Containment and Cold War

Japan vs. China 1937

• July 1937 Japan invades China, bringing a coalition of GMD and CCP.

• Invasion of Shanghai

• The Rape of Nanking• Asia’s parallel to the

Spanish Civil War, civilian targets

The Axis Powers in WW II

• Hitler signs the Tripartite Agreement with Japan in 1939, hoping that Japan will slow down Russia or the US.

• Japan signs neutrality agreement with USSR in 1940.

• Japan is under economic Embargo by US over oil interests in China, but not openly in the war yet.

• December 7, 1941, Japan bombs Pearl Harbor to force US into war.

End to the Asian War

August 6 and 9, 1945, the US drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 200,000 citizens.August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito signs an unconditional surrenderJapan is barred from any military development and left to rebuild an infrastructure

Cold War • During WW II, Big Three

meetings between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt determine what Europe and Russia will look like after the War. (Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam.

• Churchill begins worrying about the “buffer zone” that Stalin wants.

• By 1945 Roosevelt is dead and Churchill is out of office, only Stalin left

• 1946 Fulton Missouri, Churchill wars of an “Iron Curtain” descending across Europe.

Factors of the Cold War

• US having atomic weapons.

• 1949 USSR counters with their own atomic detonation.

• NATO vs. Warsaw Pact• Economic recovery

plans

• 1957 Sputnik is first satellite to orbit earth, from USSR.

• Containment of Communism has already led to US “red scare”

• Arms race

The Crises of 1956

• Stalin died in 1953, leaving a vacuum of power in the Politburo in USSR.

• Ultimately Khrushchev wins out, unexpected.

• Possible thaw?

• 1956 Khrushchev’s “secret speech” begins a policy of de-Stalinization.

• Polish uprising sees Wladislaw Gomulko as the new President.

• Hungarian protest against Soviet presence led by Imre Nagy, overthrown, tanks in Budapest, crackdown.

• Thaw is over.

Stagnant 70’s decline in Communism

Arms race, SALT talks• The arms race continues through the 1970s,

ultimately sees the Helsinki Accords signed by 35 nations.

• Reaganomics and the escalation eventually bankrupts the Soviet Union

• “The Evil Empire” begins to change under Gorbychev with glasnost’ and perestroika

• The inability to retain Eastern Europe in communism, plus Reagan’s “Tear Down the Wall” (not pink floyd) sees the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

David Hasselhoff on the Wall

Stick a Fork in it

• Gorbychev forced from office in 1991.• Yeltsin takes over and institutes “democracy”

or something like that.• Mao died in 1975 after the Cultural

Revolution, attempting to instill full communism, but not terribly successfully.

• China has a hybrid of capitalism and communism but political opposition

Yeltsin: Nash Geroi

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5FIoocja4k