Cold War Research Essay

Towards the end of the Second World War, three of the world’s leading powers came together with their main interest being to defeat Nazi Germany. The Big Three of the Grand Alliance was made up of the leaders of the United States, Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom which included Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill (Duiker & Jackson, p. 712). The Big Three held two major conferences to plan the defeat and division of Nazi Germany which were known as the Yalta Conference, and the Potsdam Conference. (Seery-Murphy, Nov. 26, 2007). While these conferences were successful in many aspects, there were also a great amount of tensions that arose as result. While the three powers agreed that Nazi Germany needed to be defeated they had disagreements on how the country should be divided and how the postwar world should be run (Duiker & Jackson, pp. 712-713). As result many tensions arose between the United Sates and the Soviet Union, and a war unlike any war the world had known developed.

This war became known as the Cold War and it arose due in large part to the military, political, and ideological differences between the US and the USSR (Duiker & Jackson, p. 712). The US was extremely anti-communism which greatly conflicted with Stalin and his Communist Regime. After the death of Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman took office and implemented the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall plan in order to attempt to contain communism and stop it from spreading to other parts of the world (Duiker & Jackson, pp. 724-725). In the Truman Doctrine President Truman agreed to provide financial aid to any countries that felt that they were threatened by communism. The Marshal Plan was implemented shortly after the Truman Doctrine and it agreed to provide thirteen billion dollars for the economic recovery of Europe due to the fact that it had been devastated by the war (Duiker & Jackson, p. 724). The United States also established The Northern Atlantic Treaty Organization in order to build up military alliances so that if any of the countries who were members of NATO were attacked, the allying powers would step in and provide military support (Duiker & Jackson, p. 726). At this point in the war the United States seemed to have the upper hand in the conflict based war, but it was about to take a threatening turn for the worst.

In the beginning of the Cold War the United States possessed a stronger economy, greater alliances, and also possessed an upper advantage due to is invention and possession of Nuclear weapons. This all changed in the year of 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device (Duiker & Jackson, p. 733). This marked the start of the Atomic Age, and the world now lived with the anxiety of the