1. The Cold War (1945–1991)
+2. The Vietnam War (1955-1975)
+3. Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989)
-4. The Munich massacre (1972)
+\-5. 1973 oil crisis and 1979 energy crisis
+\-6. Richard Nixon (1974)
+\-7. The Space Exploration
+8. Technology
+Contents
I. Cold War 1. Scenario of the 1970s
2. Vietnam War
3. Afghan War II. Space Exploration 1. Apollo–Soyuz Test Project
2. To Space and Back
III. Technology 1. Supersonic Flights
2. Computers
I. Cold War
In the second half of the 20th century, a confrontation between the two strongest superpowers of its time, the USA and the USSR, took place on the world political arena and received the definition of "cold war".
After the end of World War II the United States and the Soviet Union were the most powerful politically and economically and wanted to strengthen their leadership positions in every possible way.
In 1946, in the American city of Fulton, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous speech in which he accused the Soviet Union of aggressive expansion. The "Truman Doctrine" which he spoke in 1947, further worsened relations between the USSR and its allies. Both of these events were considered by the USSR government as a declaration of war.
The period of the Cold War lasted from 1946 to 1991. Despite the fact that the confrontation between the two powers did not turn into a "hot" war, they nevertheless took part on opposite sides in military conflicts.
1. Scenario of the 1970s By the 1970s, both sides had started making allowances for peace and security. The US opened relations with the People's Republic of China (which at the time had poor relations with the Soviet Union) as a strategic counterweight to the USSR. A number of self-proclaimed communist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in the Third World, including Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Nicaragua.
In the 1973 oil crisis, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cut their petroleum output. This raised oil prices and hurt Western economies, but helped the Soviet Union by generating a huge income from its oil sales.
In February 1979, after the Islamic Revolution Iran lost the United States as one of its most powerful allies. The United States then deployed twenty ships in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea including two aircraft carriers, and there were constant threats of war between the U.S. and Iran.
The global balance of power had shifted to the Soviet Union following the appearance of several pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World in the latter half of the 1970s (such as in Nicaragua and Ethiopia), and the action in Afghanistan demonstrated the Soviet Union's superiority.
2. Vietnam War The Vietnam War was a 20 year (1955-1975) conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as a part of the Cold War. The conflict was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other socialist countries; South Vietnam was supported by the United States and their capitalist allies. More than 3 million people were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians.
In 1970, American President Richard Nixon announced the withdrawal of American troops from border areas where most of the fighting took place.
The Paris Peace Agreement (January 1973) officially ended direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, created a ceasefire, guaranteed the territorial integrity of Vietnam and called for elections or a political settlement between North and South Vietnam. All U.S. forces were completely withdrawn by March 1973. But the warfare continued till 1975.
On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam formed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
(версия ДАСа) The Vietnam War of 1964-1975 was one of the most important events of the Cold War period. Its course and results largely predetermined the further development of events throughout Southeast Asia.
The armed struggle lasted for more than 14 years, from the end of 1960 to April 30, 1975. Direct US military intervention in the affairs of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam continued for more than eight years. Military operations also took place in a number of regions of Laos and Cambodia.
The USSR and China took the side of North Vietnam, providing it with extensive economic, technical and military assistance. By 1965 alone, the DRV received 340 million rubles from the Soviet Union free of charge or in the form of loans. Weapons, ammunition and other materiel were supplied to the VNA. Soviet military specialists helped VNA soldiers to master military equipment.
The successful completion of the war in Vietnam made it possible in 1976 to unite the DRV and the RSV into a single state - the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
3. End of the War U.S. soldiers killed more than 400 unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai in 1968. After the My Lai Massacre, anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In 1968 and 1969, there were hundreds of marches and gatherings throughout the country. In the year 1969, the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D.C., as over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully, calling for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.
In 1973, the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until 1975.
After years of warfare, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese were killed, while 3 million were wounded and another 12 million became refugees. Warfare had demolished the country’s infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly.
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II. Space Exploration
After World War II both the United States and the Soviet Union realized how important rocket research would be to the military. They each recruited the top rocket scientists to help with their research. Soon both sides were making progress in rocket technology.
After achieving great results in flying to space and even to the Moon, the USSR and the USA decided to concentrate on orbital space stations, that let to stay longer and safer in orbit. Both superpowers launched their orbital workstations with their ups and downs. These stations were designed for long duration and were meant to dock with different spaceships.
1. Apollo–Soyuz Test Project The two nations planned a joint mission to dock the orbital workstation using their own rockets to get there, known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. To prepare, the US designed a docking module that was compatible with the Soviet docking system, which allowed any of their craft to dock with any other. The module was also necessary as an airlock to allow the men to visit each other's craft, which had incompatible cabin atmospheres.
The joint mission began in 1975. The two craft successfully rendezvoused and docked. The crew shook hands, exchanged gifts, visited each other's craft and conducted joint experiments.
(версия ДАСа) Apollo–Soyuz was the first crewed international space mission, carried out jointly by the United States and the Soviet Union in July 1975. Millions of people around the world watched on television as a United States Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Union Soyuz capsule. The project, and its memorable handshake in space, was a symbol of warming between the two superpowers during the Cold War, and it is generally considered to mark the end of the Space Race, which had begun in 1957 with the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1.
The three American astronauts, Thomas P. Stafford, Vance D. Brand, and Deke Slayton, and two Soviet cosmonauts, Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov, performed both joint and separate scientific experiments, including an arranged eclipse of the Sun by the Apollo module to allow instruments on the Soyuz to take photographs of the solar corona. The pre-flight work provided useful engineering experience for later joint American–Russian space flights, such as the Shuttle–Mir program and the International Space Station.
2. To Space and Back A spaceplane is a vehicle that can fly and glide like an aircraft in Earth's atmosphere and move like a spacecraft in outer space. Two types of spaceplanes have successfully launched to orbit, reentered Earth's atmosphere, and landed: the Space Shuttle and Buran.
The Space Shuttle is a partly reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated by the NASA, its development and construction began in the 1970s. It was a part of the Space Shuttle Program and operated till 2011.
The Buran program ("Snowstorm", "Blizzard"), was a Soviet and later Russian reusable spacecraft project that began in 1974 in Moscow and was formally over in 1993. This program was started by the Soviet Union as a response to the United States Space Shuttle program. The project was the largest and the most expensive in the history of Soviet space exploration.
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III. Technology
1. Supersonic Flights The first supersonic (сверхзвуковой) transport was the Soviet Tu-144, which had its first supersonic flight in 1969 and began flying mail between Moscow and Alma-Ata (Nur-Sultan) in 1975. The first supersonic passenger-carrying commercial airplane was the Concorde with a maximum cruising speed of 2,179 km/h. It made its first transatlantic crossing in 1973, and entered regular service in 1976.
2. Computers The birth of modern computing was in the 1970s, which saw the development of: the world's first microprocessor, the C programming language, personal computers, pocket calculators, the first home video game console, the earliest floppy disks and email with the first transmission in 1971.
The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by Motorola in New York City in 1973, weighing about 2 kilograms.
Apple Computer Company, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
3. Floppy disk The floppy disk may be an obsolete technology at this point but its legacy is huge. Floppy disks aren’t used anymore but we haven’t forgotten about them.
The first commercially sold floppy disks hit the market in the early 70s, sold by IBM and Memorex and were 8” in diameter. It was then in the mid to late 70s that the floppy disk format started to get smaller in size. By the late 1970s, Apple had released its own floppys that boasted 256 KB of data storage and in 1978, Tandon released a double-sided floppy disk that could hold 360 KB but it wasn’t until the ‘80s that we were introduced to the 3,5” floppy disk that we all know and love.
Floppy disks mass production didn’t really come until the 80s and 90s but the products developed and released in the 70s was a breakthrough in computing.
4. Portable Cassette Player The first cassette players were simple, mono-record and playback units that required a dynamic microphone. They were bulky, big pieces of equipment that didn’t sound all too well.
However, In the 1970’s, Sony revolutionized the market with the release of the first portable music system. Though it wasn’t a huge engineering innovation, the TPS-L2 Walkman cassette player was small in size, just slightly larger than an actual cassette tape and definitely smaller than the tape recorder. The portable music system came with lightweight headphones, played cassette tapes and was capable of Hi-Fi stereo sound, so, needless to say, everyone wanted a Walkman when they came out.
The biggest impact the portable cassette player really had was how it changed the way we listen to music and it was the first piece of portable technology that eventually led to smaller, more modern looking devices we know and use every day.
5. First Cell Phone The Motorola team shifted the idea of mobile telephony dramatically. Before the DynaTAC (first cellphone), the idea of “mobile phones” wasn’t really all that mobile. Before that, in order to make a telephone call one had to be tied to a machine weighing a ton or carry a huge briefcase. Motorola set out to change that in 1972 when it put all its efforts into building a handheld, portable cell phone. On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper (the chief executive of the Motorola team) made the first call, famously to his top competitor Joel Engel at AT&T, and the direction of mobile telephony changed forever.
At first, it took time for the industry to develop, taking a full ten years from the first call for the DynaTAC to hit shelves. But it was the DynaTAC and the team at Motorola that gave rise to the idea of phones being personal, and phone numbers being tied to a specific person rather than a place. We use Iphones nowadays but we owe just as much to the engineers at Motorola for inventing cellphones in the first place.
