The "Marshall Plan" created by United States Secretary of State George Marshall and the "Molotov Plan" created by Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov were both designed to increase their respective country's "spheres of influence". Both plans called for the creation of alliances, treaties, and pacts with as many other countries as possible in order to weaken the enemy's political strength on the world stage. In order to do this, both the United States and the Soviet Union provided large amounts of financial aid and weapons, and signed bi-lateral trade agreements with countries and/or ethnic groups with whom which they wanted to be allied. They also provided funding to revolutionaries in other countries that were not in their sphere of influence. For example, in the Vietnam War, which was a war of the communist North against the democratic South, the North Vietnamese armies were mostly trained and equipped with weapons by the Soviet Union because North Vietnam was governed by a Communist dictatorship loyal to the U.S.S.R. The United States, on the other hand, started out sending 800 military advisors to help the South Vietnamese, whose government was led by Ngo Dinh Diem , an anti-communist and willing servant of American policies. But gradually, the Americans became more and more involved directly in the war, with American involvement climaxing in 1965 when over 500 000 American
Bibliography: Campbell, Christy Disarmament. London: MacDonald & Co. Ltd, 1986. Cheney, Glenn Alan Nuclear Proliferation. New York: Franklin Watts Publishing, 1999. Roussopoulos, Dimitrios I. The Coming of World War Three. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986. Zelinski, Victor; Draper, Graham; Quinlan, Don; McFadden, Fred Twentieth Century Viewpoints: An Interpretive History. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1996.