The Cold War: History in an Hour

But about 130 people lost their lives in trying to escape to freedom.

border dispute at the wall on 27 October resulted in Soviet and US tanks facing each other ‘nose to nose’ at Checkpoint Charlie. With instructions coming in from Washington and Moscow, the tanks waited on high alert, ready to open fire if necessary. Finally, after a sixteen-hour stand-off, the first Soviet tank withdrew five yards

Every Soviet citizen lived under the cloud of possible arrest and subsequent deportation or execution.

The superpowers knew that these bombs could not be used against each other – to do so would destroy each other and would make the world uninhabitable. To the end of the Cold War the very existence of humanity lay in this fragile balance of deterrence, known as Mutually Assured Destruction or, rather aptly, MAD. The time had come to discuss how to slow down the arms race, and the first of many, rather meaningless, agreements came in 1963 with the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

Armed with information gleaned from spies working for the US atomic industry and with the use of forced labour, the Soviet Union had broken the US’s monopol

n 29 August 1949, in the Kazakhstan desert, Soviet scientists, under the leadership of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police, successfully detonated their first atomic bomb, four years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

response, came the proclamation of East Germany with its somewhat misleading title, the ‘German Democratic Republic’.

The political division of Germany became official on 23 May 1949 with the formal proclamation in Bonn of the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’ (West Germany). Five months later, in re

potatoes. On 12 May, 1949, Stalin, knowing he couldn’t risk shooting down the planes, and realizing the PR disaster he’d caused, lifted the blockade.

During the 323 days of the Berlin Airlift (pictured below),