The Ultimate Cold War Quiz

The Cold War: Origins, Conferences, Alliances, Propaganda, Non-Aligned Nations, and Proxy Wars

• The Cold War containment policy aimed to prevent the spread of communism, and the Truman Doctrine sent military aid to countries under communist influence, such as Greece and Turkey.
• The Domino Theory, the belief that if one nation became communist, many others would follow, motivated the United States to contain communism.
• The Soviets created a buffer zone in Central/Eastern Europe to spread their influence into nations and protect the USSR from potential wars, which was referred to as the Iron Curtain by Churchill.
• Brinkmanship, the strategy of threatening a country until the other gives up, was used during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nuclear conflict between Cuba and the United States.
• The arms race, which involved the race to build as many nuclear weapons as possible, was fueled by the Manhattan project and spent billions of dollars for a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons.
• The Potsdam Conference in July 1945 saw open disagreements between the US and the USSR, with Truman angry that there were large reparations and a communist government being set up in Poland.
• The Yalta Conference in February 1945 split Germany into four zones of occupation and allowed free elections in Eastern European countries, with Russia promised to join the war against Japan when Germany was defeated.
• The Marshall Plan was a policy used by the United States to send economic aid to affected countries after WW2, which amounted to $13.8 billion across 17 countries.
• The Berlin Airlift saw the US send supplies to West Germany, mainly Berlin, with planes dropping supplies every three minutes using linear programming and a constant stream of supplies into Berlin.
• The NATO alliance was created by the US to protect the Western world from the large armies Russia had stationed in Eastern Europe, while the Warsaw Pact was created by the Soviets to keep control in Eastern Europe.
• The US propaganda agenda aimed to promote the American way of life and capitalism, while the Soviet propaganda agenda aimed to promote communism and its shared benefits, common ownership, and social equality.
• Non-aligned nations rejected ties with either superpower (US or USSR) and sought to take a ‘third path’ that was not in line with either, with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) advocating for peaceful settlement of international disputes, opposition to colonialism, imperialism, and racial discrimination, and the strengthening of the United Nations as an organ of world peace. Proxy wars, such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War, were fought between the US and the USSR through other nations, with the former supporting South Korea and South Vietnam, while the latter supported the North.