Setting the Stage: End of WWII, The Start of the Cold War, and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age.

The Cold War, In essence, was The democratic/capitalist United States versus the communist/dictatorial Soviet Union. So how did it come to this? Where did it all go wrong? Some would Say that the Cold War started after World War One, for various reasons, however the majority of Historians the start of the cold war would be after the end of World War II.
    To be more specific, it was literally drawn out when the Leaders of the Allied forces, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, met at the Yalta conference in February of 1945. The mains points were to go about dealing mainly with agreeing that victory wouldn’t be achieved until the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany,including the demilitarization of Germany, establishing democratic governments, and reestablishing borders in previously Nazi-Occupied land and other parts of war-torn Europe. Each leader proposed their own plans as to how the territories should be divvied up amongst the leading powers, and eventually came up with this:

Germany Post WWII

Berlin, Post WWII

Four territories, with the three of the largest belonging to the central powers, and the fourth to the France. With Berlin also being a city with diplomatic importance, it too was divided into four territories. They also helped reestablish the border of Poland. The conference also concluded that Stalin would help the U.S. in fighting Japan 90 days after the defeat of Germany.
    By July of 1945, Germany had been defeated, and the 3 Allied powers met once more in Potsdam, Germany, which was aptly named The Potsdam Conference. They all agreed as to how Germany should be handled Post -war, but by this time however, relationships changed between the Allied forces since February, mainly due to the fact that a) Harry Truman was now the president, as was Clement Attlee new as British Prime Minister, b) Stalin’s Red Army had begun occupying eastern Europe: the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and most importantly (The reason I even mention the Potsdam Conference) is c) The U.S. had successfully built and tested an atomic bomb. To keep relations honest with the Soviets, Truman had told Stalin that he had “a new weapon of unusually destructive force” (Keegan). This then lead to Truman to the Potsdam Declaration, where he delivered an ultimatum to Japan to surrender, or else. Japan ignored the threat, and later that year in August, The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 3 days apart from each other, forever changing how the World would (or wouldn’t) fight its wars.