COLD WAR

1. What is Cold War?2. Why Cold War happened?3. Berlin blockade and airlift4. The fall of the Berlin Wall5. Consequences

1. What is Cold War?

• Cold war is a state of political and military tension after the World War II between the USA and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

• The differences between the USA and the Soviet Union

The United States The Soviet Union

Capitalism Communism

Democratic Autocratic/ Dictatorship

Free elections No elections or fixed

“Survival of the fittest”Everybody helps

everybody

Richest world power Poor economic base

Personal freedomSociety controlled by the

secret police

Freedom of the media Total censorship

Cold war timeline of events

2. Why Cold War happened?

• After the end of the World War II in 1945, 2 allied peace conferences were held to determine the fate of Germany’s territories: the Yalta conference and Potsdam conference.

German territory is divided

• Potsdam Conference splits Germany into 4 occupation zones• Also split Berlin into 4 zones

Berlin city is divided

3. Berlin Blockade and Airlift

• In 1948, Joseph Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade, preventing food, materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin.

• The Airlift:Without going to war or giving up the city of Berlin, the US and its allies began a massive "airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other supplies.

Over the next 10 months, the US and Great Britain flew around 277,000 flights into Berlin. They carried over 2.3 million tons of supplies into the city.

On May 12, 1949 the Soviet Union stopped the blockade and the airlift was over.

The Berlin Crisis(1958-1961)

• On November 10, 1958, Soviet Premier Khrushchev demanded Western powers to pull their forces out of Western Berlin within 6 months.

• In the summer of 1961, President John F. Kennedy met with Khrushchev but no solution was found.

• East Germans were dissatisfied with life under the communist system. Between 1949 and 1961, 2.5 million East Germans fled from East to West Germany. By August 1961, an average of 2,000 East Germans were crossing into the West every day.

Conrad Schumann leaping over barbed wire into West Berlin

Building the Berlin Wall

• August 12-13, 1961, East German soldiers laid down more than 30 miles of barbed wire barrier through the heart of Berlin.

• The first concrete pilings went up on the Bernauer Strasse and at the Potsdamer Platz.

• During the rest of 1961, Berlin Wall continued to grow, eventually consisting of a series of concrete walls up to 15 feet high.

• By the 1980s, this system of walls and electrified fences extended 28 miles through Berlin and 75 miles around West Berlin.

• The East Germans also erected barriers along most of the 850-mile border between East and West Germany.

• About 5,000 East Germans escaped to West Germany but the frequency of successful escapes dwindled as the wall was increasingly fortified. Thousands of East Germans were captured during attempted crossings and 191 were killed.

4. The Fall of the Berlin Wall

• In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the reins of power in the Soviet Union. He introduced the policies of Glasnost ("openness") and Perestroika ("restructuring") to the USSR, which aimed to end the Cold War.

• The unraveling of the SOVIET BLOC began in Poland in June 1989.• Like dominoes, Eastern European communist dictatorships fell one by

one.• By the fall of 1989, East and West Germans were tearing down

the BERLIN WALL with pickaxes.

5. Consequences:

i. Division of Germanyii. Deterioration of East-West relation to their worst point since 1945iii. Formation of NATO and the coordination of the West’defences: iv. An unipolar world

Division of Germany

• Western powers set up the Federal Republic of Germany in August 1949.• Russians establishing their own German state, the German

Democratic Republic in September 1949.

Deterioration of East-West relation

• The Blockade resulted in the collapse of the wartime alliance and cooperation between the West and the Soviet Union. East-West relations entered a new, and even more deadly phase.

Formation of NATO

• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in April 1949.

An unipolar world

• During the Cold War, the world was bipolar, both the U.S. and Russia were major world powers. • After the Cold War, the international system was unipolar, the U.S.

became the sole world superpower.

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