NATO and the Warsaw Pact, 1949–1990
The opposing military blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact that divided Europe for four decades of the Cold War.
The United States and its Western European allies founded NATO in 1949 as a collective-defense pact, pledging that an attack on one member would be treated as an attack on all — a direct response to fears of Soviet expansion in the aftermath of World War II. Moscow answered in 1955 by formalizing the Warsaw Pact, binding the Soviet Union to its Eastern European satellite states just days after West Germany joined NATO. For nearly four decades the two alliances faced off across the Iron Curtain in a tense standoff that never erupted into direct war between them, until the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991 as communist governments collapsed across Eastern Europe. See NATO's intelligence infrastructure.
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