The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union for nuclear weapons escalated quickly after World War II. After the Soviets detonated their first atomic weapon in 1949, the U.S. conducted a series of atomic tests in remote areas,…

Daniel Ortega was the leader of the Sandinistas, a Marxist political party in Nicaragua that ousted the corrupt regime of Anastasio Somoza in 1979 and won national elections in 1984. Beginning in 1981, the Reagan Administration supported the…

This U.S. government intelligence report from 1950 attempts to assess the U.S.S.R.'s military and economic capabilities, while warning that the Soviet Union's avowed intentions include the destruction and/or capitulation of the United States. The…

This National Security Council Report from April 1950 outlines the U.S. Government's response to the challenges presented by the Cold War, including the policy of "containment" that sought to limit Soviet expansion "by all means short of war." The…

Executive Order 9835, signed by President Truman on March 21, 1947, established a loyalty-security program for the executive branch of the federal government. Federal employees were required to take a political test to identify "subversive"…

In this memo to Kennedy's Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles expresses his opposition to the planned Bay of Pigs invasion. Bowles cites as his reasons for concern the invasion's apparent violation of international…

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy released the following statement three days after the launch of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA-backed invasion force consisted of 1,511 Cuban exiles whose objective was to spark a popular uprising against the…

Following the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that brought Fidel Castro to power, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency proposed several plans of action to President Eisenhower. Because the covert operation would take several months to bring about, both 1960…

In 1962, the U.S. Congress passed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 named for the Republican Senator from Iowa, Bourke B. Hickenlooper, who proposed it. The law not only restricted aid to communist countries, but to any country that…

The famous "Long Telegram" was a message sent by George F. Kennan, a high-ranking diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that provided an assessment of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War. In February 1946, the United States Treasury…