Transcription
The guns of World War Two had barely cooled when a new conflict threatened to rock Europe. This time around, it was the Western democracies like Great Britain and France, and their ally across the pond, the United States, versus the Soviet Union and its communist satellites.
These two sides each formed their own security agreements to show they meant business. These were NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
After the war, the Soviet Union began to flex its muscles, installing communist governments in Eastern Europe. In 1948, the USSR toppled a democratic government in Czechoslovakia and then cut off supply routes to West Berlin. The United States and Western European allies began to get nervous.
"That's not we all like that, okay?"
In April 1949, foreign ministers of a dozen Western European and northern American nations met in Washington D.C. to sign the North Atlantic Treaty. This created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. In article 5 of the treaty, NATO nations agreed that an attack against any of them by, say, the Soviet Union for example, would be an attack against all of original NATO nations. Sound off: Belgium, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Canada, and the United States. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, and West Germany in 1955.
It was West Germany that made things a little tense. The U.S. and its allies wanted to let West Germany form its own army, but the USSR wasn't psyched about this. The Soviets warned that if West Germany did raise an army and join NATO, they'd make their own alliance. West Germany did join NATO, so the Soviet Union said, "Okay, we told yourself."
In May of 1955, it gathered its communist allies in Eastern Europe and sat them down for a good old treaty signing. That treaty was the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, or the Warsaw Pact. They called it the Warsaw Pact because it was signed in, wait for it, Warsaw. Warsaw Pact nations roll call: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Albania, East Germany, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union. In 1968, Albania left the pact as the country became more closely aligned with Communist China.
Like NATO, Warsaw Pact member nations were bound to come to each other's defense if attacked by an outside power. It also established a central military command, putting the Soviet Union firmly in charge. The Soviet Union also used the pact to keep its members in line. Popular uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were all squashed by the Soviets.
NATO and the Warsaw Pact. These were the players in the Cold War, facing down each other like two weary, nuclear-armed gunfighters, each waiting for the other to flinch, and knowing that war between them might mean the end of the world. And they would stay that way till 1991, when the Soviet Union disbanded. So too did the Warsaw Pact.
Young people in large numbers came out and joined what became known as the Red Guards. These largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate, assault, and in some cases, even murder political enemies of Mao and the Communist Party.