Winston Churchill's Conservative Party lost the July 1945 general election, forcing him to step down

as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. For six years he served as the Leader of the Opposition.
During these years he continued to influence world affairs. In 1946 he gave his "Iron Curtain" speech
which spoke of the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Eastern Bloc;
Churchill also argued strongly for British independence from the European Coal and Steel
Community; he saw this as a Franco-German project and Britain still had an empire. In the General
Election of 1951 Labour was defeated.

Churchill became Prime Minister for a second time. He continued to lead Britain but was to suffer
increasingly from health problems. Aware that he was slowing down both physically and mentally, he
resigned in April 1955. He continued to sit as MP for Woodford until he retired from politics in 1964.
Churchill died on 24 January 1965 and was granted the honour of a state funeral. He was buried in
his family plot in St Martin's Church, Bladon, near to where he was born at Blenheim Palace.

Following his defeat in the 1945 general election, Churchill became the Leader of the Opposition.
His wartime reputation was such that he retained international respect and was able to make his
views widely known.

Following his defeat in the 1945 general election, Churchill became the Leader of the Opposition.
His wartime reputation was such that he retained international respect and was able to make his
views widely known.

In 1946, Churchill was in America for nearly three months from early January to late March. [1] It was
on this trip that he gave his "Iron Curtain" speech about the USSR and its creation of the Eastern
Bloc.[2] Speaking on 5 March 1946 in the company of President Truman at Westminster
College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declared:[3]

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the
continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities
and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.

The essence of Churchill's view was that the Soviet Union did not want war with the western Allies
but that its entrenched position in Eastern Europe had made it impossible for the three great powers
to provide the world with a "triangular leadership". Churchill's desire was much closer collaboration
between Britain and America, but he emphasised the need for co-operation within the framework of
the United Nations Charter.[4] Within the same speech, he called for "a special relationship between
the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States". [3]
In 1947, according to a memorandum from the FBI's archives, Churchill allegedly urged the US to
conduct a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union in order to win the Cold War while
they had the chance. He reportedly spoke to right-wing Republican senator Styles Bridges, asking
him to persuade Truman to launch a strike against Moscow to destroy the Kremlin and make it easy
to handle the directionless Russia. The memorandum claims Churchill "stated that the only salvation
for the civilization of the world would be if the President of the United States would declare Russia to
be imperiling world peace and attack Russia". Russia would have been defenseless against a
nuclear strike at the time of the Churchill's proposal, since the Soviets did not obtain the atomic
bomb until 1949.[5] Churchill's personal physician, Lord Moran, recalled that he had already
advocated a nuclear strike against the Soviets during a conversation in 1946. [6] Later, Churchill was
instrumental in giving France a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, providing
another European power to counter-balance the Soviet Union's permanent seat. [7]