The Cuban Misille Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis is considered the hottest point in the Cold War. It is the point where the U.S. and the Soviet Union got the closest to actual fighting. The Cuban Missile Crisis started because of an arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. By 1962, the Soviet Union was lagging far behind the U.S. in the effort to create more powerful nuclear weapons. The Missiles created by the Soviets were only powerful enough to reach Europe, but the American missiles had a much farther range. They could easily reach the Soviet Union quickly. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came up with the idea of placing Missiles in an area closer to the U.S, in order to prevent a potential attack from the U.S. and provide a new strategic arsenal. At the same time, Cuba was looking for a way to defend itself from the U.S. Things were extremely tense after the U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion. Even though the invasion failed, the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was positive that there would be another invasion attempt. In 1962, Khrushchev made an agreement with Castro to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. The U.S. soon found out about the plan, and tensions began to build. The U.S. tried to stop the Soviets from bringing in anymore missiles by cutting Cuba off from them with a naval quarantine. The tensions worsened when a U-2 was shot down over Cuba. The drama continued until the Americans and Soviets came to an agreement on October 28th. The missiles were taken out of Cuba in exchange for the U.S. to promise that they wouldn't invade Cuba.

Film Lesson- The Right Stuff

In the movie, The Right Stuff, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were competing in a "space race" to send people into space. It began after World War 2 ended. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies at the time, but it was obvious that it wouldn't last. The U.S. wanted to stay ahead of the Soviets. At first, America was clearly ahead technologically. A U.S. pilot even managed to break the sound barrier and move at Mach speeds. Then the Soviets managed to send a satelite called Sputnik into space, and the race really began. The U.S. wanted to take it to the next level-they wanted to send people into space. Thousands of people signed of for the chance, but only seven were actually chosen. The first test launches by the U.S. were disastrous. Eventually, the U.S. managed to send a chimpazee into space. However, the Soviet Union took mit one step further by sending the first person into space. At the time, the U.S.S.R. was winning the space race.

I think that the most memorable scene of the movie was the scene where the U.S. is trying to launch a rocket into space, and isn't having any luck. That scene shows you how desperate the U.S. was to stay ahead of the Soviet Union. o them, it didn't matter how long it took, as long as they managed to come out on top.

NATO and the Warsaw Pact

NATO was created on April 4th, 1949 as a military alliance between the U.S. and many of the Western European nations. It was formed as a defense mechanism against communism. Under the treaty, if any nation that was part of the treaty was attacked, then all of the other allied nations would come to its defense. At first, NATO was really just an agreement for the U.S. to defend any of the nations involved in NATO, but that began to change after 1950. After the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Korea, the other nations began to realize that they couldn't just wait around for the U.S> to defend them against the Soviet Union.

The Warsaw Pact was created 6 years after NATO was created between the Soviet Union and its "satelite countries". The Warsaw Pact was originally created to counter NATO. At first, it was incredibly powerful, but the Warsaw Pact soon fell far behind NATO technologically. Eventually, the Warsaw Pact collapsed and was terminated in 1991. Oddly enough, the Soviet Union-now Russia- is now a part of NATO when NATO was originally created to go against it.