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On a rainy spring afternoon in 1952, your class has just watched a cartoon that showed a turtle hiding in his shell as a monkey sets off a firecracker. It was funny!
“But now we have to be serious,” your teacher says. You’re all going to learn to “duck and cover” like the turtle. Everyone practices diving under their desks and curling into balls.
During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. The Soviet Union is also called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). It was a group of communist nations led by Russia. The idea of communism is that everyone in society shares equally. But often in the Soviet Union, citizens were not treated fairly or equally.
The Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, and Americans worried. What would the U.S.S.R. do with this weapon? In the 1950s, Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower faced the spread of communism around the world. Many Americans saw communism as a threat to democracy.
