At the end of the catastrophic World War II, on October 24, 1945, fifty-one nations came together to officially form the United Nations, an organization that promoted peace and security for all of its villages. members. Despite the success in creating a world peacekeeping force, tensions were high between the powers of the Western Bloc (the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact), just five years after the creation of the United Nations, the first major outbreak of the Cold War occurred: the Korean War. The effects of the Korean War would not only change the state of North Korea forever and the South, but they would also have a significant effect on all other nations involved in the Korean War. A few years before the conflict in Korea, US President Truman established an international policy known as the Truman Doctrine that the United States would help countries that were fighting communism Combined with ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's development of an atomic bomb pushed tensions beyond the breaking point, pushing both countries in an arms race in which each attempted to amass more weapons than the other nation. Around the same time, in Asia, the Communist Party banned the Chinese Nationalists, the local Democratic Party, and began to gain a foothold under Mao Zedong. This aroused fear among Americans, as China was a large and influential country in Asia; Americans began to believe that China's communist society would influence smaller surrounding countries to adopt communism as well. That series of events, along with the perceived threat of the spread of communism, led to a moment... middle of paper ......nt that democracy and communism could not cooperate with each other, as demonstrated in the United Nations. Security Council after the boycott of the Soviet Union. UN initiatives often found themselves at a standstill, as the Soviet Union many times proved difficult for other members of the Security Council because its representative constantly vetoed acts that favored democracy at the expense of communism , while other powers such as the United States vetoed it. and shut down any proposals that benefited communism. The Korean War demonstrated that democracy and communism could and would not get along, adding fuel to the impending Cold War. What began as a civil war in a small Asian country quickly exploded into an international divide between opposing powers supported by incompatible political systems. The Korean War left its mark on surviving Koreans and others around the world.