Word: warsaw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...They are desperate for a CFE agreement," said a senior Administration official. "It's a matter of economic life or death." Some observers in the East speculated less charitably that the Soviet leader wanted to cut a troop deal to camouflage the impending eviction of Soviet forces from several Warsaw Pact nations...
OPEN SKIES. Based on an Eisenhower-era proposal that Bush resurrected last May, the proposed agreement would allow unarmed aircraft from any NATO or Warsaw Pact country to overfly the other side's territory. The purpose is to observe military activity and installations. Detractors of the Open Skies concept point out that the agreement provides for a notification period of 16 hours, affording ample opportunity for the concealment of many kinds of mischief. But the proposal is viewed as a useful confidence-building device by all 23 nations involved. Negotiators hope to have a document ready for signing...
...that was the postwar world; this is the post-cold war world, and things are dizzyingly different. Europe has been transformed by the retreat of Soviet imperial power, the collapse of Communist governments in the center of the Continent and the evaporation of the Warsaw Pact. The blinding pace of events actually accelerated last week, clearing the way for the unification of Germany, a new European security system and a 35-nation conference to ratify the reconstruction -- all before the end of this year...
...caretaker Communist-led government in East Berlin, which previously argued for a separate socialist existence in some kind of confederal relationship, has thrown in its hand. Unification is possible, Prime Minister Hans Modrow says, but only if the newly formed state remains neutral, unaffiliated with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. Bonn and its allies reject that idea but counter with one presented by Genscher. A unified Germany should remain in NATO, he proposed, but allied troops or military structures should stay out of the areas that are now East Germany. In Moscow for his own set of talks...
Such thinking seems curiously out of tune with the world as it looks in 1990. The Warsaw Pact, for all practical purposes, is dead as a military alliance. Soviet troops might have to fight their way through Warsaw, Prague and even Berlin before getting anywhere near the Fulda Gap, much less Bonn, Rotterdam or Paris. And while the Soviets were long considered capable of mobilizing for a strike at Western Europe in as little as 14 days, Pentagon analysts say that NATO could now detect preparations a month in advance. Some outside experts argue that signs of war would...