Billions might have died. Here's What You Need To Remember: Fortunately, the Soviet Union decided to fade away instead of burn out, and we never learned whether NATO’s plan for defeating a Communist invasion would have worked. Even before the guns fell silent in Europe in 1945, it became apparent to American and British planners that the Soviet Union would hold a massive advantage in land power along the Central front. In the early post-war years, Western planners hoped that nuclear weapons would keep the Soviets at bay. As the USSR’s own missile and nuclear programs accelerated, however, it became apparent that NATO (which came into existence in 1949) would need to come to some understanding of how to fight Warsaw Pact forces.