The Cold War was a time of tension between the Soviet Union and The United States lasting from the end of WW2 in 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The USSR and US were rivals due to their differing political ideologies, the US being capitalist and the USSR being communist with both countries wishing to spread their ideologies around the world and keep the others from spreading . There was never any bloodshed between the two countries due to MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) which is a doctrine that says if one country fires nuclear weapons at the other, the other country will retaliate by firing their own, annihilating both countries in an interaction where there’s no winners . While there was no direct fighting between the superpowers, …show more content…
During the Cold War the US and USSR believed they needed to one up each other in technological advances to stay on top, when the USSR launched the world’s first satellite “Sputnik” into orbit in 1957, US citizens became worried that the US was falling behind in space exploration which many saw as the next American frontier. Shortly after this in 1958, NASA was created and launched its own satellite “Explorer I” designed by the US army, a year later, the USSR launched “Luna 2” which was the first space probe to hit the moon. In another big win for the Soviets, in 1961 they launched the first person to orbit the Earth, just a month later the US sent an American into space . Later that month President Kennedy made a bold claim saying that the US would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, later that year, Project Apollo was put in place. The government upped NASAs budget by nearly 500% in the following years, in 1968 Apollo 8 was launched which orbited the moon, and just a year later Apollo 11 was launched which put the first people on the moon. With the US being the first to put a man on the moon, the space race was pretty much over, and the US had won, this significantly boosted American morale in the Cold War and made the Soviets look evil in their efforts to prove the strength of communist