Chapter 25 Key Terms

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Yalta Conference: A meeting in Yalta of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Joseph Stalin in February 1945, in which the leaders discussed the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, the creation of the United Nations, and Russian entry into the war against Japan.

United Nations: An international body agreed upon at the Yalta Conference, and founded at a conference in San Francisco in 1945, consisting of a General Assembly, in which all nations are represented, and a Security Council of the five major Allied powers--the United Stats, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union--and seven other nations elected on a rotating basis.

Potsdam Conference: The July 1945 conference in which American officials convinced the Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin to accept German reparations only from the Soviet zone, or far eastern part of Germany. The agreement paved the way for the division of Germany into East and West. Truman announced his possession of an atomic bomb.

containment: The basic U.S. policy of the Cold War, which sought to contain communism within its existing geographic boundaries. Initially, containment focused on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but in the 1950s it came to include China, North Korea, and other parts of the developing world.

Truman Doctrine: President Harry S. Truman's commitment to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjection by armed minorities or by outside pressures." First applied to Greece and Turkey in 1947, it became the justification for U.S. intervention into several countries during the Cold War.

Marshall Plan: Aid program begun in 1948 to help European economies recover from World War II.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): Military alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and Western European nations to counter any possible Soviet threat.

Warsaw Pact: A military alliance established in Eastern Europe in 1955 to counter the NATO alliance; it included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union.

NSC-68: Top-secret government report of April 1950 warning that national survival in the face of Soviet communism required a massive military buildup.

Korean War:

Taft-Hartley Act: Law passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1947 that overhauled the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, placing restrictions on organized labor that made it more difficult for unions to organize workers.

Red Scare: A term for anticommunist hysteria that swept the United States, first after World War I, and led to a series of government raids on alleged subversives and a suppression of civil liberties.

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): Congressional committee especially prominent during the early years of the Cold War that investigated Americans who might be disloyal to the government or might have associated with communists or other radicals.

Joseph McCarthy:

domino theory: President Eisenhower's theory of containment, which warned that the fall of a non-Communist government to communism in Southeast Asia would trigger the spread of communism to neighboring countries.

Eisenhower Doctrine: