Although the Marshall Plan helped restore Western Europe, other events of the late 1940s kept tension high: the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948, the fall of China and the Soviet A-bomb in 1949. Soviet support for the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 confirmed the threat in Western eyes. The establishment in 1949 of the Western alliance, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and the 1955 Warsaw Pact between the Soviet Union and its satellites solidified the two opposing blocs that shaped the Cold War. |
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