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Conflict and Tension Between East and West, 1945–1972

Military rivalries: the arms race and the space race

  • 3 things to know
  • Paper 1 section B

Overview

The arms race from the Soviet atomic bomb to the hydrogen bomb, mutually assured destruction, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and the space race from Sputnik and Gagarin to ICBMs, Polaris, Kennedy's Moon pledge and the Apollo 11 landing.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

What is an arms race?

Numbers

When did the USSR break the American nuclear monopoly, and how quickly did the next stage follow?

Key term

What was meant by mutually assured destruction?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What is an arms race?

    Model answer

    A competition in which each side builds more and better weapons because the other has done so, with neither daring to stop.

  2. 2

    When did the USSR break the American nuclear monopoly, and how quickly did the next stage follow?

    Model answer

    It tested an atomic bomb in 1949; the USA tested a far more powerful hydrogen bomb in 1952 and the USSR had one the following year.

  3. 3

    What was meant by mutually assured destruction?

    Model answer

    Neither side could attack first without being destroyed in the reply, so the weapons were held to prevent a war rather than to fight one.

  4. 4

    When was NATO founded, and which countries set it up?

    Model answer

    In April 1949, by the USA, Canada, Britain, France and eight other western states.

  5. 5

    What did the members of NATO commit themselves to?

    Model answer

    To treat an armed attack on any one of them as an attack on them all, and to defend one another with American forces stationed in Europe.

  6. 6

    What event of 1955 provoked the founding of the Warsaw Pact?

    Model answer

    West Germany was rearmed and admitted to NATO, which the USSR saw as German soldiers being pointed east again only ten years after the war.

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