![]() ![]() HUAC also accused State Department workers of engaging in subversive activities. Many of these “blacklisted” writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade. In Hollywood, HUAC forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. The committee began a series of hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well. Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC) brought the Cold War home in another way. Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system. astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set foot on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy (1917-1963) made the bold public claim that the U.S. ![]() That May, after Alan Shepard become the first American man in space, President John F. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961. That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.Īs a result, the stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. Thus began a deadly “ arms race.” In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In particular, American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II. To that end, the report called for a four-fold increase in defense spending. In 1950, a National Security Council Report known as NSC–68 had echoed Truman’s recommendation that the country use military force to contain communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring. The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.ĭid you know? The term 'cold war' first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called 'You and the Atomic Bomb.' The Cold War: The Atomic Age officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and strident approach to international relations. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as U.S. Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. These grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity that never developed into open warfare (thus the term “cold war”). The Soviets resented Americans’ refusal to give them a leading role in the international community, as well as America’s delayed entry into World War II, in which millions of Russians died. However, U.S./Soviet relations were never truly friendly: Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule. During World War II, the United States and the Soviets fought together as allies against Nazi Germany. The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension marked by competition and confrontation between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and Western democracies including the United States.
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