The Cold War: A MILITARY History (7 page)

In 1968 Communist eastern Europe suffered yet another of its periodic upheavals, this time in Czechoslovakia, leading to an invasion by Warsaw Pact forces, which, while NATO took no overt military action, did cause the Alliance to review its responses to aggression. NATO also issued a warning about the dangers inherent in the Soviet advocacy of the right to intervene in the affairs of a fellow member of the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’, a somewhat elusive body whose existence was not recognized by the United Nations. However, by doing nothing to interfere with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, NATO members appeared to give at least tacit acknowledgement to the existence of a Soviet ‘Great Power sphere of influence’ in which the rules which normally governed the behaviour of smaller states did not apply.

The following two years saw important diplomatic initiatives. In late 1969 the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) was held in November; this was followed in December by the launch of the West German government’s ‘
Ostpolitik
’. Chancellor Willy Brandt’s strategy proved very fruitful and resulted in a German–Soviet Treaty in August 1970 and a German–Polish Treaty four months later, and these were accompanied by direct talks between West and East Germany, which started in March 1970. In addition to all these, France, the UK and the USA took a separate initiative by starting talks with the USSR on Berlin.

The NATO proposal for talks on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR), which had first been made in 1968, finally elicited a Soviet response in 1971. Other talks also bore fruit in 1971, with the signing not only of the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin – the first such written agreement since 1949 – but also of an agreement between West and East Germany on civil access to the city. Then, in the following year, both the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty Round I (SALT I) were signed, and discussions on SALT II started.

This series of successes in the early 1970s gave rise to one of a periodic series of feelings of optimism, which led in May 1972 to the adoption of a NATO proposal for a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), to be held in Helsinki. The preparatory round of CSCE talks ended in June 1973 and the conference proper began in July, attended by representatives from thirty-three European states (Albania was the only one refusing to attend), plus the United States and Canada. The feeling of real progress continued with the opening of the MBFR talks in Vienna in January 1973.

This apparently new era in East–West relations, coupled with unprecedented
economic
well-being in most NATO countries, inevitably led to a lessening in the cohesion of NATO, but the Alliance continued. A salutary lesson from outside Europe came in October 1973, when the Egyptians carried out a major attack across the Suez Canal which took the Israelis completely by surprise – an ominous warning of what might happen in Europe if NATO lowered its guard. In addition, the Arab–Israeli war dragged in both the USA and the USSR, both of which made threatening gestures, including placing at least part of their nuclear forces on a higher alert status. Although direct confrontation was averted, the events reminded NATO members of the dangers of a sudden crisis – a reminder which was emphasized by evidence of a continuing Soviet military build-up in eastern Europe.

NATO reached its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1974 with a feeling of cautious optimism. Diplomatic negotiations were going well, the German Democratic Republic – East Germany – had been recognized by the Western countries, the two Germanies had been admitted to the United Nations in September 1973, Soviet first secretary Leonid Brezhnev had visited both Berlin and Washington, also in 1973, and the MBFR talks were firmly under way.

The following years were a continuation of these processes, and détente seemed almost to have attained a degree of permanence until on 27 December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This event had a major impact on NATO, since it appeared that behind the Soviet offers of arms control and reductions in East–West tension there still lurked the inherent aggressiveness which had caused NATO to be formed thirty years previously. The apprehension caused by the invasion of Afghanistan was increased by the threat of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Poland as the ‘Solidarity’ trade-union movement gathered pace, culminating in the takeover of power by General Wojciech Jaruzelski on 19 October 1981. On 13 December this was followed by the declaration of martial law, which led to wide-scale arrests, imprisonment and deaths.

The early and mid-1980s were characterized by a roller-coaster effect as relationships between East and West seemed to alternate abruptly between improvement and deterioration. The Alliance believed that the strategic balance of forces was tipping ever more in the favour of the USSR, and 1981 saw the first issue of a US-government unclassified report titled
Soviet Military Power
, a well-produced, illustrated and relatively detailed publication which was subsequently issued annually.
³
The Soviet Union made an immediate response by publishing its own glossy assessment of the balance of power, titled
Whence the Threat to Peace?
⁴
NATO then decided to join in this ‘documentary war’, publishing its own, somewhat less glossy, assessment of the balance in 1982.
⁵

Spain’s membership of the Alliance had first been discussed in the preliminary talks in Washington in 1948, and had been raised periodically
thereafter
, but it finally became reality in December 1981. Although Spanish delegates immediately took part in Alliance decision-making, however, some years were to pass before Spain decided to join the integrated command structure.

Throughout this period the problem of intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) was rumbling on, sparked by the Soviet decision to deploy SS-20 missiles in eastern Europe, which is described in greater detail in
Chapter 4
.

The US presidential elections in 1980 resulted in victory by Ronald Reagan, who on taking power in January 1981 immediately brought a new sense of direction to both US and Alliance discussions. One of his early moves was the 1983 announcement of the start of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was intended to provide a guaranteed defensive shield against incoming missiles and to be superior to a strategy depending upon a heavy counter-attack. The Soviet Union became extremely agitated about SDI, since it threatened to negate the value of its vast stocks of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs). Also in 1983 NATO, having failed to persuade the Soviet Union to stop deploying SS-20s, started to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in the UK and the FRG.

In 1984 NATO approved SACEUR’s new concept known as ‘Follow-On Forces Attack’ (FOFA). Soviet operational plans were known to be based on sudden attacks by in-place forces (i.e. those already in position in eastern Europe in peacetime), which were designated ‘first echelon forces’ by NATO. The Soviets intended that this first echelon would keep going for as long as possible, but that, if it was halted by NATO forces, they would then pass through fresh, previously uncommitted forces, designated the ‘second echelon’, to restore the momentum of the attack. FOFA was concerned with conventional operations to locate, attack and destroy Warsaw Pact second-echelon forces before they were committed; it required target-acquisition means that were not only more effective but operated at much greater depth than existing systems, allied to more rapid information processing, and improved means of conventional attack on targets deep in the enemy’s rear areas.

The remainder of the 1980s seemed like a helter-skelter ride as one agreement followed after another, particularly following the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and hence leader of the USSR). Progress in many areas of East–West discussions, such as the MBFR and CSCE talks, started to improve, and became even better following the Reagan–Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik in October 1986, even though that meeting itself did not result in any firm agreements.

The INF Treaty on the reduction of tactical nuclear weapons was signed in December 1987, and the Soviet army began its withdrawal from Afghanistan in May 1988, completing it in February 1989. Also in February 1989 the Soviet Union and all Warsaw Pact members except Romania announced troop reductions as a prelude to the opening of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) talks in Vienna in March. But, far away from these high-level discussions, though inspired by the atmosphere of change they engendered, the people of East Germany were taking matters into their own hands. Thus in the second half of 1989 East Germans started to escape to West Germany via Czechoslovakia, with the Czech government doing virtually nothing to help its Warsaw Pact comrade-in-arms. Then in November the popular pressure on the East German government became intense and, having realized that, on this occasion, they would receive no assistance from the Soviet army, the East German authorities opened the checkpoints in the Berlin Wall. There were many diplomatic formalities to follow, but in essence the Cold War was over and NATO had achieved the aim for which it was founded.

INTERNAL PROCESSES

The perceived threat from the Soviet Union caused the European nations and those of North America to draw together through NATO in a way which had never previously proved possible, even in the face of war. Thus, at the political level, there was regular consultation both through ministerial meetings and through the permanent representatives in Brussels, and, while they always remained sovereign nations, NATO members nevertheless sacrificed a degree of independence through membership of the Alliance. Even the most powerful nation of all, the United States, regularly consulted its NATO colleagues before the rounds of various discussions with the USSR, and as regularly reported on the outcome.

NATO did not have its own parliament, but the 188–member North Atlantic Assembly fulfilled at least some of the tasks of such a body.
^fn3
The Assembly existed outside NATO, was funded by member nations (plus a small grant from NATO itself), and met twice a year, for three days in the spring and five days in the autumn. Its task was to provide a forum where matters of current concern could be discussed by representatives of the national legislative assemblies (government ministers were ineligible for
membership
), and it then produced two types of document:
recommendations
, which were sent to the North Atlantic Council urging a particular action, and
resolutions
, which were sent to member governments and were essentially expressions of opinion.

NATO’s bureaucratic infrastructure was vast. The political and diplomatic International Staff was divided into five divisions, covering political affairs; defence planning and policy; defence support, infrastructure logistics and civil-emergency planning; scientific affairs; and international affairs.

The International Military Staff (IMS) was also large, with tentacles spread throughout the Alliance, most of its tasks being to make plans for war, to provide co-ordination on military matters, and to service a multitude of international committees and working groups. These were the forums at which national representatives provided the views of their defence ministries to NATO and took back the views of the committee or working group to their capitals. The committees and working groups covered a vast range of subjects, ranging from weapons standardization, through data systems inter-operability, to the specifications for the fuel to be used in military aircraft.

NATO also had a variety of executive functions. At NATO Headquarters itself, the IMS divisions covered intelligence; plans and policy; operations; logistics and resources; communications and information systems; and armaments and standardization. There were also a number of bodies responsible for the management of NATO-owned systems, such as the NATO Airborne Early Warning Programme Management Agency (NAPMA), which managed the NATO airborne-early-warning force of E-3A Sentry aircraft at Geilenkirchen in West Germany, the Central European Pipeline Office (CEPO), which managed NATO’s fuel pipeline and storage system, and the NATO Communications and Information Systems Agency (NACISA).

NATO owned and operated several training centres, which included the NATO Defence College in Rome, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) Training Centre at Oberammergau in West Germany, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol School in southern Germany, and the NATO Communication and Information Systems Training Centre at Latina, in Italy. Research facilities included the SACLANT Undersea Research Centre at La Spezia, Italy, and the SHAPE Technical Centre, which provided scientific and technical advice and support to SHAPE from its base in The Hague.

fn1
The ‘tripwire’ strategy, which had been promulgated in the USA by President Eisenhower on 12 January 1955 and was endorsed by NATO the following year, involved instant massive retaliation in response to any Soviet aggression.

fn2
This also happened, by chance, to be the first ministerial meeting at NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels, where it had moved to from Fontainebleau.

fn3
The number of members was based (approximately) on population: Belgium 7; Canada 12; Denmark 5; France 18; Federal Republic of Germany 18; Greece 7; Iceland 3; Italy 18; Luxembourg 3; Netherlands 7; Norway 5; Portugal 7; Spain 12; Turkey 12; UK 18; USA 36.

4

Stresses and Strains

IN SUCH A
vast organization which endured over such a long period and was composed of such disparate nations, most of whom had fought each other at least once in the twentieth century, there were inevitably a number of stresses and strains. Never once, however, did they lead to a member leaving the Alliance, either of its own volition or as a result of expulsion.

FRANCE

The most critical of these strains involved France’s departure from the integrated command structure. The reasons for this were grounded in recent French history. France had been totally humiliated by the rapidity with which the German forces overran the country in 1940. These problems were exacerbated by the split between the Vichy government, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, and the Free French, headed by General Charles De Gaulle. Although the latter participated in the Allied successes in 1944–5, it was always as a junior partner to the USA and the UK; but in the final days of the war De Gaulle’s personality was so strong that he managed to secure a French zone of occupation both in western Germany and in Berlin.