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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 RelationsPresident Jimmy Carter stood before the press on the 15th of December 1978 to deliver a historic statement. He declared that official diplomatic relations…
  • 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 IUS President Ronald Reagan stood at Eureka College on the 9th of May 1982 to announce a radical new vision for global security.
  • 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 NoteOn the 10th of March 1952, Andrei Gromyko delivered a diplomatic note to representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in Berlin.
  • 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 TreatyIn March 1976, the Soviet Union deployed its first RSD-10 Pioneer missile system in European territories. Western analysts called this weapon the SS-20 Saber.
  • 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 TreatyThe Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll in 1954 released a yield of 15 megatons, more than double the expected power. Radioactive particles spread over…
  • 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…