Paris Debates (Stubborn Stalin)

Over the course of the Cold War and today, there have been five Paris Debates. Usually these debates occur at a time of conflict or war. The most recent Paris Debate took place on December 23, 2002 talking about the planned invasion of Iraq. In the recent decade of 2000, there have been two of these debates. One on September 13, 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the other being the one mentioned earlier.

The smallest of these debates took place on January 5, 1971, where only 7 members of NATO showed including the United States Vice President. The largest debate took place on Christmas of 1963. The meeting held all the leaders of every members and some of the military advisors. The meeting was kept secret until 1987.

The 1949 Debates
On December 28th, Leaders of the members of NATO met for the first time in Paris, France to try to come to an understanding of how to deal with the Soviet Union and it's hostility. Three came ideas down to the end: An invasion of the Soviet Union from West Germany, Alaska and the Middle East, or a series of air raids on Soviet military bases, or the most feared, a series of nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union. Harry S. Truman stood up and said to the other members, "Using the (atom) bomb on Hiroshima was tough. Using it again (on Nagasaki), was even harder. But having a series of bombs and killing millions upon millions, will not happen!" It was agreed that no nuclear war will come about. And many members felt Europe, and the world for that matter, was not ready for a another Great War and so an invasion was out. The air raids were the final decision and the Divided German Conflicts.

The 1955 Debates
The meetings were held on May 23, 1955, in a response to the signing of the Warsaw Pact. A nuclear strike or strikes were already "out of the question" as said by West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. US President Eisenhower during the meeting told the leaders there, "that the United States will be preparing for a full-on invasion of the USSR. I will address my nation tomorrow about the situation at hand." A third World War was in the making. The following night Dwight Eisenhower in a television address to his nation informed the people that a war was beginning." Eisenhower with a pokerface never said the location as a civil war in Vietnam was just beginning. Nikita Khrushchev's response to the invasion was told to the members of the Supreme Soviet only 2 hours after Eisenhower's address: "Any invasion of the Soviet Union will result in an easy victory for communism." Only hours later did the NATO invasion of the USSR was changed to the NATO invasion of North Vietnam.