The Cold War Ultimate Quiz: Exam!

Mao Tse-Tung took power in China in 1949 and the country (which the USA had previously pumped $2 billion into during its Civil War) and which was regarded as the USA’s mainstay in Asia became Communist once the nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek was forced to flee to Taiwan. Truman (who is in office until 1952) was worried about countries in south-east Asia, such as Malaya (not called Malaysia yet), Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Korea, and Indonesia turning red. The idea was that if one fell they might all fall … like dominoes. As such this became known as Truman’s domino theory.

McNamara remains the longest serving Secretary of Defense, having remained in office over seven years.

Cuba is a large island near Florida in the southern USA. It had long been an American ally and its large sugar exports (amounting to 80% of its total exports) were sold mostly to the USA. Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 the US had a policy known as ‘the big stick’ policy which basically gave itself the right to interfere with places on its doorstep in South and Latin America, like Cuba. Lots of Americans holidayed there and there was a huge naval base there.

Ideology is a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

Like South Korea’s Syngmann Rhee and Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem the nation was ruled by an undemocratic dictator with the support of the USA. His name was Fulgencio Batista and he was toppled in Castro's revolution.

The US were not pleased. Castro took over US businesses in Cuba such as a large fruit company and started accepting arms from the USSR. After two years in which Cuba allowed the US to keep its naval base in January 1961 the US broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba. It had decided it was not prepared to accept a Soviet satellite state like those in Eastern Europe on its own door step or in its own sphere of influence.

An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a guided ballistic missile with a minimum range of 5,500 kilometres (3,400 miles) primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more thermonuclear warheads).

A war with active military hostilities. Not to be confused with a military 'crisis' in IB terms!

With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts.

Cuba boasted 5000 Soviet technicians as well as missiles, patrol boats, tanks, radar vans, missile erectors, jet bombers, and jet fighters.

Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar was the elected President of Cuba from 1940 to 1944, and U.S.-backed dictator from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown during the Cuban Revolution. Fulgencio Batista initially rose to power as part of the 1933 Revolt of the Sergeants that overthrew the authoritarian rule of Gerardo Machado. He then appointed himself chief of the armed forces, with the rank of colonel, and effectively controlled the five-member Presidency. He maintained this control through a string of puppet presidents until 1940, when he was himself elected President of Cuba on a populist platform. He then instated the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, considered progressive for its time,[4] and served until 1944. After finishing his term he lived in Florida, returning to Cuba to run for president in 1952. Facing certain electoral defeat, he led a military coup that preempted the election.

Since the late Nineteenth Century Vietnam had been ruled by France and was known as Indochina.

On Sunday 14th October 1962 an American U2 spy plane flew over Cuba. It took photographs of nuclear missiles. 20 Soviet ships were on their way to Cuba carrying further missiles. JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, stated in his book “within a few minutes of them being fired 80 million Americans would be dead”.

A proxy war is a phrase we use to describe a war within the Cold War where there is actual fighting but in which the two main protagonists (USA and USSR) are not actually fighting each other. The Korean War is a proxy war because although there were 30,000 US deaths they were fighting for the UNO not the USA (technically).

America in this period is in the grip of anti-Communism. A US Senator called Joseph McCarthy is especially anti-Communist and launches a series of ‘witch hunts’ against ‘Communists’ in America which lead Charlie Chaplin, being expelled from the USA. One expression used to describe these ‘witch hunts’ at the time was ‘Reds under the bed’. Another was the ‘Red scare’. Many innocent people were maltreated in this episode in US history.

A "Red Scare" is the promotion by a state or society of widespread fear of a potential rise of communism or radical leftism. In the United States, the First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with perceived national or foreign communists infiltrating or subverting U.S. society or the federal government.

Buddhist monk Quang Duc famously set himself on fire to protest the US -backed rule of Diem.

The postwar Poland was a state of reduced sovereignty, strongly dependent on the Soviet Union, but the only one possible under the existing circumstances and internationally recognized. The Polish Left's cooperation with the Stalin's regime made the preservation of a Polish state within favorable borders possible. The dominant Polish Workers' Party had a strictly pro-Soviet branch, led by Bierut and a number of communist activists, and a national branch, willing to take a "Polish route to socialism", led by Gomułka.

At the 1954 Geneva Peace Conference the country was divided at the 17th Parallel into North and South Vietnam until elections could be held. The US refused however to allow the free elections promised in the Peace Conference to take place because they feared the Communists would win easily (it was estimated they would win 80% of the public vote).

Containment is a geopolitical strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is best known as the Cold War policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to increase communist influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Africa, and Vietnam. Containment represented a middle-ground position between detente and rollback.

VC used AK-47 assault rifles; Simonov 7.62mm self-loading rifles; RPD-7 7.62mm general purpose machine guns; RPG-7 rocket launchers; T-54/T-55 main battle tanks and PT-76 light amphibious tanks; Type 63 armoured personnel carriers; MiG-17, MiG-21 and Shenyang J-6 fighters; An-2 light transports; Mi-8 helicopters. Very reliant on Chinese and Soviet materiel.

Germany was another important country divided throughout the Cold War.

The February 1945 Yalta Conference was the second wartime meeting of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the conference, the three leaders agreed to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender and began plans for a post-war world. Stalin also agreed to permit free elections in Eastern Europe and to enter the Asian war against Japan, for which he was promised the return of lands lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Although most of these agreements were initially kept secret, the revelations of the conference particulars became controversial after Soviet-American wartime cooperation degenerated into the Cold War.

Despite setbacks suffered by government forces from 1946 to 1948, increased American aid, the failure of the DSE to attract sufficient recruits and the side-effects of the Tito–Stalin split of 1948 eventually led to victory for the government troops. The final victory of the western-allied government forces led to Greece's membership in NATO (1952) and helped to define the ideological balance of power in the Aegean Sea for the entire Cold War. The civil war also left Greece with a vehemently anti-communist security establishment, which would lead to the establishment of the Greek military junta of 1967–74 and a legacy of political polarisation that lasts until today.

In November 1965 in La Dreng Valley US killed 2000 VC for the loss of 300 troops. Also the VC suffered big losses in Operation Starlite in 1965. This led to a change in tactics and the adoption of guerilla warfare tactics. They did not wear uniform and wear hard for Americans to tell apart from the South Vietnamese.

In one of the most famous orations of the Cold War period, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the Soviet Union’s policies in Europe and declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Churchill’s speech is considered one of the opening volleys announcing the beginning of the Cold War.

George Kennan, Truman’s man in Moscow, sent a famous memo called The Long Telegram to Truman outlining the dangers of Communism (especially now that Cominform had been formed in 1947). This greatly dictated Truman’s attitude to Communism (remember he didn’t like it much from the beginning – think Potsdam in 1945, Marshall Aid in 1947, and the Berlin Blockade in 1949). So when South Korea was invaded by Communists from the North in 1950 his mind was made up to support the South ruled by Syngmann Rhee against the North ruled by Kim Il Sung.

The Rambo movies portray the Taliban in a positive light and as friends of the USA - because they were fighting the Russians!

Salami tactics, also known as the salami-slice strategy, is a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, piece by piece. In this fashion, the opposition is eliminated "slice by slice" until one realizes (too late) that it is gone in its entirety. In some cases it includes the creation of several factions within the opposing political party and then dismantling that party from the inside, without causing the "sliced" sides to protest. Salami tactics are most likely to succeed when the perpetrators keep their true long-term motives hidden and maintain a posture of cooperativeness and helpfulness while engaged in the intended gradual subversion.

On 7th February 1965 the US launched Operation Rolling Thunder, extensive bombing raids in North Vietnam. This lasted until 1972. More bombs were dropped on North Vietnam than on the whole of Germany AND Japan in WWII. Approximately 6,727,084 tonnes of explosives dropped between 1965 and 1973. About 1,899,688 sorties flown. Strategic targets bombed; military installments, infrastructure and manufacturing facilities.

Held near Berlin, the Potsdam Conference (July 17-August 2, 1945) was the last of the World War II meetings held by the “Big Three” heads of state. Featuring American President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (and his successor, Clement Attlee) and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, the talks established a Council of Foreign Ministers and a central Allied Control Council for administration of Germany. The leaders arrived at various agreements on the German economy, punishment for war criminals, land boundaries and reparations. Although talks primarily centered on postwar Europe, the Big Three also issued a declaration demanding “unconditional surrender” from Japan.

The My Lai Massacre took place in March 1968. A group of US soldiers called Charlie Company started a search and destroy mission in the Quang Ngai region.

In 1930 he founded the Indochinese Communist Party. Having fought off the Japanese he now turned his attention against French rule. In 1945 he entered Hanoi in the North and declared independence. At first he kept his Communism quiet and had some sympathy from the USA. In 1949 China started giving him help though and this changed US attitudes.

Labour's Attlee won with 59.9% of the vote. Britain wanted a peacetime leader and Churchill was viewed as a good wartime leader - there is a difference!

Truman stopped short of rolling back Communism in North Korea and China (MacArthur’s wish) because of what was known appropriately as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).

When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, one of his key election issues was an alleged "missile gap" with the Soviets leading. In fact, the U.S. led the Soviets by a wide margin that would only increase. In 1961, the Soviets had only four intercontinental ballistic missiles (R-7 Semyorka). By October 1962, they may have had a few dozen, with some intelligence estimates as high as 75. The U.S., on the other hand, had 170 ICBMs and was quickly building more. It also had eight George Washington– and Ethan Allen–class ballistic missile submarines with the capability to launch 16 Polaris missiles each, with a range of 1,500 nautical miles (2,800 km).

Lyndon Baines Johnson often referred to as LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969, assuming the office after serving as the 37th Vice President of the United States under President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. A Democrat from Texas.

JFK said there was “no worse country in the world”. In April 1961 JFK supplied arms, equipment and transport for 1400 anti-Castro rebels. This was the famous Bay of Pigs invasion. They were met by 20,000 Castro troops armed with tanks and modern weapons and were slaughtered. JFK looked weak, unsuccessful, and had given off a big hint that he wasn’t prepared to get directly involved in Cuba.

Over 60 million people were killed, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion). World War II fatality statistics vary, with estimates of total deaths ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million. One of the big rifts between the Allies throughout the war was the failure by the USA and the UK to open up a second front to relieve the fighting burden on the Soviet Union.

The estimated number of Vietnamese war dead is 1 million, far higher than the US figure. General William Westmoreland issued ‘Search and Destroy’ tactics. This meant destroying everything and everyone in a village suspected of helping VC soldiers. Many civilians were killed. For every one VC weapon found there was a body count of 6.

Lech Wałęsa co-founded and headed Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, tr. Karibskij krizis), or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day (October 16–28, 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning American ballistic missile deployment in Italy and Turkey with consequent Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.

The Yalta Conference, sometimes called the Crimea Conference and code named the Argonaut Conference, held from February 4 to 11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union for the purpose of discussing Europe's postwar reorganization. The three states were represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin, respectively. The conference convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta in Crimea, Ukraine.

The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of France, Great Britain and the United States to travel to their sectors of Berlin, which lay within Russian-occupied East Germany. Eventually, the western powers instituted an airlift that lasted nearly a year and delivered much-needed supplies and relief to West Berlin. Coming just three years after the end of World War II, the blockade was the first major clash of the Cold War and foreshadowed future conflict over the city of Berlin.

Checkpoint Charlie (or "Checkpoint C") was the name given by the Western Allies to the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War (1947–1991). East German leader Walter Ulbricht agitated and maneuvered to get the Soviet Union's permission to construct the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop Eastern Bloc emigration and defection westward through the Soviet border system, preventing escape across the city sector border from communist East Berlin into West Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.

Changes in key personnel was a key reason behind early Cold War antagonism. Churchill was voted out of office allowing him more freedom to air his anti Communist views from July 1945 onwards and FDR's death meant hardline Harry S Truman, a former haberdasher, coming to power.

Speaking in 1997 Philip Caputo, a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, said “there was this sense that we just couldn’t see what could be done to defeat these people”.

Churchill, who had been defeated for re-election as prime minister in 1945, was invited to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri where he gave this speech. President Harry S. Truman joined Churchill on the platform and listened intently to his speech. Churchill began by praising the United States, which he declared stood “at the pinnacle of world power.” It soon became clear that a primary purpose of his talk was to argue for an even closer “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain—the great powers of the “English-speaking world”—in organizing and policing the postwar world. In particular, he warned against the expansionistic policies of the Soviet Union. In addition to the “iron curtain” that had descended across Eastern Europe, Churchill spoke of “communist fifth columns” that were operating throughout western and southern Europe. Drawing parallels with the disastrous appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II, Churchill advised that in dealing with the Soviets there was “nothing which they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.”

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 was a nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. Though leaderless when it first began, it was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR's forces drove Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of World War II.

African Americans made up 16% of US draftees, but only 12% of US population.