NATO

1. NATO Northern Atlantic treaty organization By: Blake Hayward & JewanHong

2. History • The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is manifestation and representation of the union of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty. • North Atlantic Treaty signed in April in 1949 • Encompasses over 28 members and countries from across Northern Europe and in North America.

3. Members • The treaty was signed in Washington D.C. on April 4th by the following countries :Luxembourg Belgum, Cananda, Iceland, France, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States. • The following countries joined at various later times: Greece, Turkey, Spain, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Istonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovania, Albania, Croatia.

4. Nato’s Reason for creation • NATO’s primary reason for creation was as a response to the growing power of the Soviet Union and as a unified effort by North American and Northern European to deter Soviet expansionism. • NATO maintains that other reasons for it’s creation was to stop the reinfection of militarism in Europe. • NATO was originally a mostly political alliance, and had never really faced need for unified military action until the Korean War. • The Korean War in 1950 inaugurated NATO as a military presence and unified the organization. • (Left leaders if NATO at time of Korean war)

5. Nato and The soviets • Most of NATO’s early focus was directed towards the deterrence and possible response to Soviet attack. • NATO was created for the purpose of confronting a “communist threat” and ergo it had a fairly radical approach to their main enemy. • Their tactic, if ever provoked by Soviet action, no matter how small, was to retaliate with nuclear weapons. • This tactic was called “Massive Retaliation”

6. Pros • NATO gives a face and common image to the military and economic superpowers of the world and acts as a great deterrent to factions that may be contemplating terrorist or other animosity towards these countries. • The North Atlantic Treaty, the constitution upon which NATO was founded is a charter of fair guidelines set out for the peaceful resolution of conflict and NATO maintains that all of their foreign involvement is in strict abidance to those guidelines. • NATO is a large world bank of military power comprised of likeminded and and peaceful countries willing to provide aid when needed, globally.

7. Cons • NATO’s expansion and the inauguration of more countries into it’s ranks makes NATO more like the UN so much as it takes longer to make decisions that the military of a single country. • Not all countries associated with NATO have to support every course of action financially. So while some countries are spending huge sums of money on involvement with something like Afghanistan, others are doing nothing. • NATO was founded as a reaction to Soviet expansion, its policies will always be questioned by old soviet countries. • NATO being a large and extremely complicated organization is hard to fund, and is thus the largest object of military spending in the world constituting of over 70% of the worlds military spending.

8. Bibliography • Nato Bibliography • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Treaty • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO • http://www.nato.int/history/nato-history.html • http://www.nato.int/history/index.html • http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rt/nato/