1945
7 May: World War Two: Germany surrenders
14 August: World War Two: Japan surrenders
1946
5 March: Britain’s former prime minister, Winston Churchill, delivers his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech.
1947
12 March: US president, Harry S. Truman, proposes the ‘Truman Doctrine’.
5 June: Announcement by US secretary for state, George C Marshall (pictured), of the European Recovery Program, commonly called the Marshall Plan
1948
25 February: Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia
24 June: Start of the Berlin Blockade
1949
4 April: NATO established
12 May: End of the Berlin Blockade
23 May: Formal division into East and West Germany
29 August: Soviet Union detonate their first atomic bomb
1 October: People’s Republic of China founded
1950
February: Start of the McCarthy era
25 June: Start of the Korean War
19 October: China enters Korean War
1952
1 November: USA detonate world’s first hydrogen bomb
1953
5 March: Death of Stalin
16 June: Uprising in East Germany
27 July: End of Korean War
1954
21 July: Vietnam divided at the 17th parallel between North and South Vietnam
1955
14 May: Formation of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe
1956
25 February: I his ‘Secret Speech‘, Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, denounces Stalin’s method of rule
June: Polish Uprising
23 October: Start of Hungarian Uprising
November: Suez Crisis
10 November: End of the Hungarian Uprising
1957
4 October: Soviet Union launches the first satellite, or Sputnik, into space
1958
January: Chairman Mao launches the Great Leap Forward
1959
1 January: Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba
September: Khrushchev visits USA
26 September: Start of Vietnam War
1960
May: US U-2 spyplane shot down over Moscow
1961
12 April: Soviet astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, becomes the first man in space
17 April: US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion
12-13 August: Berlin Wall erected
1962
October: Cuban Missile Crisis
1963
June: US president, John F. Kennedy, visits West Berlin
22 November: Assassination of John F.Kennedy
1964
2 August: Gulf of Tonkin incident escalates Vietnam War
1966
16 May: Chairman Mao (pictured) launches the Cultural Revolution
1967
5-10 June: Arab-Israeli Six-Day War
1968
4 April: Assassination of Martin Luther King
20-21 August: Soviet tanks crush Czechoslovakian ‘Prague Spring‘
1969
20 July: USA lands first man on the moon
1972
February: Richard Nixon visits China
26 May: SALT I signed
1973
15 January: Nixon halts US bombing of North Vietnam
30 April: North Vietnamese tanks enter Saigon
6-25 October: Arab-Israeli ‘Yom Kippur’ War
1974
8 August: Nixon resigns following Watergate scandal
1975
30 April: South Vietnam surrenders marking the end of the Vietnam War
1 August: Helsinki Accords signed
1978
16 October: Karol Wojtyla is appointed Pope John Paul II
1979
1 April: Islamic republic proclaimed in Iran with the Ayatollah Khomeini (pictured) at its head
24 December: Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan
1981
13 December: Martial law imposed in Poland and Solidarity banned
1983
1 September: Soviet fighter plane shoots down a Korean civilian airliner
1986
26 April: Explosion at nuclear power plant at Chernobyl
1987
12 June: Ronald Reagan visits West Berlin
1989
15 February: Completion of Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan
16 June: Reburial and state funeral of Hungarian leader, Imre Nagy, killed shortly after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956
June: Student uprising in Beijing
24 August: First post-war, non-communist eastern European government comes to power in Poland
7 October: East Germany celebrates fortieth anniversary
9 November: Fall of the Berlin Wall (pictured)
17 November: Start of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia
25 December: Execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in Romania
1990
11 March-4 May: Baltic States declare independence from the Soviet Union
3 October: Germany re-unified
1991
12 June: Boris Yeltsin elected president of the Russian Federation
1 July: Warsaw Pact dissolved
June: Last Soviet tanks leave Eastern Europe
19 August: Failed communist coup in Russia
8 December: Founding of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
25 December: Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigns
31 December: The USSR is formally dissolved
Read about the Cold War in The Cold War: History In An Hour by Rupert Colley, published by Harper Press and available in digital formats and audio.
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