Current+Events

These are current events of the cold war.

Ron Kovic never doubted the cold war truths that he absorbed during his childhood in Levittown, New York during the 1950s and early 1960s. Ron Kovic learned to hate the communists back then, convinced as he was that they were plotting to subvert his government, even "trying to take over our [school] classes and control our minds." Steeling his thoughts against unpatriotic communist propaganda, ideologically recruited for a sustained cold war effort fought on many fronts, he identified with his country's fortunes, cheering its triumphs, weeping over its defeats. He had joined the Cub Scouts and marched proudly in memorial day parades. He and his friends built fallout shelters out of milk cartons and swore to one another that they would march down to the Levittown shopping center together to enlist in the United States Marines when they came of age

Meanwhile, Ron Kovik read about the wonders of rocketry and built space ships out of any scrap material available. Some American, hopefully Ron, himself, would be the first rocketeer to travel beyond the earth. Then, "the whole block watched a thing called the space race begin." On a cold October evening in 1957, the eleven-year-old boy and his father huddled transfixed and speechless as they watched the Soviet Sputnik satellite orbiting across the sky above his house. "We were losing," Ron and most of a stunned America believed, "and America wasn't first anymore." Finally, his entire junior high school celebrated America's belated success as they collectively prayed for an ascending rocket on the television screen. As if this historical event compared to the ninth inning of a baseball game, Ron Kovic remembered later that "a guy was screaming like Mel Allen that the rocket was lifting off ... then the whole room broke into cheers. America had done it. We had put our first satellite into space. 'We did it. We did it!' the guy was screaming at the top of his lungs."

The cold war begin after the World War 2.The main enemies were the United States and the Soviet Union.Cold war got its name because both sides were scared to fight eachother directly.The hot war nuclear weapons might destroy everything.So instead the both sides fought eachother indirectly.They also used words as weapons.They threatened or denounced eachothe,or tried to make eachother look foolish.The United States and the Soviet Union were the only two superpowers following the Second World War. The fact that, by the 1950s, each possessed nuclear weapons and the means of delivering such weapons on their enemies, added a dangerous aspect to the Cold War.

The United States led the West. This group included countries with democratic political Systems. The Soviet Union led the East. This group included countries with communist political systems. The non-aligned group included countries that did not want to be tied to either the West or the East. Harry Truman was the first American president to fight the Cold War. Probably the most important, certainly the most forgotten, and surely the most controversial, was the decision to concentrate on the European theater.

Perhaps the most central conflict of the Cold War, probably the defining conflict, was the division of Germany. Thus, arguably, 09 November 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, as it marked the effective end of the division of Germany between east and west. . That is when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev held four meetings with President Ronald Reagan. He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan. And he signed an agreement with the United States to destroy all intermediate range nuclear force [INF] missiles and short-range [SRINF] missiles. an the Pacific. Avoiding a two front war has long been a fundamental strategic choice.The DoD Cold War Recognition Certificate was approved for service during the "Cold War era" from 02 September 1945 to 26 December 1991. By this account, after 45 years of protracted conflict and constant tension, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

George Catlett Marshall was chief of staff of the United States Army from 1939 through 1945 and the principal American military architect of Allied victory.Cold War tensions increased, then eased, then increased again over the years. The changes came as both sides actively tried to influence political and economic developments around the world.The Cold War also affected the middle east. In the 1950s, both east and west offered aid to Egypt to build the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River. The west canceled its offer, however, after Egypt bought weapons from the communist government of Czechoslovakiasince.Since it takes the central conflict of the Cold War to have been the struggle between the two competing social systems, which could only end with one or the other being consigned to the ash heap of history.