Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Three of NATO's members are nuclear weapons states: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO has 12 original founding member states. Three more members joined between 1952 and 1955, and a fourth joined in 1982. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has added 16 more members from 1999 to 2024. [1]
During the Cold War, most of Europe was divided between two alliances. Members of NATO are shown in blue, with members of the Warsaw Pact in red and unaffiliated countries are in grey. Yugoslavia, although communist, had left the Soviet sphere in 1948, and Albania was a Warsaw Pact member-only until 1968 .
During the Cold War, NATO operated as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union. The alliance remained in place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact , and has been involved in military operations in the Balkans , the Middle East , South Asia , and Africa .
Nato does not have an army of its own, but member countries can take collective military action in response to crises. For instance, it supported the UN by intervening in the war in the former ...
During the Cold War, NATO used radar facilities in Malta, which, like other non-NATO member European states, has generally cooperative relations with the organization. [267] When the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949, the Mediterranean island of Malta was a dependent territory of the United Kingdom, one of the treaty's original signatories.
The Western Bloc, also known as the Capitalist Bloc, was an unofficial coalition of countries that were officially allied with the United States during the Cold War of 1947–1991. While the NATO member states, in Western Europe and Northern America, were pivotal to the bloc, it included many other countries, in the broader Asia-Pacific region ...
Sweden and Finland have been formally invited to join the alliance.
Emerging from World War II, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established by 10 European countries, the United States and Canada to form a bulwark against the communist-ruled Soviet Union.