Military Rivalries Flashcards
All 13 cards in this deck
What was NATO (1949)?
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: a military alliance of the USA, Canada and western European states, in which an attack on one member counted as an attack on all.
What was the arms race of the late 1940s and 1950s?
The competition to build more powerful nuclear weapons: the USSR tested an atomic bomb in 1949, the USA a hydrogen bomb in 1952 and the USSR in 1953.
What was the Warsaw Pact (1955)?
A military alliance of the USSR and its eastern European satellite states, set up in response to West Germany joining NATO.
What was Sputnik (1957)?
The first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, launched by the USSR; it was a huge technical achievement that shocked and frightened Americans.
What were ICBMs?
Intercontinental ballistic missiles: nuclear missiles that could travel between continents. By 1957 the USSR had missiles able to reach targets in the USA.
What was Polaris?
An American nuclear missile launched from submarines, so missiles could be fired from under the sea and were very hard to destroy.
Who was Yuri Gagarin?
The Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first human in space, extending the USSR's lead in the space race.
What was the Apollo programme?
The American space programme run by NASA; Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969, giving the USA the lead in the space race.
How did the USSR view the creation of NATO in 1949?
As an act of aggression against it, which deepened the ideological divide between East and West and led to the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
What is meant by 'mutually assured destruction'?
Both superpowers had enough nuclear weapons to destroy each other, so neither could attack without being destroyed in retaliation.
Why did Soviet success in the space race worry the USA militarily?
The rockets that launched Soviet satellites could also carry nuclear warheads to targets in the USA.
What was NASA, and why was it set up in 1958?
The US space agency (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), founded by Eisenhower after the shock of Sputnik to lead US space research.
What did Kennedy promise in May 1961 about the space race?
That the USA would land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s.