Several events in the late 1940s reversed the drawdown of United States strategic forces. The 1948 blockade of West Berlin by the Eastern bloc and the outbreak of the Cold War caused the United States to deploy SAC's B-29 bomber force back to the United Kingdom and West Germany. Communist victories in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 meant that the United States would have to expand SAC to address these potential threats both in Europe as well as Asia.