When was height of cold war

In the early s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north.

However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a year conflict. Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon began to implement a new approach to international relations. To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in , began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing.

In , he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty SALT I , which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war. Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere.

As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine. Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned. In , every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a noncommunist one.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The Cold War was over. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. On December 25, , the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. Since its start a century ago, Communism, a political and economic ideology that calls for a classless, government-controlled society in which everything is shared equally, has seen a series of surges—and declines.

What started in Russia, became a global revolution, taking Both socialism and communism are essentially economic philosophies advocating public rather than private ownership, especially of the means of production, distribution and exchange of goods i. Both aim to fix the problems they see as created by a Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Married in , New York City residents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were devoted communists who allegedly headed a spy ring that passed military secrets to the Soviets.

The scheme got underway sometime after , when Julius became a civilian Communism as an ideology arose in the wake of the first Industrial Revolution when overworked, underpaid workers felt exploited and sought better representation in government. Pilot Charles Maultsby was supposed to use Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big.

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Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars? How viruses shape our world. The era of greyhound racing in the U. See how people have imagined life on Mars through history. See More. United States Change. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U. After seizing power in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba in , leftist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union. Under Castro, Cuba grew dependent on the Soviets for military and economic aid.

During this time, the U. The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations after the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Major Richard Heyser making a high-altitude pass over Cuba on October 14, , photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation.

President Kennedy was briefed about the situation on October 16, and he immediately called together a group of advisors and officials known as the executive committee, or ExComm. For nearly the next two weeks, the president and his team wrestled with a diplomatic crisis of epic proportions, as did their counterparts in the Soviet Union. For the American officials, the urgency of the situation stemmed from the fact that the nuclear-armed Cuban missiles were being installed so close to the U.

From that launch point, they were capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U. If allowed to become operational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the nuclear rivalry between the U.

The Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number of nuclear weapons that were targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw the deployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Another key factor in the Soviet missile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U. The Kennedy administration had already launched one attack on the island—the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in —and Castro and Khrushchev saw the missiles as a means of deterring further U.

From the outset of the crisis, Kennedy and ExComm determined that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was unacceptable. The challenge facing them was to orchestrate their removal without initiating a wider conflict—and possibly a nuclear war. In deliberations that stretched on for nearly a week, they came up with a variety of options, including a bombing attack on the missile sites and a full-scale invasion of Cuba.

But Kennedy ultimately decided on a more measured approach. First, he would employ the U. Navy to establish a blockade, or quarantine, of the island to prevent the Soviets from delivering additional missiles and military equipment.

Second, he would deliver an ultimatum that the existing missiles be removed. In a television broadcast on October 22, , the president notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact the blockade and made it clear that the U. Following this public declaration, people around the globe nervously waited for the Soviet response.

Some Americans, fearing their country was on the brink of nuclear war, hoarded food and gas.