In this activity, you will learn about treaties and alliances formed after the Second World War.

The Soviet Union had occupied many nations in eastern Europe as they fought Hitler's forces on the eastern front. When the war ended, the Soviet Union continued to occupy these nations and established communist governments in them.

After World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones.
In 1949, the French, British, and American zones were joined into the Federal Republic of Germany, also known as "West Germany," while the Soviet zone was made into a separate state known as the German Democratic Republic, or "East Germany."

During the cold war, West Germany was a democratic country, was allied with the United States, and had a capitalist economic system. East Germany was a communist country and was controlled by the Soviet Union.

The democratic countries, led by the United States, became worried that the Soviet Union (the USSR), might be planning to take over Western Europe. In order to strengthen their position, these countries formed an alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an alliance of 26 countries from North America and Europe. The fundamental role of NATO is to safeguard the freedom and security of its member countries by political and military means.

When NATO was formed in 1949, an agreement was signed that stated, "an armed attack against one ... shall be considered an attack against them all." This meant that if one NATO country was attacked, then the rest would come to its defense.

At present, NATO has 28 members. In 1949, there were 12 founding members of the Alliance: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The other member countries are: Greece and Turkey (1952); Germany (1955); Spain (1982); the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia (2004); and Albania and Croatia (2009).

In response to NATO, the Eastern European countries, with the USSR as the leader, formed their own military alliance in 1955. It was called the Warsaw Pact because it was signed in Warsaw, Poland. Eight European Communist nations joined the Warsaw Pact: the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.

These two alliances faced off against each other for almost 40 years.

Each side amassed an arsenal of weapons that had a greater destructive power than all of the weapons combined from previous history. Because NATO was led by the United States, that nation was able to places missiles in other European nations and Turkey that could reach targets in the USSR. At first, the United States was out of the range of the USSR missiles. In an attempt to be able to have the United States within missile range, the USSR began to assemble missiles in Cuba. When the United States discovered what was happening, their actions to stop it led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

NATO stood guard over Western Europe for more than 40 years, until the collapse of the USSR. Today, NATO's focus has changed, but it is still a strong alliance.

Another military alliance, which Canada entered after World War II, was the North American Air Defence Agreement (NORAD). This agreement was signed in 1957 between two countries, Canada and the United States. NORAD was created so that Canada and the United States could combine their air forces to defend themselves against an attack on North America. NORAD was designed to find enemy bombers or missiles and destroy them or send a warning that they were coming. Its headquarters are buried deep underground in Colorado.

 Under this agreement, the United States installed radar installations across Canada to enable early detection of aircraft flying into North American air space during the 1960s and 1970s. As technology allowed for detection from greater distances, this system became obsolete. Canada has not always agreed with the US on decisions about NORAD. For instance, Canadians got very upset when the US wanted to deploy missiles armed with nuclear warheads over Canada as part of the NORAD program. However, NORAD is still a strong alliance and important to the defense of Canada.