Cold War begins

• The Second World War took place

  1939-1945
• Allied Powers (Allies)


  • Britain (led by Winston Churchill)
  • The USA (led by Franklin D. Roosevelt)
  • The Soviet Union or USSR (led by Josef Stalin)
  • China (mainly led by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), although Mao Zedong's communists were gaining power)
  • France (led by Charles de Gaulle)
• Axis Powers


  • Germany (led by Adolf Hitler)
  • Italy (led by Benito Mussolini)
  • Japan (led by Emperor Hirohito)
• By the end of the war in 1945, the power of Germany and Japan had been broken, and the USA and USSR were established as the two main superpowers in the world
• Within months of the end of the Second World War, the USA and the USSR had become engaged in a new struggle for power, as the allies of 1945 became enemies. This struggle came to be called 'the Cold War'
• Ideological differences


  The origins of the Cold War
• Main differences between capitalist and communist systems

  • Political system
  • Media
  • Wealth
• Mutual fear and distrust grew in the years that followed between the West and the USSR
• Josef Stalin: 'Here I stand on the border line between the old, capitalist world and the new socialist world. Here, as this border line, I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and of the peasants of the East in order to shatter the old world'
• Josef Stalin was well aware of the West's hostility to communism and began a series of Five-Year Plans to ensure that the Soviet economy would be ready to fight a war against the West
• When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin and the Allies joined together, but it was not an easy alliance
• Stalin remained suspicious of the West, believing that Britain and the USA had delayed D-Day in the hope that Nazi Germany and the communist USSR would destroy each other
• The alliance of the USA, the USSR and Britain held together until it was clear that the war was coming to an end
• Yalta Conference


  February 1945 meeting of the 'Big Three' (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) to reach agreement on what would happen in post-war Europe
• Aims of the leaders at Yalta

  • Churchill wanted to ensure the survival of the British Empire and stop the USSR
  • Roosevelt sought the creation of a free world protected by the UN
  • Stalin sought the creation of a buffer zone of communist countries between Western Europe and the USSR
• Despite differences, agreements were reached at Yalta on the division of Germany, reparations, the establishment of the UN, and the influence of the USSR in Eastern Europe
• Potsdam Conference


  July 1945 meeting of the 'Big Three' (Truman, Attlee, Stalin) that was much less friendly than Yalta
• Decisions made at Potsdam included how Germany and Austria were to be divided and occupied, and changes to Germany's border with Poland
• The suspicions and tensions of Potsdam marked the first 'drop in temperature' of what would become the Cold War
• President Truman was alarmed by the idea of Soviet intervention in the Pacific and feared the USSR would try to establish Communism there
• Truman did not directly inform Stalin that the USA had developed an atomic bomb, but his attitude towards the Soviets became more assertive after the successful test
• The USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender


  August 1945
• When Stalin realised the Americans had the atomic bomb, he was furious that his allies had not shared the technology with him and regarded the bombing of Hiroshima as an act of intimidation aimed at the Soviet Union
• The atomic bomb caused the final breakdown of US-Soviet relations and the start of the Cold War
• By the mid-1950s, the USA and USSR had built enough weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over, leading to a 'cold war' that could never be allowed to descend into fighting