The Soviet Union will fight neither a conventional nor a nuclear war over Berlin, and neither will its Warsaw Pact allies.

* 1968 – Nicolae Ceaușescu, leader of Communist Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.

Because Bulgarian industry was configured to Soviet markets, the end of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact caused a severe crisis in the 1990s.

The end of the Warsaw Pact alliance and the loss of Third World markets were grave blows to the defence industry.

During the Cold War the People's Republic of Bulgaria maintained one of the largest militaries in the Warsaw Pact, numbering an estimated 152, 000 troops in 1988.

As the country was a Soviet satellite, it was a part of the Eastern Bloc and entered the Warsaw Pact as one of its founders.

Training in the Bulgarian People's Army was exhaustive even by Soviet standards, however, it was never seen as a major force within the Warsaw Pact.

With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold war, Bulgaria could no longer support a vast military.

However, no country would be allowed to leave the Warsaw Pact, disturb a nation's communist party's monopoly on power, or in any way compromise the cohesiveness of the Eastern bloc.

NATO v. the Warsaw Pact

The Eastern leaders retaliated against these steps by integrating the economies of their nations in Comecon, their version of the Marshall Plan ; exploding the first Soviet atomic device in 1949 ; signing an alliance with People's Republic of China in February 1950 ; and forming the Warsaw Pact, Eastern Europe's counterpart to NATO, in 1955.

From the late 1940s to 1989, the extensive Czechoslovak Armed Forces ( about 200, 000 ) formed one of the pillars of the Warsaw Pact military alliance.

On November 7, 1956 U. S. Air Force Matador units in West Germany, whose missiles were capable of striking targets in the Warsaw Pact, deployed from their fixed day-to-day sites to unannounced dispersed launch locations.

The highly capable BAT-2 was designed to replace the old T-54 / AT-T based BAT-M, but Warsaw Pact allies received only small numbers due to its high price and the old and new vehicles served alongside during the late Cold War.

The Cold War ( 1945 – 1989 ) provided a global network of material and ideological support that perpetuated civil wars, which were mainly fought in weak ex-colonial states, rather than the relatively strong states that were aligned with the Warsaw Pact and North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Fraying amongst the members of the Warsaw Pact nations and instability of its western allies, first indicated by Lech Wałęsa's 1980 rise to leadership of the trade union Solidarity, accelerated, leaving the Soviet Union unable to depend upon its Eastern European satellite states for protection as a buffer zone.

By 1989, Moscow had repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine in favor of non − intervention in the internal affairs of its Warsaw Pact allies.

Gradually, each of the Warsaw Pact nations saw their communist governments fall to popular elections and, in the case of Romania, a violent uprising.

During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east.

* Russian in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from the Second World War to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

Under this policy, Albania would develop its agricultural output in order to supply the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations while these nations would be developing specific resource outputs of their own, which would in theory strengthen the Warsaw Pact by greatly reducing the lack of certain resources that many of the nations faced.

* 1991 – Warsaw Pact declared disbanded.

Six weeks before the German invasion of Poland, Heschel left Warsaw for London with the help of Julian Morgenstern, president of Hebrew Union College, who had been working to obtain visas for Jewish scholars in Europe.

Nicolae Ceauşescu condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

After the negotiated retreat of Soviet troops, Romania, under the new leadership of Nicolae Ceauşescu, started to pursue independent policies, including the condemnation of the Soviet-led 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia ( Romania being the only Warsaw Pact country not to take part in the invasion ), the continuation of diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967 ( again, the only Warsaw Pact country to do so ), and the establishment of economic ( 1963 ) and diplomatic ( 1967 ) relations with the Federal Republic of Germany.

* Seven Days to the River Rhine was a Warsaw Pact war plan for an invasion of Western Europe during the Cold War.

The strategy of the Warsaw Pact was dominated by the desire of the Soviet Union to prevent, at all costs, the recurrence of another large scale invasion of its territory by hostile Western powers, akin to those carried out by the Swedish Empire in 1708, Napoleonic France in 1812, the Central Powers during the First World War and most recently by Nazi Germany in 1941.

On 14 May 1955, the USSR established the Warsaw Pact in response to the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO in October 1954 – only nine years after the defeat of Nazi Germany ( 1933 – 45 ) that ended with the Soviet and Allied invasion of Germany in 1944 / 45 during World War II in Europe.

The multi-national Communist armed forces ’ sole joint action was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

** Albania officially retreats from the Warsaw Pact upon the Soviet Union-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, having already ceased to participate actively in Pact activity since 1962.

He refused to " excommunicate " the Chinese communists, and directly told Leonid Brezhnev that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries ( which he termed the " tragedy in Prague ") had made clear the considerable differences within the Communist movement on fundamental questions such as national sovereignty, socialist democracy, and the freedom of culture.

He not only refused to take part in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, but actively and openly condemned that action.

During the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in summer 1968, he left Europe for the United States.

In the United States, the rise of the New Left and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 created hostility between leftists and the CPUSA, marginalizing it.

The 1968 invasion by Warsaw Pact troops of Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring were also applauded by Ulbricht – East German soldiers were among those massed on the border but did not cross over, probably due to Czech sensitivities about German troops on their soil – and earned him a reputation as a staunch Soviet ally in contrast to Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, who condemned the invasion.

Starting in the Communist Party of Slovakia, the only road to prominence in Communist Czechoslovakia, he became committee chairman in the town of Žiar nad Hronom, only to be dismissed in the year after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, when he delivered a pro-reform speech to the national congress in 1969 and was thrown out.

After the invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops from the Warsaw Pact, Hrabal was banned from publishing.

The film opens with the seemingly impossible appearance of Adolf Hitler in Warsaw before the 1939 invasion.

Spain, too, was a client kingdom, following the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula ; as was Poland, then the Duchy of Warsaw.

The region was listed as a special operational zone of the Operation Gladio, a clandestine NATO " stay-behind " operation in Italy after World War II, intended to counter an eventual Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe.

In the late 1960s, crises that tested intelligence responsiveness included: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam ; the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel ; continuing troubles in Africa, particularly Nigeria ; North Korea's seizure of the ; and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.