Iron Curtain Winston Churchill\'s \"Iron

Iron Curtain

WINSTON CHURCHILL'S "IRON CURTAIN" SPEECH

At the end of World War II in 1945, the United States shared the status of world superpower with the Soviet Union, measured primarily in military and economic strength. Both the U.S. And the Soviet Union, with Harry S. Truman as President of the United States and Josep Stalin as head of the Communist Party, possessed the largest navies and the most powerful airforces in the world. Yet the United States had a monopoly on the atomic bomb which served to strengthen its influence in world politics.

Overall, the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had been rather tense during the last days of World War II, but at the end of this global conflict which involved nearly every nation on earth, the Soviet Union made it clear to the American government and President Truman that "there must be governments friendly to the Soviet Union in all of the nations of eastern Europe," a policy which the U.S. asserted was in opposition to the agreements reached at Yalta, a conference held in February of 1945 between then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill (Bradley, 362).

By the end of 1945, it was evident that Europe was going to be divided into two immense sections, one controlled by the Soviet Union and the other influenced largely by the policies of U.S. And Great Britain. This situation, the first event that triggered what came to be called the "Cold War," was brought dramatically to the attention of the American people and the world in a speech by Winston S. Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946. In this very long speech, Churchill declared that the Soviet Union was seeking to advance its influence into central Europe as far as possible without actually creating another war, this time between the Soviet Union, the United States and its former World War II allies, such as Great Britain and France.

Thus, the Soviet Union made it known that it would place an "iron curtain" across the entire continent of Europe, from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic, while also urging close cooperation between the U.S. And Great Britain in order to "curtail any and all future advances into central Europe while under Soviet rule" (Bradley, 376). Although at this time Churchill was no longer Prime Minister of Great Britain, his words echoed the sentiments and fears of all Americans, especially those of President Truman who after the speech acknowledged that Churchill had addressed one of the most important problems of post-war America, namely, that the Soviet Union was a great threat to the security of the United States, particularly if and when the Soviet Union gained access to the atomic bomb.