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Warsaw Treaty hits 55
Published: 14 May, 2010, 07:20
Edited: 26 October, 2010, 07:46
Fragment of a 1990 poster for the 35th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact: “Together We Are Invincible”
(14.3Mb) embed videoTAGS: Anniversary, Conflict, Military, Politics, History
After NATO was formed in 1949, the Soviet Union built up its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union and seven European socialist states joined the treaty on May 14, 1955.
Together with the Soviet Union they rehearsed possible scenarios of a third world war.
Kossa, 60 kilometers from Leipzig, Germany, seems to be an idyllic forest with majestic pines and surprisingly wide asphalted paths in between. It is a site of a popular tourist attraction: the now declassified Warsaw Pact main bunker, which is currently a museum.
However, during the Cold War the place used to be the location of a top secret control center with unique technology.
Kossa was fully-equipped to become the command bunker of the Warsaw Pact. Heavy weaponry was brought in. A hospital and an intelligence shelter were set up beneath the earth.
The center would get the mobile signal from the troposphere in case a nuclear cloud covered the Earth. The Kossa bunker was built to deal with any attack, including a nuclear one.
In case of an attack, the allies could easily reach Western Europe.
Vladimir Kremlev (click to enlarge)
“The plan was to reach the Rhein in three days. To achieve this goal it was necessary to build a bunker right on this place,” says Olaf Strahlendorff, director of the Kossa Military Museum.
NATO also rehearsed the war.
But many question whether it has stopped the game now, two decades after the Warsaw Pact seized to exist.
“The ongoing expansion of NATO is wrong. It breaks the agreement between Gorbachev and the then-Western leaders, that there would be no troops on the territory of former East Germany. Now the whole of Germany is in NATO and other countries, too. Of course, Russia is nervous about being encircled. Especially after some of the former Soviet republics, such as Georgia, rose in arms against Russia,” said Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former communist leader and president of Poland from 1981 to 1990.
Mateusz Piskorky, president of the European Center for Geopolitical Studies, represents a new generation of politicians in Poland.
For him the 55th anniversary of the signing of the Warsaw Oact is nothing to celebrate.
“The Warsaw Pact, just like NATO, are leftovers of the Cold War. We live in an absolutely new world, in new realities. These military blocs are useless now. As for the Warsaw Pact, it should be the ground for debates between historians, but not politicians,” said Piskorsky.
Dmitry Suslov, political analyst, says there are many differences between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
“First – NATO was not imposed actually on the Allies, but they joined NATO because they wanted really to. Second – the common values between Europe and the US that push the sides together. Third is political inertia – America after the end of the Cold War did not withdraw from Western Europe on the one hand. On the other hand the Western Europeans didn’t really know how to live without NATO and they were really cautious where to gain security from if NATO disappears because they did not have any substitute,” he told RT.
“[The Europeans] were also like France and the UK concerned about the German factor – what would be the future of Germany without NATO and I would remind that one of the original purposes of NATO’s creation was to keep Germany down. So, all those many factors predetermined NATO existence after the Cold War,” Suslov added.
The main factor, as Suslov stressed, is that “NATO was the embodiment, the symbol of the triumphant West after the end of the Cold War and in the US in 1993-1994 the decision was made in Washington and then in Brussels to build the new security architecture not from a blank sheet of paper, but on the basis of the institutions that already existed – the Western institutions.”
“And the process that we saw after was the extension of the Western institutions – an attempt to create European Security architecture on the basis of NATO and attempts to build a global security on the basis of the West. Now we see the limits of that process and so we probably see the end of NATO enlargement.”
Niels Annen, a German foreign affairs expert, thinks the difference between the two alliances is that “NATO has always been composed of democracies and the NATO alliance is today open for membership.”
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Bogdanov, unfortunately you write a complete untruth when you suggest that NATO is a unilaterally imposed stricture like the Warsaw arrangement. I am keenly aware of the Baltics’ strong and spontaneous desire to be part of NATO. It was this spontaneous desire, not American pressure, that motivated them to apply for membership. I am aware of the years of effort, cost and sacrifice with Baltic countries chose to make between the time of their applications for membership and the time their applications were finally accepted. None of that was an instance of America forcing anything on them, but rather, of the Baltics themselves willingly sacrificing so as to achieve membership. Furthermore, I am aware that today Estonians’ approval of their country’s membership in NATO continues at somewhere in the mid 60s percentile. Again, this does not speak of external pressure. NATO and the Warsaw arrangement are/were both associated with a superpower, but that is where the similarity ends. NATO is a free association of sovereign nations that exists for the mutual benefit of all its members; the Warsaw arrangement was a Russian imposition upon captive nations which had no say in the matter one way or the other, and that existed purely in the interests of Moscow’s imperialism, not in the interests of its constituent countries. The Warsaw arrangement’s power was used only to oppress its own members and keep them in line when dangerous notions of freedom occurred to various ones of them over the years.
The evidence that the Warsaw pact was not a treaty but an alliance imposed by Moscow is its dissolution after the collapse of USSR. If WP was truly an agreement between partners it would still exist and Russian neighbours would not have left Russia alone to oppose NATO. USSR as oppressive regime imposed to its neighbours the alliance. No use to spend other words on this topic. It is questionable thought if current NATO is something positive for Europe and the whole world. The USA in two decades managed to totally turn down the driving values of the alliance. By now the country belongs to financial fraudsters who have pushed them toward imperialistic policies put in place also using NATO. The alliance exists only because there is no alternative to it. By now the Russia of last decade is surely more compliance to the international law that NATO members. The good became the bad and vice versa. That's the real turn of the world of last ten years. Former eastern block countries can have a kind of acrimony against Russia coming from the latter past, but Im sure year by year that stance will fade away. The process could be accelerated if Russia aknowledged her past misbehaviours toward her former allies, but Russians cannot do that as it's too early now, too many nostalgic people still live in the country. It will be done gradually and very slowly.
May 15, 2010, 20:11, Bogdanov wrote > This military block was created and maintained around another superpower - the USA -- to control Europe. I can't believe you said "to control Europe". Perhaps to give "some control" in Europe, but not to "control Europe". The French military left NATO on its own accord during deGaulle if you recall. >When the status of superpower will be completely evaporated from the United States (which will happen sooner or later, because it is already on the way there), the NATO will become history the same way as it happened with the Warsaw Treaty... History shows us that no country can remain a superpower forever...call it entropy, if you wish. But it won't happen in our lifetime.