India, May 25 -- Within four years of the formation of the United Nations - the institution meant to keep the peace and help member states peacefully resolve disputes - came the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in 1949. This military alliance had 12 member countries across Europe and North America. (It now has 32.) By 1955, the Warsaw Pact, between the Soviet Union and members of the Eastern Bloc, had come to life as a countermeasure to NATO. And there you had it. It took less than a decade after the world's most brutal war, for military alliances to make a comeback. In the wake of NATO, new US-led military alliances took root in South-East Asia and West Asia; the Soviet Union followed suit, where possible, with its o...