ABSTRACT
In July 1945, at the first post-war peace conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. It soon became apparent that the Soviets were not going to honour the Yalta agreements to permit free elections in those states of Eastern Europe that had been occupied by the Germans and liberated by the Red Army. The years 1946-1948 witnessed a series of international crises – in Eastern Europe and across the Northern Tier, culminating with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in March 1948, and the Berlin crisis during the summer of that same year. They appeared to many in the American administration to portend a Soviet expansionist trend, a search for buffer zones, or spheres of influence between themselves and Western Europe. But Soviet actions might easily lead, if only by accident, to another global conflict, this time between the Western and the Soviet blocs.
