Washington, D.C., February 5, 2020 – In the eyes of U.S. intelligence and the military services, the greatest threat to American national security during the early Cold War was the emerging Soviet missile program with its ability to deliver nuclear weapons to targets across the United States. Before the era of satellite surveillance, the U.S.
Washington D.C., January 4, 2018 – The journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries, Choice magazine, has picked the Archive’s most recent book, by Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton, as an “Outstanding Academic Title 2017.”
Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents
Washington D.C., May 10, 2017 – The United States’ cautious response to the unexpectedly powerful popular uprising in Hungary in 1956 grew out of the Eisenhower administration’s policy of “keeping the pot boiling” in Eastern Europe without having it “boil over” into a possible nuclear conflict, according to an unpublished Defense Department historical study posted for the first time by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.
Washington, D.C. February 28, 2017 - President Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled out military intervention in Eastern Europe early in his administration, despite campaign rhetoric about rolling back world Communism, according to a U.S. Defense Department draft history published today by the National Security Archive. Fear of provoking war with the Soviet Union drove the decision, the study finds, based on research in a variety of government and public sources.
The first sign of the long-suppressed dissatisfaction of the Hungarian people with a repressive and an economically inefficient regime appeared on October 6, 1956, at the ceremonial reburial of Laslo Rajk, a former cabinet minister who had been wrongly accused of various crimes and executed.
Washington D.C. May 13, 2005 - The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact had a long-standing strategy to attack Western Europe that included being the first to use nuclear weapons, according to a new book of previously Secret Warsaw Pact documents published tomorrow. Although the aim was apparently to preempt NATO "aggression," the Soviets clearly expected that nuclear war was likely and planned specifically to fight and win such a conflict.
Generals Jaruzelski, Siwicki, Tuczapski, and 6 other top-ranking Polish insiders of the Soviet military alliance reveal unprecedented details about its functioning and plans against NATO during the Cold War. 350 pages of interviews are made public today on the Zurich-based website of the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP)--an international consortium of scholars dedicated to the study of the historical dimension of European security, www.isn.ethz.ch/php. The National Security Archive at George Washington University is the primary U.S.
Vienna, Munich, Verona, and other European population and cultural centers were to be “completely destroyed,” according to 1965 Warsaw Pact plans for war in Europe made public today on the Zurich-based web site of the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP) -- an international consortium of scholars dedicated to the study of the historical background of European security, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php. Found in the Hungarian archives, the documents are vivid reminders of the menace posed by the Cold War nuclear arsenals that Presiden
Washington, D.C., June 15, 2001 – Forty-eight years ago, on June 17, 1953, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) erupted in a series of workers' riots and demonstrations that threatened the very existence of the communist regime. The outburst, entirely spontaneous, shocked the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) and their Kremlin sponsors, who were still reeling from the death of Joseph Stalin three months earlier. Now, a new National Security Archive document volume based on recently obtained and translated records from archival sources throughout the former Soviet blo