NATO

Coordinates: 50°52′34″N 4°25′19″E / 50.87611°N 4.42194°E / 50.87611; 4.42194

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO /ˈneɪtoʊ/; French: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord; OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. NATO's headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, where the Supreme Allied Commander also resides. Belgium is one of the 28 member states across North America and Europe, the newest of which, Albania and Croatia, joined in April 2009. An additional 22 countries participate in NATO's Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programmes. The combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70 percent of the global total. Members' defense spending is supposed to amount to 2 percent of GDP.

.nato

The domain .nato was a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. The domain was added in the late 1980s by the Network Information Center for the use of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, based on the rationale that none of the then existing top-level domains adequately reflected its status as an international organization. Soon after this addition, however, Paul Mockapetris, the designer of the DNS, suggested to NATO representatives that nato.int would be a better choice. The TLD .int was created for the use of international organizations, and NATO switch to using nato.int. Without use, the TLD nato was deleted in July 1996.

References

NATO (disambiguation)

NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an intergovernmental military alliance.

NATO or Nato may also refer to:

People

See also

5.56×45mm NATO

The 5.56×45mm NATO (official NATO nomenclature 5.56 NATO) is an intermediate cartridge developed in the United States and originally chambered in the M16 rifle. Under STANAG 4172, it is a standard cartridge for NATO forces as well as many non-NATO countries. It is derived from, but is not identical to, the .223 Remington cartridge.

History

In the 1950s, the 7.62×51mm NATO rifle cartridge (physically interchangeable with, but not identical to, the .308 Winchester rifle cartridge) was selected to replace the .30-06 Springfield as the standard NATO rifle cartridge. At the time of selection, there had been criticism that the 7.62×51mm NATO was too powerful for lightweight modern service rifles, causing excessive recoil, and that as a result it did not allow for sufficient automatic rate of fire from hand-held weapons in modern combat.

The British had extensive evidence with their own experiments into an intermediate cartridge since 1945 and were on the point of adopting a .280 inch (7 mm) cartridge when the selection of the 7.62×51mm NATO was made. The FN company had also been involved in the development of the .280 round including developing a version of the FN FAL in .280. The concerns about recoil and effectiveness were effectively overruled by the US within NATO, and the other NATO nations accepted that standardization was more important at the time than selection of the ideal cartridge. However, while the 7.62×51mm NATO round became NATO standard, the US was already engaged in research of their own, which ultimately led to the 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge.