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50 Years Ago in Northeastern Asia

Yalta Conference The battle of Stalingrad from September 1942 to January 1943 is called the turning point of the Second World War. This battle between the Russian and German armies sees the first decisive defeat of a German army in the war. From this point, the German armies were forced to retreat. In 1943, at the battle of Kursk, the Germans attempted to stop the Russian advance, but are defeated again. The leader in charge of the Russian armies responsible for these victories is General Georgi Zhukov.

The February 1945 Yalta Conference, named after the Black Sea resort where it was held, was a meeting between (left to right on the picture) the English leader

Churchill, the American President Roosevelt and Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union. Although the German army still fought on, it was clear the defeat of Nazi Germany was only a few weeks away, and the Yalta conference was held to determine the shape of the borders of the post-war world. However, the Yalta Conference did not prevent the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and Russia.

The American monopoly on nuclear weapons did last long. In 1949, just five years after Hiroshima, the Soviet Union joined the "nuclear club" making its first nuclear weapons test. The arms race between the United States and Russia in building nuclear weapons, which would really last until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, was now underway. Great Britain exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1952, while France became the fourth nuclear power, exploding a test bomb in 1960.

The Space Age was officially born with the launch of the Sputnik I satellite on October 4, 1957 by the Soviet Union. This technological breakthrough--Sputnik, an 85-kilogram sphere with four bug-like antennae, was the first man-made satellite--caught the Americans by surprise. The nuclear arms race between the Americans and Russians was now matched by the Space Race. The Americans followed with a number of satellites of their own, but the Russians scored another coup in 1961, with the flight of Vostok I with Major Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

Sputnik

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