Curated category
Cold War treaties
- NATOOn the 4th of April 1949, twelve nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty and bound their fates together with a single sentence.
- Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic RelationsThe Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, announced on the 15th of December 1978, changed the shape of international politics in…
- PactomaniaA 1955 article in The New York Times introduced the word Pactomania to describe a specific historical period. This term captured the intense activity of…
- Reykjavík SummitThe Reykjavík Summit, held on the 11th and the 12th of October 1986, came within a single word of ending the nuclear age.
- Warsaw PactThe Warsaw Pact was born on the 14th of May 1955, eight days after West Germany joined NATO. Its founding declaration accused a remilitarized Western Germany…
- Outer Space TreatyThe Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the 27th of January 1967, with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union all signing on…
- ANZUSANZUS is a collective security treaty signed on the 1st of September 1951 in San Francisco, binding Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to a shared…
- START ISTART I, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was signed on the 31st of July 1991 by the leaders of two nations that had spent four decades pointing tens of…
- Strategic Arms Limitation TalksThe Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in Helsinki in November 1969, at a moment when the United States already held 1,054 intercontinental ballistic…
- Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956The Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 ended a state of war that had lingered for more than a decade after the guns fell silent across Asia.
- Stalin NoteThe Stalin Note reached representatives of the United States, Britain, and France on the 10th of March 1952. Andrei Gromyko delivered it on behalf of the…
- Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear WeaponsThe Non-Proliferation Treaty, known almost universally as the NPT, opened for signature in 1968 with a single overriding fear driving its creation: that…
- North Atlantic TreatyThe North Atlantic Treaty, also called the Washington Treaty, was signed on the 4th of April 1949 in Washington, D.C., and it created the legal foundation…
- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces TreatyThe Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty ended, formally, on the 4th of August 2025, when Russia announced it would no longer abide by its terms.
- Southeast Asia Treaty OrganizationThe Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was born on the 19th of February 1955, in Bangkok, and dissolved on the 30th of June 1977, also in Bangkok.
- Antarctic Treaty SystemThe Antarctic Treaty System governs an entire continent where no human being has ever been born. On the 1st of December 1959, twelve nations signed an…
- Helsinki AccordsThe Helsinki Accords arrived in the summer of 1975 carrying one of the strangest contradictions in Cold War diplomacy. Thirty-five nations gathered in…
- Partial Nuclear Test Ban TreatyOn the 5th of August 1963, three governments gathered in Moscow to sign a document that had taken nearly two decades of argument, scientific dispute, and…
- Treaty of San FranciscoOn the 8th of September 1951, inside the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, representatives of 49 nations gathered to sign a document that would…