Today In American History

On this day in 1952 the United States and Great Britain issue a joint statement regarding U.S. airbases in the United Kingdom: an agreement stating that the U.S. will not launch an atomic attack on the European mainland without specific consent of the government of Great Britain. This joint agreement winds up a conference in Washington between President Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill that would be the first of his four official transatlantic visits to the U.S. during his second term as Prime Misister.

Just six years earlier right after the British Prime Minister had been ousted in a new post war government opposition realignment, he had been traveling with President Truman in Missouri when Mr. Churchill delivered his now famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminister College in Fulton in which he stated:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow."

With this speech Churchill helped introduce a new post war lexicon that would define a new era of "cold war" alliances and competing hegemonic interests throughout the world.