceful end to a long, terrifying and sometimes bloody epoch in world history.