The Cold War
12 Mar 1947 – 26 Dec 199179 items
cold warwarBerlin to Berlin, 1947 to 1991
For 44 years the United States and the Soviet Union fought everything but each other: an arms race, a space race, coups, spies and proxy wars from Korea to Angola. This timeline opens with the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and the blockade of Berlin a year later, and closes in the same city, with the Wall opened in November 1989, Germany whole again in October 1990 and the red flag lowered over the Kremlin on Christmas night 1991.
The words came before the dates. A year before the start, at a college in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill gave the division of Europe its name:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. — Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace”, Westminster College, Fulton, 5 March 1946
Reading it
Bands frame the long stretches: the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989, the Vietnam War, détente, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the “Second Cold War” of the early 1980s. Events run at the scale of years between the crises and of single days inside them. Open the map: this was a global war, fought in Tehran, Guatemala City, Léopoldville, Santiago, Luanda and Kabul as much as in Berlin.
Filter by nuclear for the arms race and the treaties that slowed it, germany for Berlin, proxy wars for the hot wars fought by others, coups for the governments overthrown, uprising for the revolts inside the Soviet bloc, and diplomacy for the pacts and summits.
Three stories have timelines of their own in the catalogue, so each gets one item here: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race and the revolutions of 1989. Dates are local to where things happened. The coup in Tehran is also dated in the Persian solar calendar, as Iranians remember it: 28 Mordad 1332.
Items
The Truman Doctrine
Marshall announces his plan at Harvard
Kennan’s “X” article
Communists take power in Prague
NATO is founded
The Easter Parade
The first Soviet atomic bomb
Mao proclaims the People’s Republic
Two German states
The Inchon landing
Chinese armies cross the Yalu
Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb
Stalin dies
The East German uprising
The Korean armistice
The coup against Mosaddegh
Árbenz is overthrown in Guatemala
Geneva divides Vietnam
The Warsaw Pact
Khrushchev’s Secret Speech
Soviet tanks return to Budapest
Sputnik
The U-2 is shot down
Patrice Lumumba is killed
The Bay of Pigs
The border is sealed
Tanks at Checkpoint Charlie
Tsar Bomba
Spies traded on Glienicke Bridge
The Cuban Missile Crisis
“Ich bin ein Berliner”
The Partial Test Ban Treaty
The Tet Offensive
The Non-Proliferation Treaty
The Warsaw Pact invades Czechoslovakia
Soviet and Chinese troops clash on the Ussuri
Willy Brandt kneels in Warsaw
Nixon in China
SALT I and the ABM Treaty
The Paris Peace Accords
The coup in Chile
The fall of Saigon
The Helsinki Final Act
Angolan independence, and Cuban troops
NATO’s double-track decision
Storm-333: the attack on Tajbeg Palace
The Gdańsk Agreement and Solidarity
The El Mozote massacre
“An evil empire”
Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down
Petrov’s false alarm
Able Archer 83
Gorbachev takes over
Stingers over Jalalabad
“Tear down this wall!”
The INF Treaty
The Geneva Accords on Afghanistan
Gorbachev at the United Nations
The last Soviet soldier leaves Afghanistan
The Wall opens
German reunification
START I
The Belovezha Accords
Gorbachev resigns
The Soviet Union dissolves itself