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Reading Excerpt: The Cold War: A New History (John Lewis Gaddis)

Chapter Two: Deathboats and Lifeboats - Pages 48-65

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1. How many Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs did General MacArthur order dropped on advancing Chinese columns?

2. How many Chinese soldiers were killed in the atomic blasts?

3. The Soviet Union provided the Americans with an ultimatum demanding a halt to all military operations in Korea within a period of how many hours?

4. What South Korean cities did the Soviet Union devastate with atomic bombs?

5. What caused anti-American riots to break out across Japan?

6. What policy did General MacArthur disagree with that led President Truman to sack/fire him?

7. How many Chinese soldiers probably died in the Korean war?

8. How many Koreans died in the war?

9. The only decisive outcome of the war was the establishment of a precedent. What was the precedent?

10. “As technology advanced, so too did ?”

11. Who described war as, “a continuation of political activity by other means.”?

12. What caused the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires to disappear?

13. What would the builders of the atomic bomb have been surprised to discover?

14. The shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began a process that changed something previously thought un-changeable. What was changing?

15. If the “human animal” did not change Truman wrote, the human age might be succeeded by what age?

16. At what World War I battle did 21,000 British troops die in a single day (most in the first hour)?

17. Under the Baruch Plan the US would not give up its monopoly of nuclear weapons until what process had been made foolproof?

18. Why was it likely, during the first few years of the postwar era, that the Soviets knew more about American atomic bombs than the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff?

19. What “extraordinary thing” did the “ordinary man” Truman do?

20. What did Stalin’s anxieties lead him to do?

21. Why did Stalin reject the Baruch Plan?

22. Stalin had “shrewdly calculated” something about the atom bomb. What was his calculation?

23. How many atom bombs did the USA have at the end of 1950? How many did the Soviets have?

24. Why was it likely that an American atomic attack on China would result in a Soviet attack on Western Europe?

25. Who had authorized the North Korean attack on the south?

26. In what sphere of the Korean War (air, land or sea) did American and Soviet fighting men clash?

27. Why did George Kennan and Robert Oppenheimer oppose the development of a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb?

28. The problem was not so much “how to defeat an adversary as how to convince him” not to do what?

29. How many months separated the American and Soviet hydrogen bomb test?

30. How did President Eisenhower’s opinion about using nuclear weapons compare to President Truman’s?

31. The thermonuclear test code-named BRAVO had a yield of fifteen megatons. How much more powerful was this explosion than the one that had devastated Hiroshima in August, 1945?

32. Soviet scientists reported that the “detonation of just a hundred hydrogen bombs” would have what effect on the planet?

33. What did Churchill mean when he said “it is to the universality of potential destruction that I think we may look with hope and even confidence.”?

34. The reading ends with responsibility for managing the “thermonuclear revolution” on the shoulders of what Soviet and American leaders?

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