1954-3 USSR Join NATO?

.USSR in NATO? 1954 - Cold War > .

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Cold War mapped - '45-'91 ..

Funding NATO ..

The Cold War threatened to escalate into World War 3 by 1949, when NATO formed. The communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, when Moscow unsuccessfully tried to pressure American, British, and French troops into abandoning their part of the city comprised an immediate impetus for the North Atlantic Treaty. NATO was founded amid these tensions with the Communist East.

In March 1954, Moscow made an unexpected proposition: invite the USSR to join NATO. This followed a complex diplomatic game surrounding the future of Germany. After the war, the Allies split the country into the pro-Soviet German Democratic Republic in the east and the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany in the west. Officially, Moscow advocated Germany’s reunification as a neutral and demilitarized state.

Western powers opposed the plan, fearing that communists would eventually stage a coup in a reunified Germany, leaving the whole country in the USSR’s orbit of influence, which had already happened in several Eastern European nations. Some also feared that a reunified Germany would once again threaten world peace, just as it had provoked two recent world wars. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, worried that NATO would expand to West Germany, deploying its troops at close proximity to the Socialist Bloc. The USSR found itself at a disadvantage, given its inferior economic and military strength, and the fact that tensions were already emerging in the Eastern Bloc.