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 Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to international relations. Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. After the war ended, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians.
Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and concerned about Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule of his own country. However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one. During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers.
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