The Korean War was fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following years of hostilities between the two countries. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union while South Korea was supported by the United States and allied countries. The fighting ended with an armistice on 27 July 1953.
World War II or the Second World War was a global conflict that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries, including all the great powers, fought as part of two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. Many participating countries invested all available economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities into this total war, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and delivery of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. It was by far the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in 70–85 million fatalities. Millions died due to genocides, including the Holocaust, as well as starvation, massacres, and disease. In the wake of Axis defeat, Germany, Austria, and Japan were occupied, and war crime tribunals were conducted against German and Japanese leaders.
Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can produce destruction in a much shorter time and can have a long-lasting radiological result. A major nuclear exchange would likely have long-term effects, primarily from the fallout released, and could also lead to secondary effects, such as "nuclear winter", nuclear famine, and societal collapse. A global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to various scenarios including the extinction of the human species.
World War III, WWIII, WW3, or the Third World War are the names given to the hypothetical global conflict subsequent to World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since as early as 1941. Some apply it loosely to limited or more minor conflicts such as the Cold War or the war on terror. In contrast, others assume that such a conflict would surpass prior world wars in both scope and destructive impact.
The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though none engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.
The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was the United States' general plan for nuclear war from 1961 to 2003. The SIOP gave the President of the United States a range of targeting options, and described launch procedures and target sets against which nuclear weapons would be launched. The plan integrated the capabilities of the nuclear triad of strategic bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), and sea-based submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). The SIOP was a highly classified document, and was one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy.
The military history of the Soviet Union began in the days following the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. In 1918 the new government formed the Red Army, which then defeated its various internal enemies in the Russian Civil War of 1917–22. The years 1918–21 saw defeats for the Red Army in the Polish–Soviet War (1919–21) and in independence wars for Estonia (1918–20), Latvia (1918–20) and Lithuania (1918–19). The Red Army invaded Finland ; fought the Battles of Khalkhin Gol of May–September 1939 against Japan and its client state Manchukuo; it was deployed when the Soviet Union, in agreement with Nazi Germany, took part in the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and occupied the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. In World War II the Red Army became a major military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany and conquered Manchuria. After the war, it occupied East Germany and many nations in central and eastern Europe, which became satellite states in the Soviet bloc.
World War II officially ended in Asia on September 2, 1945, with the surrender of Japan on the USS Missouri. Before that, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, causing Emperor Hirohito to announce the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on August 15, 1945, which would eventually lead to the surrender ceremony on September 2.
This is a timeline of the main events of the Cold War, a state of political and military tension after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc and powers in the Eastern Bloc.
The militarisation of space involves the placement and development of weaponry and military technology in outer space. The early exploration of space in the mid-20th century had, in part, a military motivation, as the United States and the Soviet Union used it as an opportunity to demonstrate ballistic-missile technology and other technologies having the potential for military application. Outer space has since been used as an operating location for military spacecraft such as imaging and communications satellites, and some ballistic missiles pass through outer space during their flight. As of 2018, known deployments of weapons stationed in space include only the Almaz space-station armament and pistols such as the TP-82 Cosmonaut survival pistol.
Project 596 was the first nuclear weapons test conducted by the People's Republic of China, detonated on 16 October 1964, at the Lop Nur test site. It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device made from weapons-grade uranium (U-235) enriched in a gaseous diffusion plant in Lanzhou.
The Third World War and The Third World War: The Untold Story are war novels by Sir John Hackett, published in 1978 and 1982, by Macmillan in New York and Sidgwick & Jackson in London, respectively. The novels detail a hypothetical World War III waged between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in 1985, written in the style of a non-fiction historical retrospective interspersed with accounts of the conflict from the perspectives of various people.
World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears. The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts. U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
Two global superpowers, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), rose in the aftermath of World War II. The war's aftermath was also defined by the rising threat of nuclear warfare, the creation and implementation of the United Nations as an intergovernmental organization, and the decolonization of Asia and Africa by European and east Asian powers, most notably by the United Kingdom, France, and Japan.
This timeline of nuclear weapons development is a chronological catalog of the evolution of nuclear weapons rooting from the development of the science surrounding nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. In addition to the scientific advancements, this timeline also includes several political events relating to the development of nuclear weapons. The availability of intelligence on recent advancements in nuclear weapons of several major countries is limited because of the classification of technical knowledge of nuclear weapons development.
Ukraine, a republic of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922–1991, once hosted Soviet nuclear weapons and delivery systems on its territory. Together with Russia, Ukraine was a part of the former Soviet Union but its population voted overwhelmingly for independence in 1991, which ended any realistic chance of the Soviet Union staying together even on a limited scale.
The main issues of the United States foreign policy during the 1945–1953 presidency of Harry S. Truman include:
Soviet involvement in regime change entailed both overt and covert actions aimed at altering, replacing, or preserving foreign governments. In the 1920s, the nascent Soviet Union intervened in multiple governments primarily in Asia, acquiring the territory of Tuva and making Mongolia into a satellite state. During World War II, the Soviet Union helped overthrow many puppet regimes of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan, including in East Asia and much of Europe. Soviet forces were also instrumental in ending the rule of Adolf Hitler over Germany.
United States war plans for a conflict with the Soviet Union (USSR) were formulated and revised on a regular basis between 1945 and 1950. Although most were discarded as impractical, they nonetheless would have served as the basis for action had a conflict occurred. At no point was it considered likely that the Soviet Union or United States would resort to war, only that one could potentially occur as a result of a miscalculation. Planning was conducted by agencies of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in collaboration with planners from the United Kingdom and Canada.
