Warsaw Pact Important Quotes

Here’s a man who single-handedly sets off a chain reaction which ultimately leads to the deaths of 80 million people. Top that, Albert Einstein! With just a couple of bullets, this terrorist starts the First World War, which destroys four monarchies, leading to a power vacuum filled by the Communists in Russia and the Nazis in Germany who then fight it out in a Second World War. . . . Some people would minimize Princip’s importance by saying that a Great Power War was inevitable sooner or later given the tensions of the times, but I say that it was no more inevitable than, say, a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Left unsparked, the Great War could have been avoided, and without it, there would have been no Lenin, no Hitler, no Eisenhower.41

Nineteen seventy-three, the year that the Basic Treaty came into force, was also when the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) began. A total of thirty-five countries participated: seven members of the Warsaw Pact, fifteen members of NATO, and thirteen neutral countries. The conference ended in 1975 with the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, which set out common aims for culture, science, the economy, environmental protections, and disarmament, in order to improve security and the enforcement of human rights in Europe during the Cold War. The far-reaching effect of this document, which was felt beyond the end of the Cold War and long into my time as chancellor, will play a role later on. At the time, I could neither anticipate nor recognize its importance.