NATO and The Warsaw Pact

NATO was an abbreviation for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The first members at the time of the Cold War were the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. NATO was developed in order to provide a defensive alliance against any nations that would attack any of the alliance members. Basically, a gang of countries that would defend each other in the event that another country had attacked one of them. In a form of indirect retaliation, Russia had created an alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. It consisted of the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The Soviets developed the Warsaw Pact in retaliation to the development of NATO.