<P> On 6 September 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely . As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people...it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..." </P> <P> A few weeks after the release of this "Long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri . The speech called for an Anglo - American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic". Only a week later, on 13 March Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying that Churchill could be compared to Hitler insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of English - speaking nations so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that such a declaration was "a call for war on the U.S.S.R." The Soviet leader also dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere . He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, (was) trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries". 1 </P> <P> By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman was outraged by the Soviet Union's perceived resistance to American demands in Iran, Turkey and Greece, as well as their rejection of the Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons . In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Kingdom of Greece in its civil war against Communist - led insurgents . </P> <P> The US government's response to this announcement was the adoption of containment, the goal of which was to stop the spread of Communism . Truman delivered a speech that called for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes . American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence even though Stalin had told the Communist Party to cooperate with the British - backed government . (The insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia against Stalin's wishes .) </P>

When did the cold war started and finished