3 Cold War 美国概况 教学课件.pptVIP

Joe McCarthy was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government and elsewhere. The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthys practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist pursuits. Today the term is used more generally to describe demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents. The clash between communism (共产主义) and capitalism (资本主义) began in 1917, following the October Revolution, when Russia emerged as the worlds first communist nation. This outcome made Russian–American relations a matter of major long-term concern for leaders in both countries. The Cold War was the continuing state of conflict, tension and competition that existed primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union and those countries respective allies from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. On the nuclear weapons front, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other. Cuban Missile Crisis The nuclear arms race brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before in the history of the Cold War. By 1947, US president Harry S. Trumans advisors urged him to take immediate steps to counter the Soviet Unions influence. The Truman Doctrine framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. In 1949, Maos Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China, and the Soviet Union promptly created an alliance with the newly-formed Peoples Republic of China. Confronted with the Chinese Revolution and the end of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand the containment policy by reinforcing pro-Western alliance syst