War and Conflicts

And the War rages on...

The 1960's was filled with all sorts of conflicts. The biggest conflict was the Vietnam war.

The Vietnam war's conflict was that we were protecting South Vietnam, and North Vietnam was trying to spread Communism towards the South. To defend and honor our promise to protect our ally South Vietnam, we had to go to war for the sake of freedom. However, there was much protest to this war because of the anti-war movement, and teen soldiers were being enlisted.

Another conflict was the Cuban Missile Crisis. U.S. spy planes flew over Cuba and shot photographs of a missile base in Cuba. Long story short, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles and return them to the Soviet Union. The United States was also not allowed to invade Cuba once the missiles were out.

Bay Of Pigs was an unsuccessful attempt of American-backed Cuban exiles trying to overthrow the country's dictator, Fidel Castro. The CIA trained the Cuban exiles, and JFK approved it. The mission was a failure however, because U.S. troops did not move in to back up the exiles in their fight. Of 1,300 exiles, 90 were killed and the rest were taken as prisoners.

The Gulf of Tonkin was when North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Gulf of Tonkin is off the coast of Vietnam. It was claimed that there were two attacks, August 2 and 4, 1964. However, the second assault is questioned, and may be fictional. The media said the USS Maddox was on a "routine" route, however we were really providing South Vietnam with help. This proves the "unprovoked attack" statement false.

In the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were two main enemies. It was called a "Cold War" because they didn't want to fight eachother directly. Instead, they used words that degraded the other side. The Cold War was the "major force in world politics" for about half of the twentieth century.

Nuclear War is war with the threat of nuclear weapons. During the 1960's, the world had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole entire world. Luckily, no bombs were dropped (excluding WW11)