However, consideration of those matters was postponed into the Council of Foreign Ministers, which the conference established. The conference ended with a stronger relationship among the three governments as a consequence of their collaboration, which renewed confidence that together with the other United Nations, they would ensure the creation of a just and enduring peace. Nevertheless, within 18 months relations had deteriorated and the Cold War had emerged.<ref>Lynn Etheridge Davis, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American Conflict Over East Europe (2015) pp 288–334.</ref> Preparation In May 1945, Churchill wrote Truman hoping to arrange a meeting of the three governments to occur in June. Truman hoped for Stalin to propose the meeting so as to avoid the appearance that the Americans and British were ganging up on the Soviets. With some prompting from Truman's aide Harry Hopkins, Stalin proposed a meeting in the Berlin area. Informed of this by the US, Churchill sent a letter agreeing that he'd be happy to meet in “what is left of Berlin”. Some sources suggest Truman delayed the conference in order for it to meet after the results of the first atomic bomb test were known.https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/38.pdf The conference was eventually set to begin July 16 at Cecilienhof in Potsdam, near Berlin. Stalin arrived a day late, a choice he made, according to biographer D.N. Volkogonov, “because he was accustomed to having people wait for him”. He was coming from a meeting with Mao, where he’d made the Chinese wait a day to meet with him, and then he told the Potsdam attendees he had been held up by the Chinese. He traveled to Berlin on a heavily guarded train out of fear of flying. Relationships among leaders A number of changes had taken place in the five months since the Yalta Conference and greatly affected the relationships among the leaders. The Soviets occupied Central and Eastern Europe. The Baltic states were forcibly re-incorporated into the USSR, while the Red Army also occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Refugees fled from those countries. Stalin had set up a puppet communist government in Poland, insisted that his control of Eastern Europe was a defensive measure against possible future attacks, and claimed that it was a legitimate sphere of Soviet influence. Winston Churchill, who had served for most of the war as British prime minister in a coalition government, was replaced during the conference by Clement Attlee. Churchill's