The Iron Curtain and Trumans Response

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The Iron Curtain and Trumans Response

• Containment official US policy to prevent the
  spread of communism outside the USSR
• Truman Doctrine to support free people who are
  resisting attempted subjugation by armed
  minorities or by outside pressures
• Marshall Plan US funds for the re-building of
  Europe provides 13.5 billion in aid to 16
  countries in just 4 years

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• National Security Act of 1947
• Department of Defense, National Security Council
• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Peacetime draft (1949)
• Increase in military spending by 400
• Executive Order 9835 (March 1947)
• Taft-Hartley Act
• House Committee on Un-American Activities
• McCarran Internal Security Act (1950)
• Immigration and Nationality Act (1952)

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Berlin airlift

• Located deep within communist East Germany,
  West Berlin was suddenly cut off from the West
  when Josef Stalin blockaded all surface traffic
  in an attempt to take over the war-torn city.
  Between June 1948 and May 1949, British and U.S.
  pilots made 272,000 flights, dropping food and
  fuel to civilians. The Berlin Airlift
  successfully foiled the blockade, and the Soviet
  Union reopened access on May 12.

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  Cold War European Alliance Systems  

• The North Atlantic Treaty Organization includes
  Canada and the United States and stretches as far
  east as Turkey. By contrast, the Warsaw Pact
  nations were limited to the contiguous communist
  states of Eastern Europe, with the Soviet Union
  as the dominant member.

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1st Steps Toward European Integration

• 1948 Congress of Europe created the
• Organization of European Economic Cooperation
  (OEEC)
• European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
• European Economic Community (EEC)
• 1967 merged to create the European Community

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Hungarian Revolution, 1956 By mid-1956 the
Hungarian Imre Nagy (1896-1958) had taken
advantage of the liberalizing atmosphere to begin
dismantling collective farms and to move toward a
multi-party political system in Hungary. The
Soviets used tanks to crush the Hungarian reform
movement. Thousands of Hungarians were killed
during the fighting or subsequently executed, and
200,000 Hungarians fled to the west. Here we see
members of the insurrection destroying Soviet
propaganda material and portraits of Stalin, in
Koeztarsasag Square, Budapest.
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Cold War confrontation, 1959 U.S. vice president
Richard M. Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushshev had a heated exchange of views during
Nixon's visit to a Moscow trade fair in 1959. Two
years earlier, the Soviet Union had launched the
world's first space satellite.