Creation of the Eastern Bloc

After World War 2, The western allied powers began to have disputes with Russia over
which territories were theirs, and which ones were Russias. In addition during the war in 1939
the USSr entered into the molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany, effectively putting
Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland into German and Soviet spheres of influence. This
allowed the USSR to gain a foothold in those countries and eventually annexed Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania, and turned the other countries under their sphere of influence into so-called satellite states
of the USSR. This effectively created a split in Europe, where the capitalist Western countries were
faced with a wall of Eastern Communist countries and strained U.S.-USSR

relations.

Soviets get the A-bomb

In the wake of the discovery of the wests nuclear projects, the USSR created their own nuclear
program to develop an Atomic weapon. The fathers or heads of this project was Dr. Andrei
Sakharov and Dr. Igor Kurchatov. The Russians needed a weapon that could compete with the
American made A-Bomb. The success of Russias nuclear program was thanks to Russias
extremely skilled sy ring that acquired information through espionage about the hows of the
American Nuclear project. This lead to the fear of nuclear armageddon and forced the U.S.USSR relationship to a very thin and tenuous line because the Russians had stolen some of the
American research.

Creation of Nato
Because of the Expansion of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, the Western nations decided to
form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but is more widely known as NATO. At the time more
than 11 western countries took part in the organization.The Coalition's main goal at the time was
to stop the spread of Communism. This treaty effectively made it so that if one of the countries
that were part of NATO got attacked, it would be considered an attack on all the Countries that
were apart of NATO. This allowed the U.S. to gain more support against the USSR, helping to
dissuade the USSR from attacking any western countries
.