In 1968, a large number of countries signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an agreement under the aegis of the United Nations obliging the signatory countries not to develop or export military nuclear technologies. It followed a series of crises linked to the deployment of nuclear weapons by both the Soviet Union and the United States on allied territories, cyclically creating severe tensions, the most representative being the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kroutchev's Soviet Union deployed SS-4 and SS-5 nuclear missiles on the communist island of the Caribbean, provoking the intervention of American forces, and 11 days of very strong tensions between the two blocs.
However, during the last two decades of the Cold War, both sides took great liberties in respecting the treaty, notably with the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles in East Germany, and American Pershing-2 missiles in Federal Germany, causing the Euromissile crisis from 1982 to 1985, often presented as the most serious crisis of this period. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, then of the Soviet Union, Russia had to withdraw all of its nuclear weapons from the countries of Eastern Europe, then from the Soviet republics having emancipated from the USSR, to in the end, find oneself, de facto, to respect the treaty stricto sensu.
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