Investigates the attempt of Great Britain to commandeer Germany's Third Reich assets as reparations and its mixed results. Allied Commission on Reparations' plans under the Postdam Conference of 1945; Concerns influencing the British administration's approach to official and unofficial seizures of German property; Decline of the possible potential advantage of reparations to the British economy's public sector.

The role played by Britain in the conduct of East-West relations during the formative period of the cold war, from 1945 to 1950, is only now beginning to receive the detailed scholarly attention which the subject merits by virtue of its importance and which the release of the official papers makes possible.

There is little reason to doubt that the Truman Doctrine was the direct result of the British announcement to the Americans on 2I February I 947 of the almost immediate withdrawal of financial aid to Greece.1 The Truman Doctrine, in turn, is generally accepted as the real beginning of the Cold War; at least it is the declaration of full American involvement. What is not so definite is the British motivation for their withdrawal of aid.

Winston Churchill did not start the Cold War and he did not finish it. But he did see it coming, sounded its early warning, and defined the central problems that would occupy the leaders that followed him.

Winston Churchill urged the United States to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union to win the Cold War, a newly released document reveals. The previously unseen memorandum from the FBI archives details how Britain’s wartime leader made his views known to a visiting American politician in 1947.

Britain was the first country to investigate the development of nuclear weapons. Work by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in Febuary 1940, and the MAUD Committee (a code name chosen from the first name of one member's nanny) report showed the feasibility of fission weapons. British scientists, known as "the British Mission," later made major contributions to the Manhattan Project.

Nobody disputes that the end of the cold war was a defining moment for the United States—and even more obviously for Germany and the Soviet Union. But when it comes to Britain there has been strikingly little reflection about how things changed in 1989. Historians and commentators have tended to regard the cold war as something that happened somewhere else; and to regard the defining questions for post-war Britain as the loss of empire, or the endless prevarication about Europe.

Key documents from historic moments including 'First meeting with Gorbachev, 16 Dec 1984', '1975: The Iron Lady I (Chelsea speech)', '1976: The Iron Lady II' (Kensington speech - Attacking detente & angering the Soviets) and '1987: Interviewed on Soviet Television'.

Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who passed away this week, built a surprising mutual-admiration relationship with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s – including behind-the-scenes agreement against the reunification of Germany, and profound disagreement about nuclear abolition – according to translated Soviet records of key meetings between the two leaders, posted online today for the first time by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Chapter extract from The Cambridge History of the Cold War Volume 1: Origins. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp112-132.
On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Britain and its loyal Empire–Commonwealth had 4 million troops serving overseas for the Allied cause. Wartime summit meetings had reinforced both the reality and the image of a Britain as a world power as Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States parleyed with the Soviet leader, Iosif Stalin, while the tide of fighting brought them all towards victory. It was therefore inevitable that the British would have a large role in shaping the untidy transition that was to come, and that would transform the world from war to an uncertain peace.