Therefore, now their fear was greater and nearer than ever.
The Cold War was based on the nuclear military competition between the two superpowers (Holm 7). Six months after the treaty in Yalta, on August 1945, the human history and also the Cold War came to a new phase by two atomic bombs that dropped in the city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This event marked the end of the Second World War but also started a new beginning of a greater tension to the Cold War. The United States remain as the only super power until four years later, in 1949, when the Soviet Union had successfully gained access to American secrets. Now the new balance of power had formed in a bipolar situation. The Soviet was able to create for their own nuclear weapons and later was successfully tested. The Cold War tensions were heightened when both the United State and the USSR soon developed hydrogen bombs, and both powers tested their nuclear power (Kiellogg 269).
One of the major early events on the Cold War was the Korean War in the 1950. Moreover, people of the world over feared the worst that Korea would be the spark to explode the Cold War into a Third World War (Robertson 194). It happened when China and Soviet aided Communist North Korea in its attack against South Korea. American quickly responded to the threat against a democratic South Korea. However, the war ended without any real victory. North Korea eventually withdrew from the southern state and America went home. The war was a fight for containment. The American government did not want to invade a Communist country for fear of retaliation by the Soviets or the Chinese (Healy 3). The American people wanted to destroy Communism and desire of the nation was to show a victory over Communism. However, the Korean War was unsuccessful at doing this.
Some other major events on the Cold War were such as the crisis at Cuba in 1962 and the Vietnam War.
