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ber 1946), Czechoslovakia (June 1948), Hungary (August 1949), and 

 East Germany (October 1949) became Communist People's Republics. 

 The Greek civil war raged through the early postwar years; the 

 Truman doctrine and Marshall plan proposals came in March and 

 June 1947 ; the Berlin blockade and airlift began in mid-1948 ; and the 

 NATO Treaty was signed in April 1949. 



The Far Eastern world was no less in flux. Indochina and Indo- 

 nesian anticolonial wars were in progress by 1946. The Philippines, 

 India, and Pakistan attained independence in 1946 and 1947. U.S. 

 dominance in the Pacific was consolidated from Hawaii to occupied 

 Japan. And the Chinese civil war ended in 1949 with Communist 

 ascendency over the mainland. 



The rapidly changing system of international power relationships 

 and national interests in the postwar world made more difficult the 

 analysis of policy alternatives in the national and international con- 

 trol of the atom. Viewed as the most commanding source of military 

 power in the postwar world, the atomic weapon altered the world 

 power structure immeasurably, and the United States tried to use the 

 fact of its possession as a surrogate for great troop strength. But its 

 very potency made it an unusable weapon in influencing the shifts of 

 power alignment during these years. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union 

 sought to blunt the bomb's influence in diplomacy while striving 

 vigorously to secure its own nuclear capability. Taking into considera- 

 tion all these parallel developments, it is clear why the negotiations to 

 bring the new force under international control yielded no useful 

 diplomatic product. 



