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100-823: The Former Ford Factory (also Old Ford Motor Factory and Old Ford Factory depending on sources) is located along Upper Bukit Timah Road at Bukit Timah in Singapore . It is the place where the British Army forces surrendered to Imperial Japanese Army forces on 15 February 1942 after the Battle of Singapore . The Old Ford Motor Factory had since been gazetted as a National Monument in 2006, and converted into an exhibition gallery and archive named Memories at Old Ford Factory . The permanent exhibition gallery showcases life in Singapore under Japanese wartime rule, and

200-422: A canal along their entire lengths. Bukit Timah Road begins at the junction with Rochor Canal Road, Serangoon Road and Selegie Road just south of Tekka Centre as Bukit Timah Road, follows a canal in a northwest direction up to its junction with Clementi Road where it continues northwards as Upper Bukit Timah Road ( Chinese : 武吉知马路上段 ) until the junction with Bukit Panjang Road and Choa Chu Kang Road near

300-804: A German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in April 1949. The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic that October. Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state , completely reliant on and subservient to

400-646: A general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published 19 October 1945 in the British newspaper Tribune . Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare , Orwell looked at James Burnham 's predictions of a polarized world, writing: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery... James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is,

500-522: A major propaganda effort began in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press in the Soviet Bloc. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of

600-642: A neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO, but his attempts were cut short after he was executed several months later during a Soviet power struggle. The events led to the establishment of the Bundeswehr , the West German military, in 1955. In 1949, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong 's People's Liberation Army defeated Chiang Kai-shek 's United States-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China. The KMT-controlled territory

700-675: A new war". 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 stated a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..." In December,

800-710: A plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already taken by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine , the United States enacted the Marshall Plan , a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union. Under the plan, which President Harry S. Truman signed on 3 April 1948,

900-629: A secret 1950 document, the National Security Council proposed reinforcing pro-Western alliance systems and quadrupling spending on defense. Truman, under the influence of advisor Paul Nitze , saw containment as implying complete rollback of Soviet influence in all its forms. United States officials moved to expand this version of containment into Asia , Africa , and Latin America , in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by communist parties financed by

1000-480: A source of intelligence. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the KGB perfected its use of espionage to sway and distort diplomacy. Active measures were "clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy goals," consisting of disinformation, forgeries, leaks to foreign media, and the channeling of aid to militant groups. Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin , former head of Foreign Counter Intelligence for

1100-555: A time. In 1979, the toppling of pro-US governments in Iran and Nicaragua and a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan again raised fears of war. In the 1980s, the US provided support for anti-communist forces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the leadership of the USSR changed with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev , who expanded political freedoms in his country and the Eastern Bloc. This led to

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1200-542: A unified and neutral Germany was undesirable, with Walter Bedell Smith telling General Eisenhower "in spite of our announced position, we really do not want nor intend to accept German unification on any terms that the Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our requirements." Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 – May 1949), one of the first major crises of

1300-513: The Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic ". A week later, on 13 March, Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying Churchill could be compared to Adolf 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 USSR." The Soviet leader also dismissed

1400-859: The Berlin Wall to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from fleeing to West Berlin , at the time part of United States-allied West Germany . Major crises of this phase included the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945–1949, the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Suez Crisis of that same year, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 ,

1500-482: The Brewster Buffalo ), came in individual break-down parts that were shipped to Singapore in large wooden crates. However, most of the aircraft constructed at the factory never fulfilled their intended purpose of defending British Malaya as well as their main stronghold of Singapore. They were all gradually flown out of Singapore towards the end of January 1942 when the prospects for Singapore's defense against

1600-758: The Cuban Missile Crisis began after deployments of U.S. missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles in Cuba; it is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war . Another major proxy conflict was the Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975; the Soviets solidified their domination of Eastern Europe with operations such as the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Both powers used economic aid in an attempt to win

1700-719: The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the Vietnam War of 1964–1975. Both superpowers competed for influence in Latin America and the Middle East , and the decolonising states of Africa , Asia , and Oceania . Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, this phase of the Cold War saw the Sino-Soviet split . Between China and the Soviet Union's complicated relations within the Communist sphere, leading to

1800-847: The Eastern Bloc . Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito–Stalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained communist but adopted a non-aligned position and began accepting financial aid from the US. Besides Berlin, the status of the city of Trieste was at issue. Until the break between Tito and Stalin, the Western powers and the Eastern bloc faced each other uncompromisingly. In addition to capitalism and communism, Italians and Slovenes, monarchists and republicans as well as war winners and losers often faced each other irreconcilably. The neutral buffer state Free Territory of Trieste , founded in 1947 with

1900-581: The Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942 to 1945, the factory was designated as a butai , or a Japanese-run facility. Nissan , which was then a prominent zaibatsu , or a vertically-integrated monopoly, took over the entire plant to assemble trucks and other motor vehicles for the Japanese military based in Malaya and Singapore as well as abroad elsewhere, such as in its various occupied territories in

2000-511: The KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from anti-Vietnam War activists , the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , and the anti-nuclear movement . In early 1947, France, Britain and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for

2100-518: The Kingdom of Greece in its civil war against Communist-led insurgents. In the same month, Stalin conducted the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement . The US government responded to this announcement by adopting a policy of containment , with the goal of stopping the spread of communism . Truman delivered a speech calling for

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2200-648: The Old Ford Motor Factory at Upper Bukit Timah Road. A canal was built in later years between Dunearn Road and Bukit Timah Road to solve the flooding problem in the area. In the 1990s, a tunnel and a flyover was constructed namely the Bukit Timah Underpass and the Wayang Satu Flyover in order to improve traffic flow. The Newton Flyover was built in the 1970s which goes over the junction of Newton Circus becoming

2300-569: The Sino-Soviet border conflict , while France, a Western Bloc state, began to demand greater autonomy of action. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred to suppress the Prague Spring of 1968, while the United States experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War . In the 1960s–1970s, an international peace movement took root among citizens around

2400-746: The Soviet boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event marking the beginning of the full-blown Cold War and the end of its prelude, as well as ending any hopes at the time for a single German government and leading to formation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic . The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey. With

2500-608: The Space Race . The US and USSR were both part of the Allies of World War II , the military coalition which had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. After the war, the USSR installed satellite governments in the territories of Eastern and Central Europe it had occupied, and promoted the spread of communism to North Korea in 1948 and created an alliance with the People's Republic of China in 1949. The US declared

2600-672: The Ten Mile Junction shopping mall then continues with Woodlands Road. The road passes through the Bukit Timah Planning Area . Buildings named after the road are Bukit Timah Plaza and Bukit Timah Shopping Centre. This road is also affected with the North-South Expressway construction nearby. "Bukit Timah" in Malay means " tin bearing hill ". The British surrendered to the Japanese at

2700-568: The Truman Doctrine of " containment " in 1947, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 to assist Western Europe's economic recovery, and founded the NATO military alliance in 1949 (which was matched by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in 1955). Germany's split occupation zones solidified into East and West Germany in 1949. The first major proxy war of the period was the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, which ended in stalemate. In 1962,

2800-609: The Turkish Straits crisis and Black Sea border disputes were also a major factor in increasing tensions. In September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov ; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in

2900-515: The United Nations Security Council Resolution 82 and 83 backed the defense of South Korea, although the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest of the fact that Taiwan (Republic of China), not the People's Republic of China , held a permanent seat on the council. A UN force of sixteen countries faced North Korea, although 40 percent of troops were South Korean, and about 50 percent were from

3000-399: The 64th anniversary of the British surrender of Singapore and its subsequent fall to Imperial Japan on 15 February 1942. The site was gazetted on 15 February 2006. During the renovation, the front facade and building were preserved to a moderate depth. While the building facade was retained to look as it was first completed in 1941, other rooms remain the same. One example is the boardroom where

3100-782: The Asia-Pacific region. Following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the Ford Motor Factory became a repair depot for British military vehicles. Normal business operations under Ford were resumed in 1947. Between 1947 and 1980, the plant continued to produce cars and vehicles, including parts and equipment such as tires and engine components for the local as well as regional markets. The Ford Factory closed its doors permanently in June 1980, and moved its operations to Regent Motors (Ford Service Centre) at Alexandra Road. The factory

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3200-463: The Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world. The CIA also covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called Crusade for Freedom . The rearmament of West Germany was achieved in the early 1950s. Its main promoter was Konrad Adenauer ,

3300-465: The Cold War, preventing Western food, materials and supplies from arriving in the West Germany's exclave of West Berlin . The United States (primarily), Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other provisions despite Soviet threats. The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against

3400-777: The Communist governments militarily. The fall of the Iron Curtain after the Pan-European Picnic and the Revolutions of 1989 , which represented a peaceful revolutionary wave with the exception of the Romanian revolution and the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992) , overthrew almost all of the Marxist–Leninist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control in

3500-574: The Japanese military's conquest looked bleak and grim. Many battles and skirmishes were fought between the British Army forces and the Imperial Japanese Army forces around the areas of the Ford Motor Factory in Bukit Panjang , Choa Chu Kang , Hillview , Bukit Batok and Bukit Timah . The factory was subsequently taken over by the Japanese forces and used as its military headquarters for commanding all of its forces in both

3600-400: The KGB (1973–1979), described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence ." During the Sino-Soviet split , "spy wars" also occurred between the USSR and PRC. In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform to impose orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in

3700-428: The Marshall Plan, seeing it as an effort by the US to impose its influence on Europe. In response, the Soviet Union established Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) to foster economic cooperation among communist states. The United States and its Western European allies sought to strengthen their bonds and used the policy of containment against Soviet influence; they accomplished this most notably through

3800-514: The Russian Civil War further complicated relations, and although the Soviet Union later allied with Western powers to defeat Nazi Germany , this cooperation was strained by mutual suspicions. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, disagreements about the future of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe , became central. The Soviet Union's establishment of communist regimes in the countries it had liberated from Nazi control—enforced by

3900-421: The Soviet Union and its communist party , which had an influence across the Second World and was also tied to a network of authoritarian states. The Soviet Union had a command economy and installed similarly communist regimes its in satellites. United States involvement in regime change during the Cold War included support for anti-communist and right-wing dictatorships , governments, and uprisings across

4000-408: The Soviet Union was used to monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals. Although to an extent disinformation had always existed, the term itself was invented, and the strategy formalized by a black propaganda department of the Soviet KGB. Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably

4100-400: The Soviet Union, which at the time was undergoing the Era of Stagnation . This phase saw the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing the liberalizing reforms of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("reorganization") and ending Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in 1989. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to further support

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4200-499: The Soviet Union. A number of self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in developing countries , including Angola , Mozambique , Ethiopia , Cambodia , Afghanistan , and Nicaragua . Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. Beginning in the 1980s, this phase was another period of elevated tension. The Reagan Doctrine led to increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on

4300-455: The Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. Following the World War II Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran , the country was occupied by the Red Army in the far north and the British in the south. Iran was used by the United States and British to supply the Soviet Union, and the Allies agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months after the cessation of hostilities. However, when this deadline came,

4400-425: The Soviets agreed to withdraw from Iran after persistent US pressure, an early success of containment policy. By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman was outraged by the perceived resistance of the Soviet Union to American demands in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance

4500-404: The Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in motion a brief scare that war would occur, and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress. In an immediate aftermath of the crisis, the London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in

4600-426: The Soviets remained in Iran under the guise of the Azerbaijan People's Government and Kurdish Republic of Mahabad . Shortly thereafter, on 5 March, 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" dividing Europe from " Stettin in

4700-455: The Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War , but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American Communists , financed by

4800-434: The US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war . Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist – Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948 . All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies, double agents , moles , and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The Soviet KGB ("Committee for State Security"),

4900-476: The US government gave to Western European countries over $ 13 billion (equivalent to $ 189 billion in 2016) to rebuild the economy of Europe . Later, the program led to the creation of the OECD . The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to the European balance of power , such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions or elections. The plan also stated that European prosperity

5000-419: The US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with central and eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance ). Stalin

5100-424: The USSR. In this way, this US would exercise " preponderant power ," oppose neutrality, and establish global hegemony . In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the " Pactomania "), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan (a former WWII enemy), South Korea , Taiwan , Australia , New Zealand , Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS in 1951 and SEATO in 1954), thereby guaranteeing

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5200-412: The United Nations, was split up and dissolved in 1954 and 1975, also because of the détente between the West and Tito. The US and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into " Bizone " (1 January 1947, later "Trizone" with the addition of France's zone, April 1949). As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives of a number of Western European governments and

5300-445: The United States a number of long-term military bases. One of the more significant examples of the implementation of containment was the United Nations US-led intervention in the Korean War . In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities, Kim Il Sung 's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea at the 38th parallel . Stalin had been reluctant to support the invasion but ultimately sent advisers. To Stalin's surprise,

5400-401: The United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan , they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the West German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark currency to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased. The US had secretly decided that

5500-450: The Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard Soviet hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away; in the 1960s, the pact evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained significant scope to pursue their own interests. In 1961, Soviet-allied East Germany constructed

5600-423: The Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors . Edward Jay Epstein describes that the CIA understood that the KGB used "provocations", or fake defections, as a trick to embarrass Western intelligence and establish Soviet double agents. As a result, from 1959 to 1973, the CIA required that East Bloc defectors went through a counterintelligence investigation before being recruited as

5700-402: 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." Soviet territorial demands to Turkey regarding the Dardanelles in

5800-432: 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. Enunciation of

5900-426: The bureau responsible for foreign espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness. The most famous Soviet operation involved its atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States' Manhattan Project , leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. A massive network of informants throughout

6000-483: The chancellor of West Germany, with France the main opponent. Washington had the decisive voice. It was strongly supported by the Pentagon (the US military leadership), and weakly opposed by President Truman; the State Department was ambivalent. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 changed the calculations and Washington now gave full support. That also involved naming Dwight D. Eisenhower in charge of NATO forces and sending more American troops to West Germany. There

6100-416: The communist party. Radio and television organizations were state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party. Soviet radio broadcasts used Marxist rhetoric to attack capitalism, emphasizing themes of labor exploitation, imperialism and war-mongering. Along with the broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America to Central and Eastern Europe,

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6200-441: The country and was banned following the 1991 Soviet coup attempt that August. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist governments across much of Africa and Asia. The Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state, while many of the other republics emerged from the Soviet Union's collapse as fully independent post-Soviet states . The United States

6300-417: The events in World War II , including wartime crops and food rationing. It is also one of the principal markers for the Bukit Timah KTM corridor and the now- Downtown MRT line Stage 2, the others include Beauty World (Seventh Mile) and Bukit Panjang (Tenth Mile). Originally named Memories at Old Ford Factory, it was closed for renovations in 2016, and was known as Syonan Gallery: War and its Legacies , which

6400-451: The exhibition is one of the continuation of final battles from Pasir Panjang and at Fort Siloso . The factory was established and built for the Ford Motor Company of Malaya (also known as Ford Malaya in short) in October 1941 and possessed an Art Deco -style façade, which was typical of most buildings and structures, both public and private, of that era, and became Ford's first motor-car and vehicle assembly and construction plant in

6500-410: The factory following their country's surrender at the end of WWII, and the sightings and sounds of supernatural activities at the locked-up premises, such as the supposed playing of old Japanese music and songs dating back to the 1930s and 1940s and alleged sightings of restless, perhaps sometimes even hostile and malevolent, spirits roaming around the old factory's buildings. Plans for the conversion of

6600-408: The fall of the communist governments of Europe from 1989, which concluded with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Western Bloc included the US and a number of First World nations that were generally capitalist and liberal democratic but tied to a network of often authoritarian Third World states, most of which were the European powers' former colonies . The Eastern Bloc was led by

6700-691: The first ever Semi-Expressway standalone road, that features both the underpass and flyover without changing any direction. Along the road, major landmarks include Tan Kah Kee MRT station , Anglo-Chinese School (Barker Road) , Balmoral Plaza, Coronation Plaza, Hwa Chong Institution , Sixth Avenue MRT station , Kandang Kerbau Women's and Children's Hospital , Kampong Java Park, King Albert Park, Little India MRT station , Hwa Chong International School , Methodist Girls' School , National Junior College , Nanyang Girls' High School , Newton Food Centre , Newton , Singapore Botanic Gardens , Singapore Institute of Management , Tekka Centre , Ngee Ann Polytechnic at

6800-401: The formation of NATO , which was essentially a defensive agreement in 1949. The Soviet Union countered with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which had similar results with the Eastern Bloc. As by that time the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states, the pact has been long considered superfluous. Although nominally a defensive alliance,

6900-549: The junction of Clementi Road and Upper Bukit Timah Road. At Upper Bukit Timah Road, landmarks include Bukit Timah Plaza, Bukit Timah Market and Food Centre, Beauty World, Cheong Chin Nam Road, Hoover Park, The Rail Mall , Former Bukit Timah Fire Station , Saint Joseph's Church, Bukit Timah , and the Old Ford Motor Factory . Businesses and organisations located along Bukit Timah Road include: 1°19′22″N 103°48′46″E  /  1.3228°N 103.8129°E  / 1.3228; 103.8129 Cold War The Cold War

7000-412: The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbours. In The Observer of 10 March 1946, Orwell wrote, "...after the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire." The first use of the term to describe

7100-402: The loyalty of non-aligned countries , such as India . By the 1970s, Japan and Western Europe rebuilt their economies, allowing them more diplomatic independence. After the Sino-Soviet split between the USSR and China in 1961, the U.S. initiated contacts with China in 1972 . In the same year, the US and USSR signed a series of treaties limiting their nuclear arsenals, which eased tensions for

7200-414: The most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. Soviet and Eastern Bloc authorities used various methods to suppress Western broadcasts, including radio jamming . American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles , acknowledged that

7300-592: The old Ford Factory into a war museum similar to the Imperial War Museum began after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The announcement was made in December 2002, with the renovation project costing S$ 10 million. After the 7 July 2005 London bombings , both the Preservation of Sites and Monuments (PSM) and the Singapore government jointly announced the preservation of the site as a National monument on

7400-459: The old factory began circulating amongst the local population, mostly centered on the periods of the end of British colonial rule over the island in February 1942 and the subsequent Japanese occupation of Singapore and its end in 1945. Such paranormal tales include the presence of ghosts of former Japanese personnel and troops once stationed at the motor plant, some of whom also committed suicide at

7500-671: The policy change. Once again, the East Berlin communists attempted to disrupt the Berlin municipal elections , which were held on 5 December 1948 and produced a turnout of 86% and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. The results effectively divided the city into East and West, the latter comprising US, British and French sectors. 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue, and US Air Force pilot Gail Halvorsen created " Operation Vittles ", which supplied candy to German children. The Airlift

7600-441: The political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side. According to historian Robert L. Benson, "Washington's forte

7700-479: The presence of the Red Army —alarmed the US and UK. Western leaders saw this as a clear instance of Soviet expansionism, clashing with their vision of a democratic Europe. Economically, the divide was sharpened with the introduction of the Marshall Plan in 1947, a US initiative to provide financial aid to rebuild Europe and prevent the spread of communism by stabilizing capitalist economies. The Soviet Union rejected

7800-404: The recently captured Malaya as well as Singapore. Following the Battle of Singapore , it is the place where British forces under Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival surrendered to Japanese forces under Lieutenant-General Yamashita Tomoyuki on 15 February 1942. The Imperial Japanese Army would later relocated its headquarters from the motor plant to Raffles College along Bukit Timah Road. During

7900-650: The region of Southeast Asia. During the Malayan Campaign of the World War II starting from December 1941, the factory's modern and state-of-the-art assembly equipment was taken over and used by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) to assemble fighter aircraft for defending Allied air forces in the region, aside from the RAF. The fighter planes, most of which were of American origin (such as

8000-469: The source of the term, Lippmann traced it to a French term from the 1930s, la guerre froide . The roots of the Cold War can be traced back to diplomatic and military tensions preceding World War II. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , where Soviet Russia ceded vast territories to Germany, deepened distrust among the Western Allies. Allied intervention in

8100-463: The specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch , an influential advisor to Democratic presidents, on 16 April 1947. The speech, written by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope , proclaimed, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency with his book The Cold War . When asked in 1947 about

8200-491: The surrender took place, which contains a replica of the original table, the clock set at the exact time of the surrender, and a map of Malaya during the war. There is a large modern structure at street level south of the factory building where visitors can enter and have a walk either up the hill or through the building to the factory area. The museum is also dedicated to the entire history of the Ford Factory, together with

8300-405: The two superpowers , though each supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as proxy wars . Aside from the nuclear arms race starting in 1949 and conventional military deployment , the struggle for dominance was expressed indirectly via psychological warfare , propaganda campaigns , espionage , far-reaching embargoes , sports diplomacy , and technological competitions such as

8400-411: The world, while Soviet involvement in regime change included the funding of left-wing parties , wars of independence , revolutions and dictatorships. As nearly all the colonial states underwent decolonization and achieved independence in the period from 1945 to 1960, many became Third World battlefields in the Cold War. At the end of World War II, English writer George Orwell used cold war , as

8500-486: The world. Movements against nuclear weapons testing and for nuclear disarmament took place, with large anti-war protests . By the 1970s, both sides had started making allowances for peace and security, ushering in a period of détente that saw the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the 1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China that opened relations with China as a strategic counterweight to

8600-505: Was 'signals' intelligence - the procurement and analysis of coded foreign messages." leading to the Venona project or Venona intercepts, which monitored the communications of Soviet intelligence agents. Moynihan wrote that the Venona project contained "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." The Venona project

8700-606: Was a period of global geopolitical tension and struggle for ideological and economic influence between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc , that started in 1947, two years after the end of World War II , and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between

8800-412: Was a strong promise that West Germany would not develop nuclear weapons. Widespread fears of another rise of German militarism necessitated the new military to operate within an alliance framework under NATO command. In 1955, Washington secured full German membership of NATO. In May 1953, Lavrentiy Beria , by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of

8900-567: Was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union. In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Czech Communists executed a coup d'état in Czechoslovakia (resulting in the formation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (9 May 1948)), the only Eastern Bloc state that

9000-548: Was as much a logistical as a political and psychological success for the West; it firmly linked West Berlin to the United States. In May 1949, Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade. In 1952, Stalin repeatedly proposed a plan to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in elections supervised by the United Nations, if the new Germany were to stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal

9100-679: Was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 , creating a unified Department of Defense , the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War. Stalin believed economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that

9200-478: Was converted into a warehouse storage facility. In 1983, Hong Leong Group acquired the site and the art deco building was renamed Hong Leong Industries Building for a while before it was decommissioned again in the 1990s. The rear portion of the former Ford Factory was demolished and became a condominium known as The Hillside , which was built in 1998. Just after the Cold War , several horror stories connected to

9300-553: Was dropped due to the public outcry for the use of the Japanese word Syonan , which was the name the Japanese used to refer to Singapore. It was renamed Surviving the Japanese Occupation: War and Its Legacies on 15 February 2017, by Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim . Upper Bukit Timah Road Bukit Timah Road splits into two roads at Newton Circus, the west-bound Bukit Timah Road and east-bound Dunearn Road , both of which straddle

9400-472: Was kept highly secret even from policymakers until the Moynihan Commission in 1995. Despite this, the decryption project had already been betrayed and dispatched to the USSR by Kim Philby and Bill Weisband in 1946, as was discovered by the US by 1950. Nonetheless, the Soviets had to keep their discovery of the program secret, too, and continued leaking their own information, some of which

9500-506: Was left as the world's sole superpower. In February 1946, George F. Kennan 's " Long Telegram " from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. The telegram galvanized a policy debate that would eventually shape the Truman administration 's Soviet policy. Washington's opposition to

9600-545: Was now restricted to the island of Taiwan , the nationalist government of which exists to this day. The Kremlin promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China. According to Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad , the communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military mistakes than Chiang Kai-Shek made, and because in his search for a powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest groups in China. Moreover, his party

9700-403: Was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of HUMINT (human intelligence or interpersonal espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however, he concludes: We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that there were no successful "moles" at

9800-550: Was still useful to the American program. According to Moynihan, even President Truman may not have been fully informed of Venona, which may have left him unaware of the extent of Soviet espionage. Clandestine atomic spies from the Soviet Union, who infiltrated the Manhattan Project at various points during WWII, played a major role in increasing tensions that led to the Cold War. In addition to usual espionage,

9900-655: Was turned down by the Western powers. Some sources dispute the sincerity of the proposal. Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, the first Soviet atomic device was detonated in Semipalatinsk , Kazakh SSR . Following Soviet refusals to participate in

10000-487: Was weakened during the war against Japan . Meanwhile, the communists told different groups, such as the peasants, exactly what they wanted to hear, and they cloaked themselves under the cover of Chinese nationalism . Confronted with the communist revolution in China and the end of the American atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand its containment doctrine. In NSC 68 ,

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