cold war essay

Essay by bbushman101High School, 11th gradeA, October 2014

download word file, 4 pages 0.0

Cold War Essay

The Cold War was a political, economic, technological, and social war between the United States and Soviet Union that lasted from 1945 until the Soviet's demise in 1991. This war resulted in common suspicions, amplified hostilities and multiple international incidents that pushed the superpowers to the edge of disaster. During the Cold War major financial, fear-causing, and governmental issues and events arose.

The three major financial issues of the Cold War included the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the arms race. The Marshall plan was a plan to financially aid war-torn Western European countries out of the fear that economic dislocation would promote disturbances, or in other words promote communism, according to George Marshall in his debut of the plan in 1947 (Doc 5) . The United States, under this plan, provided aid totaling $12.5 billion to those Western European countries. As a result, those countries supported the U.S.

rather than the Soviet Union. The Berlin Airlift was the United States response to the blockade ordered by Stalin. The plan was a massive airlift of food, supplies, and fuel for the troops and citizens that occupied West Berlin, as seen in the Berlin Airlift photograph (Doc 3). The daily airlift climbed to nearly 7000 tons, costing the United States a large amount of money. As a result of the airlift, Stalin ended the blockade, which marked the end of the initial phase of the Cold War and marked a political victory for the Unites States, proving to the world the United States' ingenuity prevailed over the Soviet's tenacity. The nuclear arms race truly started with the creation of the atomic bomb during WWI, but didn't really take off until the United States' constructed and tested the world's first Hydrogen bomb, as seen in the image of...