In May 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered, marking the beginning of the end of World War II. The already difficult war treaty between allies the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union began to crumble. By 1948, the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in countries liberated by the Red Army. Both the Americans and the British feared continued Soviet control over Eastern Europe and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties attempting to gain power in Western European democracies. However, the Soviets were determined to maintain control of Eastern Europe as part of a safety net approach to guard against any further threats from Germany. The Soviets wanted to spread communism around the world, mainly for ideological reasons, while the United States did not. So when American aid provided under the Marshall Plan brought Western Europe under American influence and the Soviets installed openly communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the two world superpowers began to clash. By 1947-48, the Cold War was solidified and very, very real. Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay “Containment” was the strategy the Americans implemented to fight the Soviets. In the famous “Long Telegram,” diplomat George Kennan explained this policy: “The Soviet Union is a political force fanatically convinced that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi.” As a result, America made the decision to “contain in the long term, patiently but firmly and vigilantly, Russia’s expansionist tendencies.” “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who resist attempts at enslavement by external pressures. » This method of thinking, this policy, would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades. The containment strategy also provided justification for a U.S. arms buildup. In 1950, a National Security Council known as NSC-68 echoed Truman's recommendation that the United States use military power to control and contain communist expansionism wherever necessary. As a result, the United States military budget quadrupled in defense spending. U.S. officials at the time encouraged the development of nuclear weapons like those that ended World War II. Thus began the famous “arms race”. In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, the test was codenamed "RDS-1", commonly known as "Joe-1" in the United States. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even bigger and more capable bomb: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed them closely. As a result, the stakes of the Cold War were now dangerously high. The first H-bomb was dropped on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The bomb, named "Mike", showed a very clear and undisputed result of just how fearsome and deadly nuclear technology could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island and exploded a 6,300-foot-diameter, 130-foot-deep crater in the ocean floor. At that time, in 1952, it was the largest nuclear explosion ever known. Today hestill ranks fourth among all US nuclear tests. "Mike" had the power to destroy half of Manhattan, and as the arms race continued, subsequent American and Soviet tests would send radioactive waste into the atmosphere. On October 4, 1957, the Cold War extended into space with the launch of a Soviet-made R-7 missile, carrying "Sputnik" (Russian for "traveling companion"), the world's first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed in Earth's orbit. The launch of Sputnik was a surprise to most Americans, and not a pleasant one at that. The idea that the Soviets had beaten the Americans in space was unpleasant, it was crucial to not losing much ground. Furthermore, the idea that the Soviets possessed an intercontinental missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead into American airspace meant that intelligence gathering was now a top priority. In 1958, the United States launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the US military under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, kicking off the "space race". It may be that after Alan Shepard became the first American to go into space, John F. Kennedy boldly publicly declared that by the end of the decade, the United States would land a man on the Earth. Moon. As we know, his claims came true. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong of NASA's Apollo 11 mission became the first man to set foot on the Moon, winning the space race. In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War took place when the Soviet-backed army took action. The North Korean People's Army has invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south. American officials feared that this was the start of a communist campaign to take over the world and believed that non-intervention was no longer an option. Truman did send American troops to Korea, but the war ultimately reached a stalemate and ended in 1953. In 1955, the United States and other members of the Korea Treaty Organization North Atlantic (NATO) made West Germany a NATO member and allowed them to enter NATO. to remilitarize. The Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization between the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgari, which threw the foundations of a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. Other international conflicts followed; In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy faced many troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. These two events seemed to prove that the real communist threat now came from the unstable, postcolonial “Third World.” Nowhere was this more evident than in Vietnam, where, after the collapse of French colonial rule, they had been plunged into a struggle between the US-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem to the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh, in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of the anti-communist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they wanted to "contain" communist expansion in Vietnam, they would should intervene themselves. . However, what was supposed to be a brief military action turned into a disaster that lasted 10 years. As soon as President Richard Nixon took office, he.