The Cold War: A Military History

ONE OF THE greatest problems facing NATO was that, as a defensive alliance, it could only react to Warsaw Pact aggression or threat of aggression. Of necessity, it required time to implement the many measures required to bring its forces and individual member nations on to a war footing. Thus there was a heavy dependence upon accurate and timely strategic warning which would indicate that Warsaw Pact offensive operations were imminent, and upon which firm decisions could be made to set the mobilization process in train.

Such strategic warning depended upon intelligence staffs receiving clues, which could have come from satellites, electronic intelligence (ELINT), airborne sensors, political analysis, covert or overt human intelligence (HUMINT) sources, or the ever-inquisitive media. Receipt of such warning signals was, however, insufficient in itself, and adequate strategic warning also required correct interpretation (i.e. translating information into intelligence) and, once that had been made, a determination to take action.

The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War on 6 October 1973 was one of several lessons to NATO about what could go wrong. Before the invasion that began the war, many strategic surveillance systems had been focused on the Middle East, and military, political and media interest in the area were intense. Despite all of these, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians managed not only to co-ordinate their plans but also to conduct preliminary moves, involving large numbers of men and a great deal of equipment, without causing undue alarm in either Israel or the United States. When the attack came, at 1400 hours on 6 October, it achieved both strategic and tactical surprise, and was a brilliant military success, with Egyptian troops pouring across the Suez Canal to eliminate the Israeli strongpoints. The Egyptians then withstood a succession of armoured counter-attacks, during which they achieved a further tactical surprise by employing a combination of artillery, heavy anti-tank guided weapons and RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank weapons, which, in combination, completely halted these counter-attacks until the Israelis had devised methods of dealing with this new threat.

That the Israelis then managed to turn the tables on the Arab forces is not of great relevance here; the inescapable fact was that the Egyptians had achieved a masterly surprise, and, if that could be achieved in the Middle East, it was clear that it might also happen in central Europe. What was more, the Arabs had used essentially Soviet methods, as expounded publicly by Marshal Sokolovskiy, which can be summarized as being intended to mislead the enemy commanders by developing attacks in the least expected direction, concealing moves to prepare for the offensive, and deceiving the enemy with regard to the time, place and strength of the attack.^{1} These tactics were not original, however, but were originally postulated by the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote in about 500 BC that ‘all warfare is based on deception… offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him… attack when he is unprepared; sally out when he does not expect you’.^{2}

Before the Yom Kippur War, NATO planners had assumed that they would receive adequate warning of a lengthy Warsaw Pact process of mobilization. The lessons of Yom Kippur, however, coupled with the increasing strength and readiness of Warsaw Pact forces, meant that a surprise attack using in-place forces appeared to be a distinct possibility.

THE NATO ALERT BOOK

The essential requirement for NATO was that, should an attack have appeared imminent, the Alliance had to bring its military forces and member nations to a state of war in an orderly manner, at similar speeds, and in time for their armed forces to occupy the planned deployment positions from which they would repel the invaders. This would have been achieved by means of the NATO Alert System, which was codified in the ‘Alert Book’.^{3}

The Alert Book set out a number of ‘readiness states’, each broken down into a number of discrete ‘measures’, each of which was carefully described. These measures could be ‘called’ either individually or in groups, and, under normal circumstances, the calling of a higher readiness state meant that any outstanding measures from the previous, lower, state would automatically be implemented. As always in NATO, however, nations retained certain rights, and many measures were subject to national caveats. These procedures were routinely tested, particularly during exercises known as ‘FALLEX’ and ‘CIMEX’, and were progressively refined during the years of the Cold War.[1]

The lowest alert state was Military Vigilance, which was designed to be called in a period of low-level but increasing tension. It was intended to be applied by major NATO commanders (MNCs) to assigned forces without prior reference to the North Atlantic Council or to governments, although these would of course have been informed that it had been called. It consisted of a number of precautionary military measures which were estimated to have neither economic nor political effects, and which could be maintained for a protracted period without serious effects on individuals or units. Measures to be called could have included some or all of: manning war headquarters with skeleton staffs, activating reserved communications circuits,[2] rechecking mobilization plans, covert reconnaissance of planned emergency dispersal sites, and conducting readiness exercises. These were all aimed at making it easier for NATO’s military forces to move rapidly into the first of the formal alert states, Simple Alert.

The Formal Alert System consisted of a set of three progressive states, which were designed to provide increasing readiness in a period of rising tension, to ensure an orderly transition from peace to war, and to ensure the survival of NATO forces. Each state contained a series of measures:

• Simple Alert placed ‘assigned’ forces (i.e. those firmly promised to NATO in time of war) at combat readiness, and advised nations to place ‘earmarked’ forces (i.e. those promised subject to provisos) at maximum readiness for war. Under normal circumstances, Simple Alert could be called by MNCs only after they had obtained approval from governments through their permanent representatives to the North Atlantic Council. In the case of a sudden emergency, however, such as intelligence of an imminent attack by the Warsaw Pact, the MNC could call Simple Alert on his own authority, provided previous authority to do so had been given by the governments concerned.

• Reinforced Alert brought all NATO forces to the highest possible degree of readiness, and was normally the signal for operational command of ‘earmarked’ forces to be transferred to the MNC. Reinforced Alert would normally be called by the North Atlantic Council, but, in urgent cases, could be called by the MNC in consultation with the governments immediately affected.

• General Alert meant that hostilities had either commenced or were immediately imminent, although (at least in theory) it could have been called in a period of tension. General Alert was also the signal for MNCs to implement their emergency deployment plans if these had not already been implemented under a previous measure.

Within these three alert states there was a host of measures, which were placed, by agreement between the MNCs and individual governments, in one of four categories:

• Category 1. MNCs could order a Category-1 measure with or without the related alert stage having been called.

• Category 2. Governments agreed to MNCs implementing such measures once the appropriate alert stage had been called with their approval.

• Category 3. Governments reserved the decision to execute the measure, either wholly or in part, even though the related alert stage had been called.

• Category 4. Such measures did not apply to the government concerned.

In the ‘tripwire’ era, the alert states automatically included the whole of NATO, but with the advent of flexible response the system was amended so that an MNC could call General Alert either throughout his command or only in specified areas.

The alert system was designed to cope with discernible increases in tension, but there was clearly a danger of a situation where the Warsaw Pact attacked with such suddenness that the Formal Alert System could not have been implemented in time. To cope with this a ‘Counter-Surprise’ system was devised, which enabled MNCs to take ‘crash’ action if their forces were actually under attack or where an attack was clearly imminent within hours.

There were a number of possible scenarios. One was where Warsaw Pact forces were on a large-scale exercise close to the Inner German Border and then suddenly started to advance towards a NATO country. Another was where military forces were taking part in ‘internal action’ against a member of the Pact and then swung to invade NATO territory. The latter could have arisen in 1968 when, following the invasion of Czechoslovakia, a number of Soviet and East German divisions suddenly swung westward and advanced to within a few kilometres of the Czechoslovak–West German border.

Counter-Surprise consisted of two states: State Orange, based on a possible attack within hours, and State Scarlet, which would have been called when under actual attack or with an attack expected in less than an hour. In the early days, even when either of these states had been called, the MNC still had to wait for Reinforced Alert to be called before he obtained operational command of his assigned forces, but from 1964 such command was transferred automatically on the calling of either state.

The alert system highlighted a number of significant issues and was the subject of repeated negotiations between NATO commanders and national governments. From the national point of view, no government wished to give up its authority to take steps to protect its own national interests. To protect this authority, few forces were under NATO’s operational command in peacetime, being either firmly promised in time of war (‘assigned’ forces) or promised with provisos (‘earmarked’ forces). On the other hand, NATO commanders wanted to assume operational command of forces, particularly the assigned forces, as early as possible during the transition-to-war process. The transfer of authority (known colloquially as ‘chopping’) was originally specified for Reinforced Alert but was later reduced to Simple Alert, although certain nations still placed caveats on this.

Such caveats – and there were many scattered through the Alert Book – meant that when a particular measure was called it excluded a specified country, whose explicit agreement to the measure had to be obtained. Such caveats were sometimes based on national political requirements, but some were also based on practical considerations. A particular problem, for example, concerned Berlin, whose defence was a tripartite responsibility – involving only France, the UK and the USA – and did not directly involve NATO. Thus the UK, for example, placed caveats on the transfer of command of certain of its Germany-based forces, since these might have been required to implement one or other of the various contingency plans under tripartite command rather than under NATO command.[3]

The measures were extremely comprehensive. Within the assigned forces they involved many hundreds of actions involved in preparing for war, such as (to take but a few examples) outloading stores and munitions, the recall of people from leave and courses, the general examination of plans, preparations for the control and reception of refugees, and so on. Within national defence ministries plans were also re-examined, reservists were recalled, civil transport was requisitioned in accordance with previously prepared plans, and many other actions were set in train.

The measures went far wider than defence ministries, however, and involved action by most civil ministries as well. Transport ministries had to implement actions at airports, at ports and on the railway systems, and had to requisition transport and position it according to defence-ministry requirements. Health ministries had to take precautionary measures at hospitals and to clear ward space for wartime casualties among both military forces and the general population. Interior ministries were required to activate civil-defence plans, to place the police, gendarmerie and fire units on standby, to take over the direction of national media, and, in some countries, to prepare and, if necessary, to implement evacuation plans. In addition, since the administration of NATO forces remained a national responsibility, there were national plans (e.g. for US and British troops in West Germany) for such matters as closing down schools for forces’ children and repatriating civilian staff and forces’ families.

THE WARSAW PACT

The Soviet air force and the strategic rocket force were virtually fully manned at all times, and the vast majority of units were in their wartime locations. The Soviet navy, while ships in commission were well manned, still required reservists to bring crews up to war establishment and to activate ships in the reserve fleet. A major factor, however, was that in normal times the navy maintained only about 10 per cent of its active vessels at sea, which meant that a substantial number of ships and submarines would have had to leave port during a very short period to reach their wartime stations.

The combat formations and units of the land forces – by far the largest element of the Soviet military machine – were placed in three categories in peacetime: Category-A units were manned at between 75 and 110 per cent of their war establishment; Category-B at 50–70 per cent; and Category-C at 10–33 per cent. All units in the Western Group of Forces (i.e. in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland) were in Category A and were usually manned up to 100 per cent, while those in the western USSR were at slightly lower levels. Category-B units would have been available for deployment in thirty days, and Category-C units in sixty days. In very general terms the categories also reflected the equipment, with Category-A units having the latest and best equipment and Category-C the oldest and least effective, with Category-B lying somewhere in between.

Officially, in the Soviet Union mobilization had to be ordered by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, which instructed reservists to report for duty and ceased the discharge of serving conscripts until further notice. Mobilization would have been effected through the local military headquarters, which were also responsible for the local drafts and thus experienced in assembling and dispatching manpower. Similar systems were employed in the other Warsaw Pact countries by their respective governments.

A SURPRISE ATTACK

Throughout the Cold War NATO claimed that it was possible for the Warsaw Pact to carry out a surprise attack, in the course of which NATO’s in-place forces could have been overwhelmed before their reinforcements could have reached them. Certainly the later moves during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, when the Soviet and East German divisions suddenly closed up to the border with West Germany, showed that such a move was at least possible.

Such an attack would have fitted in with Soviet military thinking, since the Category-A forces facing NATO could have attacked from a ‘standing start’ with the aim of throwing NATO off balance and gaining time until, first, the Category-A units in the western USSR arrived to take over, followed by the Category-B units, which would have taken longer to mobilize.

Both sides, but particularly the West, had very complicated mobilization and deployment plans, which involved a lengthy series of interlocking and mutually dependent events. Many of the elements of these plans were tested in peacetime, but the realism of the tests was constrained by peacetime actualities: before an exercise, for example, merchant ships and civil aircraft had to be ordered months in advance, to enable owners to programme their availability; in the real thing, they would have been required at very short notice, without argument, and commercial compensation would have been a matter for later negotiations. Further, the sheer scale and complexity of the totality of the plans was impossible to test.

There can be no doubt that the military staffs in NATO and in national capitals would have been pressing hard for the politicians to make the decisions necessary to start the mobilization process. Nor can there be much doubt that most politicians in most countries in any situation short of an all-out Warsaw Pact attack would have been urging caution, counselling patience, questioning the validity of the intelligence assessments, indicating the escalatory nature of mobilization, seeking other ways of resolving the crisis, and, in all probability, declining at least some of the military requests.

Such decision-making processes were, of course, practised in peacetime exercises, but there were two factors which caused possible disputes to be played down. The first was that an exercise, by definition, was not the ‘real thing’ and thus arguments and pressures which could have arisen in reality were either glossed over or ignored altogether. Second, there was strong pressure to keep an exercise moving forward in accordance with a planning timetable, in order that all phases of the war could be practised before the unalterable end-of-exercise time was reached. This in itself prevented any major problem being allowed to delay matters for too long.

Had the reality ever arisen, however, dissension in the North Atlantic Council, particularly over calling Simple Alert and Reinforced Alert and in setting national mobilizations in train, was highly likely and could have proved very difficult to resolve. The military would then have pressed even harder for action, arguing that their plans would disintegrate into chaos if held back for too long, and pointing out the disasters that would occur if the Warsaw Pact attacked before all NATO’s troops were deployed. Such differences of opinion within the Alliance would have been exploited for all they were worth by the Soviets and their supporters in the West.

The lesson of August 1914 was very relevant to NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War. In the hothouse climate of Europe in 1910–14, most countries were tied into one of the major alliances; the rest were neutral. The general staff of the likely belligerents, all of whom, except for Great Britain, had conscript armies, had prepared the most detailed mobilization and deployment plans (and Britain, too, needed to mobilize certain categories of reservists if war was imminent). Such mobilization could be either total or partial in order to meet a specific threat from a particular country or group of countries.

Under such plans, the announcement of national mobilization would set in train a series of events. This began with individuals being required to report within a designated time to specified depots, where they would be kitted out; then, as soon as the units were formed, they were automatically moved to a designated location, which was part of the national war plan. Such movement was almost entirely by railway, plus, in the case of France, sea transport from North Africa to the metropolitan country, and, in the case of the UK, ferries across the Channel. These plans necessitated manually prepared and controlled timetables of extraordinary complexity, which were carefully intermeshed with each other; as a result, the whole mobilization process became very rigid and inflexible.

For the general staffs, there were two major dangers. The first was that a potential enemy could, quite literally, steal a march by completing its mobilization process first. Thus mobilization itself became an act of war. The second was that, in every country, the mobilization plans could not start without a political decision, except for some very minor preliminary moves. As a result, when the time came in July/August 1914, the generals had to demand the mobilization order early and often, until it was actually given.

The deed which sparked the First World War mobilizations was a totally unexpected event – the murder in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on 28 June 1914. This generated an ever-deepening crisis until Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, whereupon Imperial Russia ordered mobilization against Austria-Hungary, but not against Germany, with whom at that time it had no immediate quarrel. Germany, however, demanded that Russia should demobilize; when the latter refused, Germany, fearing attack, declared war and started full mobilization on 1 August. France, knowing that this made a German attack inevitable, ordered mobilization on the same day. Germany, in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan (as modified by Helmuth von Moltke, the younger), thereupon declared war on France and invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August, the latter act provoking an ultimatum from Great Britain. When the Germans rejected this, Great Britain declared war on Germany and also mobilized.

In hindsight, the whole business possessed a dreadful inevitability, as the political and military leaders, like lemmings leaping over a Norwegian cliff, rushed helter-skelter to war. For those taking part, however, it was a nightmare period as each general staff sought to ensure that its nation was not caught off-balance.

During the Cold War, NATO’s plans too were extraordinarily detailed and interdependent, and there was a strong possibility that their complexity and inflexibility were such that a situation analogous to that of August 1914 might have arisen. Thus a modern equivalent of the ‘tyranny of the railway timetables’ could have forced leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain into a war which few of them, like most of the leaders in 1914, really wanted. If the result in 1914 was dire, however, the consequences of such a mobilization race during the Cold War would have been unimaginably worse.

THROUGHOUT THE COLD War there was no other place or group of people that epitomized the issues at stake as clearly as Berlin and the Berliners; indeed, on more than one occasion, events in and around Berlin dragged Europe – and the world – to the brink of war. The city’s curious status stemmed in part from its role as the traditional capital first of Prussia and then of united Germany (from 1871), but mainly from its political and emotional significance as the capital city of, first, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial Germany and subsequently of Hitler’s Third Reich. Thus the very name ‘Berlin’ struck a chill into the hearts of its enemies, and reaching and controlling it became the symbolic military goal of all four Allies during the Second World War.

THE LEGAL POSITION

In international law, the four occupying powers derived their rights and status in Berlin from the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945. This was formalized by a declaration issued on 5 June 1945, under which, in the absence of any German central government or authority, the Four Powers assumed supreme authority over the country.^{1}

The post-war status of Germany was first considered by the American–British–Soviet European Advisory Commission (EAC),[1] which began its meetings in London in early 1944. This group quickly decided that Germany would be divided into three zones of occupation, giving the USSR an area stretching to within 100 km of the Rhine and including some 36 per cent of the population and 33 per cent of the country’s industrial resources. Berlin was deep inside this proposed Soviet zone, but was designated a ‘special area’ which would be occupied by and come under the joint administration of the three Allied powers.[2] This was subsequently documented in the London Protocol of 12 September 1944, although the Yalta Conference of Heads of State (4–11 February 1945) later amended this to include a French Zone of Occupation and a French sector in Berlin. Significantly, the EAC was unable to agree on the methods of access to the Western garrisons in Berlin from their occupation zones, thus creating a problem which was to endure for some forty-five years.

When the Red Army took Berlin on 2 May 1945 it found a devastated city, which had been heavily bombed by both the British and the US air forces, and then subjected to relentless Soviet artillery shelling during the final battle. Some 3 million inhabitants had survived. At an inter-Allied meeting in Berlin on 29 June the details of the Western move into the city were agreed with the Russians, and the British and the Americans were allocated the use (but not the control) of one main highway and one railway line each, plus two air corridors. They used these routes to move their occupation forces to Berlin, starting on 1 July, and were followed later by the French.

Initially ‘the four occupying powers’, acting through the Allied Kommandantura, administered the city as a self-contained entity, quite separate from the four zones of occupation (i.e. the American, British, French and Soviet zones), and for administrative purposes the city was subdivided into four sectors, each controlled by one of these powers. Despite these arrangements having been agreed relatively amicably, the problem of access for the three Western garrisons raised itself immediately, since it was obvious that regular contact was required with the Western occupation zones, but they were physically separated from these by a wide stretch of Soviet-controlled territory.[3]

Air access was negotiated and agreed in a written document, signed on 30 November 1945, which guaranteed the use of three corridors, each 32 km wide. A further agreement established a quadripartite Berlin Air Safety Centre (BASC), which managed an air-control zone 32 km in radius and was also responsible for regulating traffic in the corridors from Berlin to the boundaries of adjacent control zones. BASC operated continuously from 12 December 1945 to 31 December 1990, providing a twenty-four-hour service, and was the one Allied body from which the Soviets never withdrew. All flight plans – giving full details of the planned route, height, arrival and departure times, and speed – had to be filed at the BASC and agreed before an aircraft could enter the air-control zone. At the time this agreement was signed, the practical height limit for contemporary transport aircraft was some 3,050 m, and, while this was not written into the agreement, this became accepted ‘by custom and practice’, together with a minimum of 914 m.[4]

Unfortunately, no equivalent formal agreement was ever achieved for the use of the overland access routes by road, rail and canal. All three were originally used in 1945–6 and were then maintained by custom and practice, although they were subject to frequent interference by the Soviet and (later) East German authorities.

POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS

When the planning for setting up the Federal Republic of Germany began in 1949, the German drafters of the proposed Federal Constitution (Basic Law) included a statement in Article 23 in which ‘Greater Berlin’ was listed as the twelfth Land of the Federal Republic.[5] The three Western Allies’ military governors, however, prevented this in a letter dated 12 May 1949, denying authority for Berlin to be declared a Land and also stipulating that, while Berlin might send a small number of representatives to the Bundestag (Federal parliament) and the Bundesrat (Senate), they had to be non-voting.[6] The Allied Kommandantura later also stated that Federal legislation had to be voted into Berlin law by the Magistrat (the Berlin City Assembly) before it could become valid in Berlin.

The Federal Republic of Germany duly came into being on 21 September 1949 (though still formally occupied by the Western Allies), and the Soviets responded on 7 October by declaring that the Soviet Occupation Zone had been redesignated the German Democratic Republic (GDR), with its capital in Berlin. This was followed by announcements on 10 October that the Soviet Military Administration had been redesignated the Control Commission, and on 12 November that the Soviet military governor had transferred his functions to the East Berlin Magistrat.

The position of West Berlin was further redefined in 1952, when the ‘Relations Convention’ was under discussion. On 26 May 1952 the three Western Allies informed the Federal chancellor that, while they formally maintained their position that West Berlin should remain excluded from the Federal Republic, they would nevertheless permit the Federal Republic to provide economic assistance to West Berlin, where the currency would be the West German Deutschmark (DM). Thus, by the late 1950s, and with little change for the remainder of the Cold War, the position in West Berlin was that:

• The Federal government represented West Berlin overseas.

• Berlin was represented in both the Bundesrat and the Bundestag, and both of these bodies met from time to time in West Berlin.

• The Federal president had an official residence in West Berlin.

• The Federal government maintained some fifty governmental offices in West Berlin, but not the Ministry of Defence, which was specifically excluded from West Berlin.

• Federal German Law had been adopted almost in its entirety in West Berlin, and the superior Federal courts had jurisdiction in appeals, except for the Federal Constitutional Court, which had no jurisdiction in Berlin.

• The Federal government subsidized the West Berlin economy, balanced the budget, and maintained strategic stockpiles in the city.[7]

• The Western Allies and the Federal authorities maintained an amicable difference of view on the status of the city. Thus the Federal Constitutional Court laid down that Berlin was a Land of the Federal Republic, but accepted that Federal German responsibility was temporarily limited by the Allied occupation rights. The Allies, however, never varied from their view that the city was not a Land and were always careful to maintain its status as an occupied city under Four Power authority, because this was the basis for defending West Berlin, for upholding Western rights there and for access.

Within Berlin, the top policy body was the Four Power Allied Control Council, attended by the four commandants, which met regularly until 20 March 1948. On that day the three Western commandants met their Soviet colleague for what promised to be a routine meeting, but, to their astonishment, as soon as the proceedings opened, Marshal Sokolovskiy, the Soviet representative, launched into a prepared statement containing a long list of charges against the Western Allies, reading them at a tremendous pace. As soon as he had finished he stormed out, and for the remainder of the Allied stay in Berlin the three Western commandants continued to meet in the Allied Kommandantura, but with the Soviet seat remaining empty.

On 1 April 1948 Red Army units stopped the regular British, French and US trains to Berlin just inside the Soviet zone. All three were shunted into a siding, where they were left engineless for some fourteen hours, after which they were pulled back into their respective Western zones. Citing the introduction of the new Deutschmark as the reason for their action,[8] the Soviets increased the harassment until a total land blockade was imposed on 22 June 1948. The Western Allies decided that West Berlin must be maintained as a bastion of Western freedom, but, although it was a fundamental assumption in their responses that the Soviets would not go to war over the issue, great care was nevertheless taken not to push the Soviet leadership into a corner from which either open conflict or humiliation would be the only route out.

Soviet measures included blocking all road, rail and canal routes from the Western zones to Berlin – the Western commandants suddenly realized they had neglected to obtain written agreements for these from the Soviets – and the cessation of all direct deliveries of food, coal and electrical power from the Soviet zone. Air was left as the only means of supplying the city, and, to the surprise of the Soviets, the Western Allies organized the ‘Berlin Airlift’, which proceeded to deliver sufficient food and coal to maintain the Western garrisons and the population of West Berlin through the winter of 1948 and into the spring of 1949. The blockade lasted for 318 days, during which the Allies flew in some 2,360,000 tonnes of supplies in a total of 277,728 flights, at a cost of seventy-five American, British and German lives. The land blockade was quietly lifted on 12 May 1949, although the Allied air-resupply operation continued until the situation had stabilized at the end of September.

The Berlin Airlift was an enormous and extremely complicated operation, and when the Soviets eventually relaxed their blockade it appeared that they had lost. However, a pattern had been established which was followed throughout the years during which Berlin was divided: if there was a written agreement, the Soviets stuck to it.

The airlift also had two other, perhaps less publicized, results. First, it broke down the barriers which had existed since May 1945 between the Western troops and the German population, removing the psychological barriers between victors and defeated, and creating a mutual respect and considerable sympathy for each other. Second, it showed the French that they could not act on their own over Berlin or occupied West Germany, and from 1948 onwards they were much more co-operative.

The relationship between East Berlin and the GDR was, however, somewhat different, and in the late 1950s the eastern sector was progressively integrated into the GDR – a process clearly directed by the USSR. Despite this, the Western Allies were always convinced that there was a strong feeling of contempt for their East German allies among the Soviet forces, which had no parallel in the relationship between the Western Allies and the population of the Federal Republic.

WESTERN PLANS

The Western powers knew that their garrisons in West Berlin were militarily extremely vulnerable. They were some 180 km from the Inner German Border and totally surrounded by Soviet and GDR ground and air forces. Each of the three Western powers maintained a nominal brigade in the city: in 1986, for example, there were 4,300 US troops, 3,000 British and 2,700 French. It would, however, be wrong to visualize these as brigades in the normal sense, since they were tailored to their role. The combat elements of the British Berlin Infantry Brigade, for example, consisted of a company of eighteen tanks,[9] three lorry-borne infantry battalions (with just six armoured personnel carriers each), a company of engineers and (from 1977) a platoon of helicopters. A ‘normal’ infantry brigade based in Western Germany, however, had a battalion of tanks, three infantry battalions mounted in armoured personnel carriers, a battalion of helicopters, a battalion of artillery and a company of engineers.

The Berlin brigades did, however, have a strong representation of combat-support elements, including an intelligence company, a signal company, a military-police company and administrative assets such as a transport company. It was also widely reported that the large antennas on a hill named the Babelsburg, all of which pointed into East Germany, were for SIGINT purposes.

The chain of command for the Western garrisons was complex, since it reflected both national and allied requirements, and covered political and civil matters as well as military. In addition, it differed between peace and war. Within Berlin the four Allied commandants worked together as the Allied Kommandantura, although after the walkout by the Soviet commandant in 1948 it was left to the three Western commandants to correlate their plans and responses to Soviet pressures, with the chairmanship revolving between the three on a monthly basis. The chairman had specific duties, which included making the co-ordinated response to Soviet or East German initiatives, as well as co-ordinating action during the early stages of a military confrontation. It was, however, appreciated that in war the three Western Allies would have to work even more closely together, and so it was agreed from early during the occupation of the city that in a crisis and conflict the US commandant would become the single commander.

In January 1951 the Allied Staff Berlin was established, with the tasks of preparing tripartite plans for the defence of West Berlin, setting up the command posts and communications necessary to control such plans, and establishing ‘Force B’. This was a new section of the West Berlin Police, organized and equipped as light infantry, with one battalion in each of the three Western sectors. The force eventually numbered some 1,850 men, but it was disbanded in the early 1960s.

In 1961, however, the Allied commandants proposed that the arrangement for the single commander should become more formal. In particular, they wanted it to be implemented earlier in a crisis, especially in a situation where communications between Berlin and the zones in West Germany had either broken down or were (much more likely) blocked by the Soviets.

The three Western commandants had civil as well as military responsibilities, and to help with the political side they were supported by a senior diplomat, who served as ‘deputy commandant and minister’. Each of the Western commandants reported politically to the appropriate ambassador in Bonn, and militarily direct to their defence ministry in their national capital, but keeping their national commander-in-chief in the Federal Republic (i.e. CINCFFA for France, CINCBAOR for the UK, and CINCEUR for the USA) informed. Overall co-ordination was the responsibility of the Washington Ambassadors Group in Washington DC, chaired by the US secretary of state and comprising the British, the French and (informally) the West German ambassadors.

Any military help for the Western garrisons would have had to come from the three national contingents in West Germany, but, since Berlin was an Allied responsibility, NATO was not involved in the military command chain for the city during peacetime and the early stages of a crisis. The overall military commander of Berlin was therefore Commander-in-Chief US Forces Europe (CINCEUR),[10] whose peacetime planning function with regard to Berlin was exercised through a tripartite headquarters.

This headquarters, known as Live Oak, was formed on 4 April 1959 and was originally situated in the US forces’ HQ European Command (HQ EUCOM) barracks at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, some 32 km south-west of Paris. The British detached a major-general from commanding a division to become the first chief-of-staff – a step which underlined the extreme importance attached to the task – and he began the process of preparing reinforcement and defence plans, assisted by three teams of officers, one each from France, the UK and the USA, with each team comprising one officer (at colonel level) from the navy, army and air force. By mid-1960, however, draft plans were ready and the HQ was allowed to run down in numbers and prestige, until the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall brought it back into the limelight, where it stayed for the rest of the Cold War.

The HQ moved from HQ EUCOM to SHAPE at Fontainebleau in October 1960, to be closer to the main operational headquarters; then it moved to Belgium, where it took up residence in a separate building within the SHAPE compound at Mons.[11] It continued to be headed by a British major-general (Chief-of-Staff Live Oak), with a small staff from the US, France and the UK, who were responsible for keeping the contingency plans up to date and for conducting the regular exercises. Live Oak was not, however, a command headquarters, and in war it was planned to form a small headquarters run by a senior US officer on SACEUR’s staff and under the personal command of SACEUR.

Maritime operations associated with a Berlin crisis were co-ordinated by a naval headquarters designated Deep Sea, collocated with SACLANT at Norfolk, Virginia. Air operations were controlled by another headquarters, designated Jack Pine, which was located at Headquarters USAF Europe (USAFE) at Ramstein in southern Germany.

It was natural that the West Germans should have taken an intense interest in everything to do with Berlin, and in particular with the Western sector. As a result, a Bundeswehr liaison team was located with Headquarters Live Oak, and the West German authorities were aware of the contingency plans. They did not, however, take part in any of the operations or exercises, and right up to the end no Bundeswehr personnel were allowed into West Berlin in uniform.

A constant preoccupation among the Western commandants was the need to react promptly and firmly to any action which might imperil the status or well-being of the Western garrisons in Berlin. The most serious threats came from actions by the Soviets, which ranged over the years from relatively short delays to road traffic, trains or canal barges (usually blamed on ‘difficulties over paperwork’), through temporary closure of the routes, to total blockade, although the ultimate threat – a direct attack – never materialized. There were also less direct threats, particularly from uprisings by the discontented population of East Germany, either within East Berlin or in East Germany as a whole. Such uprisings were considered to be particularly worrying, since they would attract intense media attention and could unintentionally threaten the Western garrisons, while lacking an identifiable leadership to negotiate with, as happened in 1953, and as nearly happened again in 1989.

The more likely threat, however, was of action by the Soviets to restrict access to Berlin, and the Western commandants identified a requirement to discover Soviet intentions and, where necessary, to deliver a warning that the Western powers were determined to resist. Throughout, however, there was a firm desire to keep the situation under control and to avoid provoking the Soviets into further action.

During the build-up to the closure of the land routes in March 1948, General Lucius Clay, the first US commandant in Berlin, proposed that each of the Western Allies should bring a division to Helmstedt and that the force should then advance to Berlin. By July he had recast his proposal so that the force consisted of a more realistic 200 trucks, escorted by a US contingent consisting of a constabulary regiment, some infantry and an engineer battalion, while the British were to provide an infantry battalion and the French a detachment of anti-tank troops.

The plans were slowly refined over the years, and by the early 1960s there were four phases of reaction. In Phase 1, reconnaissances (known colloquially as ‘probes’) were carried out to determine the seriousness of Soviet intentions. If these failed to achieve the desired result, Phase 2 consisted of a pause on the ground while political action took place, either at the United Nations or between the three Western Allies and the Soviet leadership. If this failed and access was still being denied, then Phase 3 was implemented, which involved stronger military action. If that too failed, then Phase 4, nuclear action, was considered.

The military staff tried to picture every possible contingency which might arise, and then prepared a plan to deal with it.[12] In 1962, for example, the military plans, known as ‘BerCons’ (Berlin contingency plans), included:^{2}

• BerCon Alpha 1 – large-scale fighter escorts for transport aircraft using the Berlin air corridors;

• BerCon Alpha 2– conventional battle for air superiority over Berlin;

• BerCon Bravo – five low-yield, airburst nuclear weapons against selected targets, to demonstrate Western resolve to resort to more powerful nuclear weapons if necessary;

• BerCon Charlie 1 – an attack by a reinforced division along the Helmstedt–Berlin autobahn;

• BerCon Charlie 2 – an attack by two divisions (i.e. a weak corps) in the Kassel area;

• BerCon Charlie 3 – an attack by three divisions (i.e. a normal corps) from Helmstedt along the axis of the Mittellandkanal as far as the river Elbe;

• BerCon Charlie 4 – an attack by three divisions towards Berlin, launched from the Thüringerwald area in the US zone.

There were also plans for a tripartite battalion group, which comprised a British infantry battalion, a US tank company, a French armoured-car platoon, a US engineer platoon (including an armoured bridgelayer), and a leading platoon made up of equal numbers of infantrymen from the three nations. Such a force was designated Trade Wind if mounted from West Germany or Lucky Strike if mounted from West Berlin.

The contingency plans developed by Live Oak from 1959 onwards included possibilities physically far removed from Berlin and even from Germany. There were, for example, a number of naval plans (known as MarCons – i.e. maritime contingency plans) consisting of a series of naval measures, varying from distant blockades of the type that had been so successful off Cuba to close-in blockades off Soviet ports such as Vladivostok.

Naval operations in support of Berlin were occasionally very positive. In May 1959 there was a feeling of crisis over Berlin. There had been a number of incidents on the autobahn and more trouble over the 3,050 m aircraft ceiling, and a Four Power foreign ministers’ conference was held in Geneva, opening on 11 May. One of the measures taken by the Western Allies was for the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to ensure that at least one carrier task group was at sea throughout May, with each carrier maintaining at least six aircraft at immediate-launch status. Again in 1961, during the crisis caused by the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Sixth Fleet was placed on the alert, and on this occasion was reinforced by extra long-range ASW aircraft, while a further ASW carrier group was deployed to the Norwegian Sea.^{3}

All such plans included arrangements for informing the Soviets that these actions were directly related to Berlin, which was usually achieved through the Washington Ambassadors Group, consisting of the US secretary of state and the French and UK ambassadors (with the informal presence of the West German ambassador).

The Berlin Airlift demonstrated that the air corridors were essential to the survival of the Western garrisons, and a number of contingency plans were devoted to ensuring that such access continued. One plan, devised by Live Oak in the early 1960s, involved flying a civil airliner of the type normally used on the Berlin run down one of the air corridors if there was any threat to close it. It was, of course, appreciated that this was not a reasonable mission for a civil aircrew, so, in the British case, the Royal Air Force negotiated a contract with state-owned British European Airways (BEA), which involved six military crews being trained to fly the then current Viscount turboprop airliner. The plan was that, during a crisis, one of these aircraft would be taken over by the British air-force aircrew at Hanover Airport and flown without passengers to Berlin (Tempelhof) and back.

This contingency plan was actually put into operation for the first time on 16 February 1962, at the request of General Lauris Norstad (CINCEUR), although all did not go as smoothly as had been intended.^{4} First, despite the planning and training, when the time came BEA officials refused to hand over one of their aircraft to the air force. This was in part because they did not believe the threat to be sufficiently serious, but also because they were concerned at the commercial consequences of one of their aircraft being shot down or otherwise forced to land by the Soviets, who would then discover that a civil airliner was being flown by a military crew. The matter was so complicated and feelings ran so high that it had to be resolved by a meeting between the company chairman, Lord Douglas, and the secretary of state for air, where Douglas, albeit with considerable reluctance, eventually agreed to make the aircraft available. It was duly taken over, and the flight plan for the northern corridor was cleared with the Soviet representative at the Berlin Air Safety Centre, whereupon the crew flew the aircraft down the central corridor. Not surprisingly, such an error caused considerable embarrassment, although, despite the tensions at the time, the Soviets failed to take any advantage. There were, however, serious repercussions in London, where it was eventually established that there had been a misunderstanding between the relevant authorities in Berlin and Hanover. The US forces developed a similar arrangement with Pan American Airlines, as did the French forces with Air France.

In any crisis on land, the initial aim of the Western Allies was to establish the seriousness of the Soviet threat. This was achieved by using a tripartite force known as a ‘probe’. The codewords changed over the years, but in the 1960s this operation was known as Operation Free Style if the probe force was mounted from the West German end of the autobahn and as Back Stroke if it was mounted from the Berlin end. Such probes were always preceded by a very precise warning to the Soviets, and there were three levels:

• If it was planned to accept any Soviet physical obstruction of the autobahn and to turn back without further discussion, the probe force would consist of fifty-six men in fifteen vehicles.

• If it was planned to accept any physical obstruction placed by the Soviets but only to turn back on being forced to do so (i.e. following protests and a confrontation), the probe force would consist of seventy-seven men in eighteen ‘soft’ vehicles (i.e. trucks) and two armoured personnel carriers.

• If it was planned to take positive action to remove any physical obstructions, but only to use force in self-defence, then the force would consist of 120 men, mounted in twenty-two ‘soft’ vehicles, two armoured cars and two armoured personnel carriers.

INCIDENTS

In total there were many hundreds of incidents involving the Western garrisons during the years they were in Berlin, ranging from the trivial to the extremely serious, with causes varying from incompetence, overenthusiasm or accident to sophisticated planning and co-ordination. In November 1950 tension in Berlin led to the Western Allies reinforcing their garrisons, which included reinforcements from the US 6th Infantry Regiment, together with a British tank squadron equipped with thirty Comet tanks. Then in May 1951 land travel between East and West Berlin was cut, and telephone systems were severed.

The period 1950–51 also included the ‘barge war’ between the British (who controlled three important canal locks in Berlin) and the Soviets. This started with the Soviets interfering with barge traffic between the Western occupied zones and West Berlin; the British responded firmly to this at their locks, where they stopped all East German traffic. This was resolved by an agreement signed on 4 May 1951, although the Soviets and the GDR later built a new stretch of canal, which removed the need for them to use the British-controlled locks.

May 1952 saw intermittent interference with Western military traffic on the British autobahn route; this was aimed at the military police patrols rather than at the traffic itself. Also in 1952 the USSR responded to the recent agreements between the Western Allies and the FRG by instructing the GDR to declare a 5 km ‘security zone’ along the inter-zonal border and the Baltic coast. East German civilians residing in the zone were ruthlessly evicted and resettled elsewhere.

The East Berlin uprising broke out on 16 June 1953, when building workers in the Stalinalee protested against a 10 per cent increase in production norms without any increase in pay, although when crowds gathered the next day the nature of the protest quickly changed from economic to political. The GDR’s Volkspolizei (National Police) were overwhelmed, and the Soviet army had to be called in to restore order. On 18 June the Western commandants sent a ‘strong protest’ to the Soviet commander, but there was little else they could do and it was all soon over. Thirty-five people were killed and 378 injured in the actual fighting, with an unknown further number executed or imprisoned by the GDR authorities afterwards.

Knowing of the shortage of food in the GDR, on 10 July 1953 President Eisenhower offered to supply $15 million worth of foodstuffs for the people. The offer was resisted by both the GDR and the Soviet governments, but the USA went ahead and set up supply depots in West Berlin, and some 3 million people from East Berlin and elsewhere in the GDR managed to collect at least one food parcel each.

The USSR handed over responsibility for borders and for civil traffic on the autobahns to the GDR on 21 January 1956; Soviet military-manned checkpoints were, however, retained for military traffic. The Western Allies protested, particularly when the GDR raised civil vehicle charges on the autobahns by between 100 and 1,000 per cent, and the increases were later reduced, but not eliminated.

On 27 November 1956 two US congressmen and the wife of one of them were visiting East Berlin when they were arrested and detained by the Volkspolizei. Not surprisingly, this caused immediate and strong US reactions, and the group was quickly released.

On 10 November 1958 Khrushchev made a speech in Moscow in the course of which he proposed that West Berlin should become a ‘Free City’, adding that if he failed to receive agreement within six months he would transfer all Soviet powers over West Berlin to the GDR. He then sent identical notes confirming this to the British, French and US governments on 27 November. This led to a new ‘Berlin crisis’, and there was some low-level harassment – for example, a US convoy was halted for two days at the Soviet checkpoint at Helmstedt (2–4 February 1959), and aircraft were also harassed in the corridors. The situation was further complicated in February 1959, when new passes for the Western missions to the Soviet commander-in-chief were issued in the name of the GDR. The Western Allies immediately protested, since the missions were accredited to the Soviet commander-in-chief in person, and demanded that the previous passes be reinstated, which they were. Finally, in this particular episode, Khrushchev’s six-month deadline arrived on 27 May 1959, but the Western Allies allowed it to pass without any response and the Soviets took no further action.

In the late 1950s the question of the 3,050 m ceiling in the air corridors became a major issue, as piston-engined airliners were being replaced by new types, powered by turboprops, which had an economical cruising altitude considerably in excess of that figure; the Viscount aircraft used by BEA, for example, normally flew at 4,250 m. In an effort to force the issue, on 27 March 1959 a US air-force C-130 Hercules transport flew towards Berlin at an altitude of 7,600 m along the southern corridor, where, to nobody’s surprise, it was buzzed by three Soviet fighters. Similarly, a US C-135 jet transport flying at 3,600 m on 3 April and another C-130 at 6,000 m on 15 April were both buzzed. These incidents led to bitter arguments over the 3,050 m maximum, which the Soviets said had become accepted by ‘custom and practice’. Eventually this maximum was accepted by President Eisenhower in person, who declared that it was not an issue worth going to war over.

Meanwhile, escape to West Berlin and West Germany was relatively easy, and the loss of people from the GDR was becoming such a serious problem that it was beginning to threaten the future of the state itself. Table 32.1 shows the annual losses (mostly into West Berlin) since the end of the Berlin Airlift.

The Communist state’s problems were exacerbated when, in late 1959, the GDR started to collectivize the remainder of its privately owned farms; this proved to be an even more unpopular move than usual, but was nevertheless ruthlessly implemented. It was completed by mid-1960, resulting in at least 15,000 farmers fleeing to the West and, coupled with the inefficiencies always associated with collective farming, leading to yet another food crisis in the GDR that year. As a result, escapes to the West increased dramatically, reaching 30,000 in July 1961 and 20,000 in the first twelve days of August, with no less than 4,000 on 12 August alone.

It was widely realized, even in the West, that the GDR would have to do something to halt this outflow of people, but when it came the action caused considerable surprise and dismay. At 0230 hours precisely on 13 August 1961 East German troops and workmen began to build the ‘Berlin Wall’, which was not only to separate the two parts of the city for the next twenty-eight years, but was also to become the very symbol of the Cold War. The S-bahn (overground railway) and U-bahn (underground railway) were closed, but, significantly, no move was made to interfere with the military rights of access to West Berlin. Initially, thirteen crossing points were left open between West and East Berlin, although these were later reduced: first to twelve and later to seven.

The Western commandants protested, but soon West Berlin was ringed by more than 160 km of wall. US vice-president Lyndon Johnson visited the city to boost morale, the US sent a 1,500-strong battlegroup along the southern autobahn, while the British dispatched reinforcements on a slightly smaller scale, including eighteen armoured personnel carriers and eighteen reconnaissance vehicles. On 22 October the East German Volkspolizei attempted to prevent the US deputy commandant from going into East Berlin and, although that particular incident was resolved, the situation escalated during the next few days and US tanks were deployed to the main East–West crossing point, Checkpoint Charlie. The Soviets countered by deploying their own tanks, and the two groups of tanks confronted each other (with, as always, the world’s press looking on) at a range of 100 m for two days. In December President Kennedy called up 300,000 US reservists, while on 13 December 1961 the Operation Free Style force in West Germany was put on forty-eight-hours notice to deploy to the border, although it was not in fact used.

The escapes continued, albeit on a very much reduced scale. As each method was discovered, the GDR took steps to prevent a recurrence, where-upon the next escapers tried an even more ingenious technique. The Berlin Wall eventually included 290 watchtowers, 136 bunkers, 105 km of trenches, 257 km of dog runs and 122 km of fencing with warning devices, all of which required a garrison of no less than 14,000 East German troops.^{5}

In March 1962 the Soviets tried a new tactic in the three air corridors by attempting to reserve so much time for their own flights that there was no capacity left for use by Western aircraft. Even more seriously, they also jammed the air-safety radio frequencies and, on one night, dropped chaff in the corridors to jam the radars. After high-level protests these practices ceased.

There were also incidents on the ground. On 12 March 1962 East German guards shot at a car from the British mission and the British driver was wounded and taken to an East German hospital, where he was operated on. Eventually the Soviet commander-in-chief, Marshal Ivan Konev, apologized, and the soldier was returned to West Berlin. On 20 March 1962 a car from the US mission was shot at, also by East German troops, although nobody was wounded on this occasion, and the occupants were released after being detained for several hours.

In 1963 the Canadian entertainer Hughie Green, who was due to record a TV show in Berlin, decided to fly to the city in his personal aircraft, a twin-engined Cessna 310. His agreed route took him along the southern corridor from Stuttgart to Gatow, but as soon as he was in the corridor he was buzzed by a succession of Soviet jet fighters. These flew very close to his aircraft, rocked their wings, and lowered their undercarriages ordering him to land, and eventually fired warning shots on six separate occasions. Green, a very experienced Second World War pilot, maintained his course and eventually landed safely in Berlin.

Two incidents in 1964 were potentially very serious. The first took place on 10 March, when a US RB-66[13] electronic-surveillance aircraft was shot down over East Germany. This was followed on 28 June by the shooting down of a US North American T-39 aircraft,[14] which had strayed just outside the southern corridor. Both types of aircraft were employed on electronic monitoring missions, but the events were eventually resolved by diplomatic action.

In 1965 the Soviets took exception to sessions of the Bundestag being held in Berlin, and staged manoeuvres by both Soviet and East German troops to show their displeasure. The autobahns were closed to traffic, and Soviet air-force fighters created sonic booms over West Berlin, aimed at the Kongresshalle where the sessions were taking place.

Similar problems recurred in 1969, when the FRG decided to hold a session of the Bundesversammlung in Berlin.[15] Again the Soviets closed the autobahns for several days, deploying a division of troops along the British autobahn, but when the British ran a low-level probe the Soviets allowed it to pass and the crisis was over. The West Germans persisted, and Dr Gustav Heinemann was duly elected president on 5 March, although no further presidential elections were held in West Berlin while the Cold War lasted. There was further interference with traffic along the autobahn during 1971, as well as attempts to close the air corridors, which were countered by flying probes under the control of the Jack Pine air headquarters.

One of the final serious incidents occurred on 24 March 1985, when Major Arthur Nicholson, a member of the US mission, was shot dead by a Soviet soldier while attemping to discover details of the then new Soviet T-80 tank at the Ludwigslust training range near Berlin. The incident took place at a time when global US–USSR relations were particularly good, and the case was dealt with quietly and caused very little public friction.

THE BERLIN ACCORD

In 1971 the Federal German government prompted the four wartime Allies into seeking to achieve an agreement on the status of Berlin, and this resulted in a series of meetings culminating in the ‘Berlin Accord’ of early September 1971. So tortuous were the negotiations that the document avoided actually specifying what was meant by Berlin, referring only to ‘the area in question’, although, since the Soviets refused to discuss East Berlin, the accord actually dealt only with West Berlin. Despite this, both sides gained something. All renounced the use of force in trying to solve Berlin’s problems, while the Western powers acknowledged that Berlin was not only not part of the FRG, but remained under Four Power occupation; they also agreed that Federal bodies would not meet there.[16] In return, the Soviets dropped their assertion that West Berlin lay within the GDR and agreed that the West German government could represent West Berliners internationally. A number of minor problems were also dealt with, and the accord, having been signed by the Four Powers, was then turned over to both German states for implementation, which, not by chance, gave East Germany equal status with West Germany, which had long been a Soviet goal.

THE END

After the Berlin Accord had been signed, life in the city and the corridors followed a much more even path until January 1989, when twenty people, frustrated in their desire to emigrate to the West, occupied the West German mission in East Berlin. These left after obtaining a promise that their applications would be processed by the GDR authorities, but in August another and much larger group occupied the building. Again they were persuaded to leave, and the would-be emigrants turned their attention to escape routes through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

On 7 October, when the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, attended the GDR’s fortieth-anniversary celebrations in East Berlin, there were a number of freedom demonstrations in major cities in East Germany. Unrest in the GDR gathered strength, causing the Western commandants to feel considerable concern, especially in the late summer and autumn of 1989, as the activities of dissident East Germans were something over which they had no control, and they reviewed their plans.

Erich Honecker, the long-time Communist Party leader, was removed from office on 18 October and was replaced by Egon Krenz, who on 24 October also became state president and military commander-in-chief. The problems persisted, however, with some 150,000 demonstrators marching in Leipzig on 23 October, but, significantly, without any interference by the East German security forces. Two days later the demonstrations spread to Dresden, Erfurt, Gera and Rostock, and Krenz spoke on the telephone to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl about possible relaxations in the cross-border controls.

The political temperature in the GDR steadily rose, Krenz visited Moscow and Warsaw, and on 4 November a crowd of some 1 million demonstrated in East Berlin. The Western commandants in West Berlin were concerned at the situation and opened their emergency operations centres, although there was little they could do other than dispatch patrols to monitor what was happening on the other side of the Wall.

The focus of attention switched rapidly between the GDR, the FRG, and Moscow, but it was fitting that the crucial event took place in Berlin. On 9 November the Communist Party leader in East Berlin gave a radio and television interview in which he gave the impression that any GDR citizen could now go to the border and obtain an exit visa, thus avoiding the lengthy bureaucratic procedures which had caused so much frustration in the past. A huge crowd immediately formed and headed for the checkpoints at the Wall, where the bemused guards, lacking clear orders, opened the gates, allowing the East Berliners to flood into the West. Some 3 million were estimated to have visited the FRG and West Berlin over that weekend, and there were long delays on the Helmstedt–Berlin autobahn as it was flooded with the East Germans’ infamous slow-moving Trabant cars.

The momentum of change then increased rapidly, and it was soon agreed that reunification would take place. The threat to the Western garrisons in West Berlin was over, and the formal ending of the Live Oak mission came on 2 October 1990.

LIFE IN BERLIN

Life in Berlin between 1945 and 1989 could never have been described as ‘normal’, but this is not a social history and only a couple of features can be mentioned to illustrate the extraordinary modus vivendi which was reached there, despite all the stresses of the Cold War.

First, one of the curious features of life in Berlin was that the members of all four garrisons were always allowed into each other’s sectors. This was of little consequence between the Americans, British and French, but it also meant that members of these three Western garrisons regularly visited East Berlin in uniform, either for sightseeing or to attend events such as the opera. They also went shopping in the East – an activity that was made more attractive by obtaining East German marks at seven times the normal exchange rate. The Soviet armed forces enjoyed similar rights in West Berlin, although these were exercised much less frequently, with small parties of troops being closely supervised by political ‘minders’ to prevent any contacts with Westerners or defection.

Another curious feature was that for many years the Federal German government met a significant part of the costs of the three Western garrisons through the ‘Berlin Occupation Costs Budget’, usually simply known as the ‘Berlin Budget’. Towards the end this amounted to DM1,300 million a year, which was distributed as follows: USA – DM600 million; UK – DM400 million; France – DM300 million. Under this arrangement the Western garrisons met their own salaries and financial allowances, as well as the costs of ‘warlike equipment’ such as weapons and ammunition, but the Berlin Budget funded infrastructure costs, ranging from vehicles and radio equipment to typewriters and paper. As some 90 per cent of the Berlin Budget was spent in West Berlin and the Federal Republic, however, it was essentially recycled within the German economy.^{6}

FORTY-FOUR YEARS IN THE FRONT LINE

The tensions caused by the very existence of West Berlin – a bastion of Western democracy and capitalism deep inside a Communist state – were very real, and it was considered, not unrealistically, that if conflict was ever to break out between the Soviet Union and NATO it would be over (or in some way related to) Berlin. The city enjoyed a unique status throughout the Cold War, not least because it was the one place where the French never for one moment left the Western Allies’ forum but continued to play a full part in all planning, discussions, command arrangements and reactions to crises. Nor were there any arguments about the French troops serving as an integral part of the probes, where, depending on the situation, they could find themselves under US or British command.

The soldiers and airmen on both sides in Berlin, on the corridors and in West Germany did their level best to keep matters under control. Naturally, they responded to the orders from their superiors, but they also did all they could to ensure that the ‘other side’ was never left without room for manoeuvre, so that problems could be resolved without serious loss of face. Thus, when Western soldiers sometimes unintentionally strayed into East Berlin or the GDR (e.g. by falling asleep on a train), they would be detained, their parent force would be informed, and then the chastened individuals would be quietly returned after a two- or three-day interval.[17] In a much more serious incident on 5 April 1948 a Soviet fighter aircraft collided with a BEA Viking transport aircraft which was coming in to land at the British military airfield at Gatow. Fourteen people, including the Soviet pilot, were killed. The British and Americans were preparing to provide fighter escorts for all transport flights, when Marshal Sokolovskiy informed the British commandant that no interference had been intended. Thus it was presumed that the incident was either a genuine accident (the airspace over Berlin tended to be crowded) or was the result of a miscalculation by the Russian pilot, and the proposed countermeasures were cancelled.

Perhaps the tensest period was in October 1961, when the US and Soviet tanks faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie. One false move by a junior officer or a soldier on either side could have resulted in an extremely rapid escalation of the situation, but it never happened. Again, this speaks very highly for the troops of both sides.

Where individuals broke the recognized rules, however, action could be swift and direct, and there were numerous instances of Western officers or soldiers being shot, although, so far as is known, there were never any cases of Soviet or East German soldiers being shot by Western troops.

The vulnerability of West Berlin was palpable. The Western garrisons totalled some 10,000 troops, but these were predominantly infantry. There was a small number of tanks, but only the US had artillery – a token force consisting of just one battery of six 155 mm guns. There were airfields in West Berlin, but modern fighters or bombers were never stationed there; they would have been far too vulnerable, and would have been eliminated within minutes in a pre-emptive strike, if conflict had broken out. Thus the Western garrisons were unable to conduct aggressive action, and their weapons and equipment were demonstrably intended only for defensive purposes.

The officers and troops of the three Western garrisons were accompanied by their wives and families, and there were plans to evacuate these dependants in time of crisis, although it was highly unlikely that there would have been an opportunity to do so. In war, all that could have been done was to concentrate the three Western garrisons quickly, probably centred on the Olympic complex in the British zone, and struggle to survive until the outcome of the war had been decided elsewhere.

The Western outpost in Berlin was surrounded and greatly outnumbered by the Group of Soviet Forces Germany (GSFG), supported by the large East German army (NVA). As was discovered after the end of the Cold War, the plan had been for the Soviets to ignore West Berlin, leaving its fate to the NVA, which had detailed plans to take West Berlin by storm.

The low-level contingency plans for Berlin designed to ascertain Soviet intentions – the land and air probes – proved their worth on several occasions, if only because the Soviets chose to let them do so. The larger plans, however, which involved forces of battlegroup, brigade and divisional strength, were of dubious utility. They were predicated on the force following the authorized route (i.e. the autobahn), which would have meant that the battlegroup would have been spread out over a distance of several miles, but with a frontage only one or possibly two vehicles wide. Despite the inclusion of engineer equipment such as bridgelayers in the convoys, all that the Soviets would have needed to do to bring the whole force to a standstill would have been to put a barrier across the autobahn or demolish one of several bridges, leaving the force commander with an agonizing choice of what to do next: go on and run the risk of starting a major war, or turn back in a massive and humiliating retreat. It was perhaps as well that nobody was ever confronted by that dilemma.

TACTICAL-NUCLEAR-WEAPON development originated not with a statement of operational requirement from the military, but with US scientists in the late 1940s, who realized that it had become technically feasible to develop nuclear warheads which could fit into both small missiles and artillery shells. The first fruit of this was a massive 280 mm cannon, which was fielded by the US artillery in 1952 – the same year that NATO set itself a goal of ninety-six divisions. By 1954, however, it had become clear that this NATO goal was unattainable, and it was proposed that fielding tactical-nuclear-weapons systems would offer a method of substituting artillery for infantry and tanks. This was seized upon by the military in general, not least because at that time the Soviet Union did not possess any tactical nuclear weapons, thus giving NATO an absolute superiority. The proposal was also particularly popular with the artillery arms of the NATO armies, who saw themselves promoted to become the major arm on a nuclear battlefield. The Soviet army was not far behind, however, and it too began fielding tactical nuclear missiles in the late 1950s.

Once the first tactical nuclear weapons – both guns and missiles – were in service they increased rapidly in both type and quantity, although their roles differed significantly between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. For the Soviet army, battlefield nuclear weapons were simply an extension of the Warsaw Pact’s offensive doctrine and were primarily intended to eliminate NATO’s tactical nuclear forces. NATO, on the other hand, saw these weapons as a new type of defensive weapon, whose power very conveniently made up for a lack of manpower. So long as NATO possessed a monopoly in such weapons this theory had a certain validity, but once the Soviet Union possessed them too the theory was seriously weakened, although the fielding of such weapons continued unabated until almost the end of the Cold War. The situation was further complicated by the French, who, as will be seen, had a fundamentally different rationale for the use of such weapons.

GUNS

There were two types of battlefield nuclear weapon: guns/howitzers and missiles.[1] First in the field in 1952 was the US army’s massive 280 mm atomic cannon (officially the ‘Gun, Heavy, Motorized, 280 mm, M65), although this was regarded as something of a military curiosity, even at the time. The original projectile was the W19, with a yield of 15 kT, but this was later replaced by the W23, with a variable 10–15 kT yield. These projectiles had a range of 30,300 m, but each gun required a crew of several hundred and some twenty vehicles, and a deployed gun detachment was reputed to resemble a small village. Despite its disadvantages, the system remained in service for eleven years.

Advancing technology then enabled the USA not only to develop smaller-calibre atomic projectiles, but also to make the guns dual-capable, so that they could fire conventional high-explosive rounds as well. The most widely used of these weapons were the M109 and M110. The first of these to enter service, in 1961, was the M110 203 mm cannon, firing the W33 atomic round, which had a maximum yield of 12 kT; in 1963 this was followed by the M109 155 mm howitzer, firing the W48 round with a yield of 0.1 kT. Both of these weapons were always used for airbursts.

Both the M109 and the M110 were mounted on tracked chassis, which gave them a high degree of battlefield mobility. Both proved to be excellent systems, and their barrels, chassis and rounds were developed throughout their long periods of service, particularly to enhance the range, which in the case of the M109 increased from 18,100 m (M109A1) to 30,000 m (M109A3). These weapons were widely exported, although only NATO countries (West Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey and the UK) received the nuclear rounds. As of 1983, 1,000 W33 and 3,000 W48 rounds were held in western Europe, but the United States alone possessed the 203 mm W79 enhanced-radiation (ER) round with a yield of 10 kT (W79—0) and 1–2 kT (W79—1), although this was never deployed to units.

The artillery has always been of great importance in Soviet military doctrine, and it must have seemed natural for the USSR to follow the Western lead and develop atomic rounds. The first of these to appear were fielded in the late 1960s, when a 0.2 kT atomic round for the S-23 180 mm towed cannon was introduced. The next nuclear artillery piece was the 2S3 152 mm M-1973, which fired a 2 kT round over a range of 24,000 m, followed by the 2S7 203 mm gun in 1975. As far as is known, the Soviet Union never supplied nuclear shells to any of its Warsaw Pact allies.

MISSILES

In the late 1940s both the USA and the USSR not only owned and tested samples of the German A-4 (V-2), but also had teams of German scientists from Peenemünde to help them with further developments. Although this eventually led to missiles with intercontinental ranges, the original missiles were for battlefield use, and a series of such missiles was developed throughout the Cold War.

Between 1945 and 1950 the US army built a number of virtual copies of the A-4 under the name Hermes, one model of which carried a 454 kg high-explosive warhead over a range of 242 km. Although the German army had operated the A-4, it had employed it as a strategic rather than a tactical weapon, but when, in the early 1950s, atomic warheads became sufficiently small to enable them to be mounted on missiles, the US army saw them as battlefield weapons. These US missiles can be considered in three groups, according to their range.

The first long-range army missile (and the third missile system to enter service) was developed by the original V-1 team, headed by Werner von Braun. The Redstone entered service in 1958, and was essentially an enlarged and much improved V-1 with a range of 400 km, though its payload of either a 1 MT or a 2 MT atomic weapon gave a totally new dimension of firepower to a battlefield commander. The liquid-fuelled Redstone needed many men and vehicles, one particular requirement being a special plant capable of producing 20 tonnes of liquid oxygen per day.

Next was the Pershing, which entered service in 1962 and rapidly replaced the Redstone. This was a two-stage, solid-fuelled missile, which was launched vertically from a ground-mounted base-plate, with four tracked vehicles forming a fire unit. This was subsequently replaced by the Pershing IA system, which used the same missile but with wheeled trucks, including a trailer-mounted launch platform, making the whole system air-portable. The Pershing I/IA missile delivered 60 kT, 200 kT or 400 kT warheads over a 740 km range with an accuracy of 400 m. Pershing I and IA all served in West Germany, with the US army and the German Luftwaffe.

Development of the Pershing II system, a modification of the Pershing IA, began in 1976, with the intention of producing a system with greater accuracy and reliability, but with the same range as the Pershing IA. A requirement for much greater range was added during the development process, which involved the new system in a major political controversy, since the new 1,800 km range enabled it to reach targets in the western USSR. Despite this, 120 Pershing IIs were eventually fielded (by the US army only) in 1983 as part of NATO’s twin-track strategy. The warhead was a W-85 nuclear weapon, with a yield, selectable according to the desired terminal effects, of between 5 and 50 kT, and a CEP of 45 m. A proposed earth-penetrator warhead was cancelled in 1982.[2] All Pershing systems were directly affected by the terms of the 1987 INF Treaty, which banned missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,600 km, and by May 1991 all Pershings had been withdrawn and destroyed.

The first of the medium-range missiles to enter service (and also the first US army missile) was the Corporal, which was fielded in 1953, having been rushed into service as a result of the Korean War. In essence a modified meteorological rocket, Corporal carried a 60 kT atomic weapon over a range of 138 km and a fire unit was carried on a series of wheeled trucks, with the missile being launched vertically from a base-plate. It saw service only with the US and British armies, from 1953 to 1967, and, principally because of its liquid fuel, it was extremely cumbersome and manpower-intensive, requiring fifteen vehicles and 250 men per launcher. A far more serious tactical limitation, however, was that it took seven hours from entering a location to launch the weapon.

The second medium-range weapon was Sergeant, which was much smaller and lighter than the Corporal. Its use of solid fuel enabled very considerable economies to be made, since a fire unit required just three semitrailers and a standard truck, while the missile was ready to fire in thirty minutes after arriving in a location. Sergeant carried a 60 kT warhead over a maximum range of 140 km, and entered service in 1961.

The shorter-range systems began with Honest John, a small (7.6 m long) and light (2,141 kg) free-flight rocket, which was fired from a ramp fixed either on the back of a six-wheeled truck or on a ground-mounted tripod. Honest John was widely used throughout NATO from 1954 onwards, but was replaced by Lance in the 1970s, except for Greece and Turkey, who kept it in service well into the 1980s. Highly mobile, Honest John had a range of 6–38 km.

The Lance system, which replaced both Honest John and Sergeant in most NATO armies, was smaller, lighter, more mobile, more reliable and had a much greater maximum range, of 125 km. It carried either a variable 1–100 kT fission warhead or a 1 kT ER warhead, which was procured only by the US army and was never in fact deployed. Lance was designed for use against depth targets.

At one time thought was also given to two very short-range missile systems to be controlled by a battlegroup commander. Known as the Weapon System Battlegroup Lightweight M28 and Heavyweight M29, these had a range of 2,000 m and 4,000 m respectively. The lightweight system was more widely known as the Davy Crocket and was a 120 mm recoilless weapon, consisting of a launch tube which sat on a tripod mounted either on the ground or on a light vehicle such as a Jeep. In both cases the crew was totally unprotected. The projectile was very small, being 64.8 cm long and 28 cm in diameter, and contained a 0.25 kT warhead, which could be fired to a maximum range of 2,000 m. It did not take long, however, for it to be realized that it was singularly ill-advised for the crew to be caught in the open just 2,000 m from a nuclear explosion (indeed, the front-line ‘friendly’ troops would have been even closer), and, to the great relief of the troops involved, the system left service in 1971. The British army had shown initial interest in this system, but wisely decided not to purchase it.

Like those of the USA, the Soviet Union’s first post-war missile was a development of the German A-4; this led to the SS-1A (NATO = ‘Scunner’) with a range of 300 km and a 750 kg high-explosive warhead. The first nuclear battlefield missile to enter service (in 1957) was the Scud-A, which was mounted on a converted JS-3 heavy-tank chassis and carried a 50 kT warhead over a range of some 150 km. This was later supplemented by the Scud-B system, which carried a 70 kT warhead over a range of 300 km. Although Scuds were supplied to many other countries, nuclear warheads were only ever issued to the Soviet army and the system served throughout the Cold War, as plans to replace it with the SS-23 were cancelled as part of the INF Treaty.

The SS-12 (‘Scaleboard’) was a road-mobile, solid-fuelled ballistic missile, which was first fielded in 1962, followed by a modified version, the SS-12B (initially designated SS-22), in 1979. The missile had a maximum range of 900 km and a CEP of 30 m, carrying either a high-explosive or a 500 kT nuclear warhead, and system reaction time was estimated at sixty minutes. The SS-12B was withdrawn under the terms of the INF Treaty, and all missiles were destroyed.

One of the significant features of both the SS-1 and the SS-12 was that later versions were transported by 8 × 8-wheel TELs. These were highly mobile for off-road driving, were air-conditioned, accommodated the full crew and all necessary equipment, and even had an automatic tyre-pressure-regulation system. All these features enabled the missile detachment to move into a new location, set up the missile quickly, launch, and then move to a resupply point – the so-called ‘shoot-and-scoot’ tactic.

All Warsaw Pact exercises made use of battlefield nuclear weapons in support of attacks. A typical scenario, as shown in Map 3 (see here), used some 233 weapons in the first strike, followed by 294 in the second strike. As used in these exercises, the intended purpose was to eliminate NATO forward troops – Area B, for example, coincided with the North German Plain. Following such a strike, the Warsaw Pact tank and motor-rifle units would have been able to advance rapidly into NATO rear areas.

The UK made one attempt at a battlefield missile system in the late 1950s. Known as Blue Water, it was intended to replace the American Corporal, but, despite working very satisfactorily, it was cancelled in 1962.

The other west-European project, the French Pluton, was much more successful. The French operated a number of Honest John battalions in the early 1960s, but when France left the NATO integrated command structure in 1966 the units were deactivated and the missiles were returned to the USA.

There was then a gap until the French developed the Pluton system, which first flew in 1969 and entered service in 1974. The entire system – including nuclear warhead, missile, launcher, chassis and electronics – was of French design. The missile was mounted in a large, open-fronted box atop an AMX-30 tank chassis and required a crew of four. The missile could carry either a 10 kT warhead for use against targets in the forward areas or a 25 kT warhead for use against rear-area installations such as tank, vehicle or troop concentrations; headquarters; railways; or bridges. As with all missiles, CEP varied with range, and was 400 m at the maximum range of 120 km. Unlike many other systems, Pluton was purely nuclear and had no high-explosive or chemical capabilities.

Pluton was deployed only on French territory in peacetime, in five missile regiments, each with seven operational launchers. A total of seventy missiles was deployed, giving one on each launcher, plus one reload. A second-generation French system, Hades, was developed in the 1980s. Some thirty missiles were actually produced, but were then put into storage and were never fielded.

TARGET ACQUISITION

One problem affected the battlefield nuclear weapons of both sides: that of accurate and timely target acquisition.[3] Static targets – a railway station, say, or a bridge, an airfield or a major crossroads – could be selected off a map. Targets of military opportunity, however – such as a concentration of tanks, a headquarters or a logistics unit – were much more difficult, especially as both sides tended to make the great majority of such units move at frequent intervals. The problem was fourfold: first, to have a means of acquiring a target; second, to transmit the target-acquisition information to an intelligence-gathering centre; third, a command system had to allocate destruction of the target as a nuclear task; and, finally, a control system had to find a weapon within range and task it.

The most difficult of these was the acquisition process, which became progressively more difficult with distance from the front line. Increasing resources were allocated to this as the Cold War progressed, including ground radar, aircraft reconnaissance, drones, stay-behind parties, remote sensors and the airborne warning and control system (AWACS), to name but a few.

SAFETY

A large number of battlefield nuclear weapons were deployed from the 1950s onwards, being fielded by the Soviet army on one side and by the majority of NATO armies on the other. On both sides the actual warheads were under very strict control. On the Soviet side nuclear warheads were the responsibility of special KGB detachments, who held the warheads and issued them only on orders received down an entirely separate chain of command.

The US system involved devices known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), which required a coded password to be inserted, either mechanically or electronically, in order to unlock the arming circuits. Such devices became increasingly sophisticated over the years – for example, the numerical combination increased from four to twelve digits, with the later codes being used not only for release but also to specify such factors as the permitted yield in a variable-yield warhead. Such PALs were operated by US army custodial detachments, which served with every US and NATO unit possessing such weapons.^{1}

THE BATTLEFIELD-NUCLEAR-WEAPONS ISSUES

The US attitude to battlefield nuclear weapons went through several variations. During the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated that ‘The present policies will gradually involve the use of atomic weapons as conventional weapons for tactical purposes’,^{2} and the field army was restructured into what was known as the ‘Pentomic’ organization. Under President Kennedy, however, the emphasis changed to ‘flexible response’, with the major emphasis on conventional forces, and it remained that way for the remainder of the Cold War.

In its Fiscal Year 1975 report to Congress, the US Department of Defense stated that:

However, such doubts appear to have disappeared by the time the 1982 report was written, for this stated that:

The 1983 the US Joint Chiefs-of-Staff made a significant addition to the possible uses of theatre nuclear forces when they stated that:

Two British examples are relevant. Sir Solly Zuckerman, the government’s chief scientific adviser, wrote that:

If this was extrapolated to cover the entire Central Front, and deep interdiction strikes were added, the number of weapons, their total yield and their effect became almost incalculable, as another British study showed. This is examined in more detail in Chapter 35, but suffice it here to say that this postulated the use by each side of 500 tactical nuclear weapons in the northern part of the Central Front and 250 in the south, with an average yield of 30 kT each, plus a further 250 interdiction strikes (i.e. against bridges, railway yards, and so on) averaging 300 kT each.

The effects of the use of weapons in such numbers would have been catastrophic. Within the zone where such weapons had been used, towns and villages would have been devastated, all but the strongest buildings would have been destroyed, roads and bridges would have become impassable, forests would have been razed, enormous fires would have been raging, and civilian casualties would have been vast. In addition to all this, since NATO was defending, many of the attacking Warsaw Pact forces it was targeting would have been on NATO – particularly West German – territory, while the depth attacks would have stretched well into East Germany.

On the NATO side, nuclear artillery units were allocated to army group, corps and even divisional level, but ‘nuclear release’ (i.e. the authority to start using them) was retained at the very highest level. All the weapons were US-owned and controlled by a PAL, and it would have been impossible for NATO to use them without the authority of the president of the USA, while it seems improbable that he would have given such authorization without consulting NATO. At the very least, the president would have had to consult the West German chancellor, since not only would the great majority of the weapons have been launched from West German territory but they would in many cases have landed on targets on either West or East German soil. Further, West Germany would have been a very likely target for many of the retaliatory Soviet strikes.

This very issue was highlighted by the French Pluton system, which was declared to be part of the French pre-stratégique force, intended to deliver a ‘final nuclear warning’ to an aggressor. The announced French intention was that in wartime most, if not all, Pluton regiments would join the French Second Army Corps in south-west Germany, where German territory is about 300 km wide. As Pluton’s maximum range was 120 km, this meant that even if the Plutons were sited well forward the missiles would have been launched against targets on West German territory – a concept over which the Federal government expressed some concern. As a result, at the end of a visit to West Germany in 1987, President Mitterrand gave an assurance that France would never deploy Pluton in this way, which raised the question of just how it could be used.

THERE WERE MANY possible scenarios for Soviet aggression in central Europe, but the worst case for NATO was a sudden attack launched by the in-place Warsaw Pact forces, which would have been reinforced covertly to the greatest extent Soviet commanders deemed feasible without being spotted by the West. The British assessed that the maximum that could have been used in an attack on the Central Front under such conditions was fifty-two divisions, of which twenty-three (nineteen Soviet and four Polish) would have faced NORTHAG and twenty-three (eleven Soviet, four Polish and eight Czech) would have faced CENTAG, with three East German divisions attacking Schleswig-Holstein. A further three East German divisions would have surrounded and attacked West Berlin, before moving on to further tasks.

A different scenario might have involved a Warsaw Pact attack to seize a specific and significant area in as short a time as possible, possibly using a major exercise in eastern Europe as the initial cover for such an operation. NATO experts believed that the Alliance would have detected such an exercise and called Simple Alert and Reinforced Alert, and a British study assumed that (with D-day being the day of the Soviet attack) Simple Alert would have been called on D-3 and Reinforced Alert on D-1, but this seems excessively optimistic. Even if it was correct, however, the Warsaw Pact would have started to attack well before NATO mobilization was complete, and the prospects of reinforcements such as from the UK to West Germany or Denmark reaching their deployment positions in time would have been very slim.

Some pretext for the attack would have been concocted, and the military moves would have been accompanied by messages to Western governments and to non-NATO nations that this was a limited attack with restricted aims. If the Warsaw Pact forces had achieved these limited aims and then halted, they would have placed NATO in a major dilemma, even supposing that members of the Alliance had been unanimous in their reactions to the initial attack. NATO’s first aim would have been to contain and halt the Soviet attack, while exerting heavy diplomatic pressure in an effort to force the Soviets to withdraw. The most serious possibility for NATO would have been to counter-attack immediately using tactical nuclear weapons, but it is highly questionable whether this would have been feasible, since public opinion in many Western countries could have been opposed to such a move. In particular, the West Germans would have been in a major dilemma, since it would have been they who had lost territory, but it would have been Germans who would bear the brunt of the casualties from a retaliation. If, eventually, the Soviets had withdrawn to their side of the Inner German Border under some face-saving pretext, they would have lost little, apart from a few hundred casualties. A second option would have been to sit tight and challenge NATO to oust them.

THE WARSAW PACT ATTACK PLANS

In the mass of documents released since the end of the Cold War, no evidence has been found of any Warsaw Pact defensive plans, except for a few formulated in the final three years, after President Gorbachev had insisted that the General Staff prepare them. Instead, all plans concentrated on a series of massive attacks, which were aimed at securing Soviet control of the entire west-European land mass. According to Soviet and East German planning documents, the major plan for the Central Front aimed at reaching the German–French border in between thirteen and fifteen days, and then of overrunning France so that the leading troops arrived at the Atlantic coast and the Franco-Spanish border by the thirty-fifth day. The attack would have been conducted by five, possibly six, ‘fronts’ (see Map 3, to which the numbers/letters refer):^{1}

• Jutland Front (2). This front was to advance northward through Schleswig-Holstein, across the Kiel Canal, and then on up through Jutland (2A). The Danish island of Bornholm would also have been captured. This would have opened the Belts (thus enabling the Soviet Baltic Fleet (1) to sail into the North Sea), closed the Baltic to NATO naval forces, and obtained valuable forward airfields for use in the land battles on the Central Front and in the naval battles in the North Sea. The advance along the Baltic coast would have been aided by amphibious assault forces from East Germany, Poland and the USSR, and possibly also by paratroops.

• Coastal Front (2B). The Coastal Front would have initially followed behind the Jutland Front attack and then broken away to swing south of Hamburg and along the northern edge of the North German Plain, with its right flank following the line of the North Sea coast. This would have secured the ports of Bremerhaven, Wilhelmshaven, Emden and Rotterdam (closing them to NATO maritime traffic), and secured the right flank of the main attack.

• Central Front (3). The main axis of this attack would have been across the North German Plain along the line Braunschweig–Hanover–Bielefeld–Hamm, then on through the northern edge of the Ruhr and thence to Aachen, Maastricht and Liege to the French Channel coast.

• Luxembourg Front (4). This advance would have begun in Thüringia and passed through the Fulda Gap, crossing the Rhine north of Frankfurt and then moving on towards the French cities of Reims, Metz and Paris.

• Bavarian Front (5). This attack would have originated in Czechoslovakia and swept through Bavaria and onward through Baden-Württemburg, over the Rhine and then into France.

• Austrian Front (6). Plans existed for a sixth front, which would have been mounted from Hungary, advancing through eastern Austria and on past Munich, with its left flank passing through Swiss territory to the south of the Bodensee (Lake Constance). This appears to have been a contingency plan, depending on whether or not the forces were required for operations in Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia.

Once west of the Rhine, two major thrusts would have been made towards the Atlantic coast (7) and the Spanish border (8).

The forces involved in these massive attacks would have totalled sixty divisions, of which some thirty-eight would have been Soviet, including a Naval Infantry brigade. Other Warsaw Pact forces were, however, an integral part of the plan. The East Germans would have contributed eight divisions to the Jutland, Coastal, Central and Luxembourg fronts, with a further three divisions being responsible for attacking and taking over West Berlin.[1]

The Polish army would have contributed six divisions to the Jutland and Coastal Fronts, plus an amphibious assault brigade to take part in the landings along the Baltic coast. Czech forces would have contributed four divisions to the Bavarian Front, and, had it been activated, some Hungarian divisions would have been allocated to the Austrian Front. Coming up fast from the east would have been second- and third-echelon Soviet forces from Belorussia and the Ukraine, having first been brought up to war strength by mobilization.

It appears that the non-Soviet forces would not have been used in the advance into France. The East Germans, once their main operational missions had been accomplished, were required to impose military control on West Germany, with the immediate priority being to ensure that the territory could be used as an advanced operational and logistic base for continuing Soviet operations further West. The East Germans would presumably have been helped in this by the Czechs and Poles, since the task would have been enormous, involving, among many things, the imposition of military government, securing NATO prisoners of war, restoring of essential services, controlling refugees, and isolating nuclear-contaminated areas.

In these plans it was intended to use nuclear weapons as an integral part of the attacks, even if NATO did not use them first, and many targets had already been selected. The main attacks on the Central Front would have been allocated 205 Scud rockets at army level and 380 short-range missiles at divisional level, with 255 nuclear bombs carried by aircraft; of these, the first-echelon armies could each have expected some twenty Scuds, fifty-five short-range missiles and ten air-delivered bombs. Yields would have varied between 3 kT and 100 kT, and the weapons would have been targeted on NATO nuclear-weapons and nuclear-support facilities, airbases, headquarters and communications centres, troop concentrations and naval bases.

IN CONSIDERING THE Cold War, it is inevitable to speculate what might have happened if, events having worked out differently, war had broken out, leading to a nuclear exchange. Such an assessment is beset by difficulties, one of the most important being that only two atomic bombs have ever been dropped in anger. There were many subsequent tests, but these were, almost without exception, conducted in clinical conditions, and were concerned with small numbers of representative objects, such as houses, tanks, aircraft and ships. In particular, there is no precedent from which to judge how populations or the military might have reacted. When the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unsuspecting populations had no idea what had caused the disasters that had befallen them, and their subsequent behaviour gave little guidance as to how the survivors of a massive nuclear attack might have behaved; equally well-researched studies have reached conclusions varying from total discipline to total anarchy.[1]

THE US STRATEGY FOR NUCLEAR WAR

The original US nuclear-war plans were prepared at a time when bombers predominated, atomic bombs were in very short supply, and there was a lack of co-ordination of plans. The 1947 plan concentrated on destroying the war-making capability of the Soviet Union through attacks on government, political and administrative centres, urban–industrial areas and fuel-supply facilities. It was to have been achieved by dropping 133 atomic bombs on seventy Soviet cities in thirty days, including eight on Moscow and seven on Leningrad.^{1} This plan was ambitious, to say the least, primarily because the USA possessed a total of only thirteen atomic bombs in 1947 and fifty in 1948.^{2}

In May 1949 a new plan, named Trojan, required 150 atomic bombs, with a first-phase attack against thirty cities during a period of fourteen days. Then, also in 1949, came another plan, named Dropshot, in which a war in 1957 would be centred on a thirty-day programme in which 300 atomic bombs and 20,000 tonnes of conventional bombs would be dropped on about 200 targets, with the atomic bombs being used against a mix of military, industrial and civil targets, including Moscow and Leningrad.^{3}

All these plans included substantial quantities of conventional bombs and were essentially continuations of Second World War strategies. Interestingly, even as early as 1949, planners were earmarking command centres for exemption from early strikes (‘withholds’ in nuclear parlance), so that the Soviet leadership could continue to exercise control.

Up to about 1956 the US authorities based their plans on intelligence which was far from complete and, as a result, they deliberately over-estimated their opponent’s strengths. In 1956, however, the Lockheed U-2 spy plane started to overfly the USSR, and this, coupled with more effective ELINT and SIGINT, meant that a more accurate picture was obtained.

By the early 1950s the production rate of atomic bombs had increased to the point where US field commanders – both air-force and navy – began to make plans for their use, each of them planning to use them in support of his battle. There was nothing in this situation to prevent several commanders from selecting the same target; indeed, a US Senate committee was told that in the Far East 155 targets had been listed by two commanders and 44 by three, while in Europe 121 airfields had been targeted by two commanders and 31 by three.^{4}

A first attempt at some form of co-ordination was made in a series of conferences held in the early 1950s, which achieved partial success. The situation came to a head, however, when the navy’s Polaris SLBMs and the air force’s Atlas ICBMs became operational in the early 1960s, and a Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS) was established, with an air-force lieutenant-general at its head but with a naval officer as his deputy. The first outcome of the JSTPS’ work was the Comprehensive Strategic Target List (CSTL), which identified 2,021 nuclear targets in the USSR, China and their satellites, including 121 ICBM sites, 140 air-defence bases, 200 bomber bases, 218 military and political command centres, 124 other military targets, and 131 urban centres.^{5} This CSTL duly became an integral part of the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which was produced in December 1960.

There were no alternatives in this SIOP-60, which consisted of one massive nuclear attack, and it was one of the earliest targets for reform when President Kennedy took power in January 1961. US planners were now, however, aided by virtually complete satellite coverage of the USSR, giving them information on the potential enemy never previously available (and which, among other things, made it clear that the supposed ‘missile gap’ did not exist). This resulted in SIOP-63, which consisted of five categories of counter-force option: Soviet missile sites; bomber and submarine bases; other military targets; command-and-control centres; and urban–industrial targets. This received serious criticism from three separate quarters. First, from within the USA, because of what appeared to be a first-strike strategy; second, from the USSR, which denied the possibility of controlled counter-force warfare; and, third, from NATO allies, who were very alarmed by the total absence of any urban targets (the so-called ‘no cities’ strategy).

President Kennedy’s secretary of state for defense, Robert McNamara, then developed the concept of Assured Destruction, which he described in public first as ‘one-quarter to one-third of [the Soviet Union’s] population and about two-thirds of its industrial capacity’ and later as ‘one-fifth to one-fourth of its population and one-half to two-thirds of its industrial capacity’. Whatever was said in public, however, within the US armed forces SIOP-63 was not withdrawn, and thus there appears to have been a marked divergence between the public and the internal rhetoric.

Proponents of this policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) argued that the one way to make nuclear war impossible was to make it clear that any nuclear attack would be answered by a total attack on an enemy’s population, together with its industrial and agricultural base. While such a concept might have been valid in the early days of the nuclear confrontation, it rapidly lost its credibility when it became clear that, even after such a strike, the USSR would still have sufficient weapons to make a response-in-kind on US cities.

The strategy of ‘flexible response,’ introduced in 1967, required facing an opponent with a credible reaction which would to inflict losses out-weighing any potential gain. The deterrent power of such a strategy depended on the capacity of the proposed response to inflict unacceptable losses on the opponent, while its credibility depended upon its ability to minimize the risks of higher-order losses on the responder’s own country in subsequent rounds. This posed something of a dilemma, in that the deterrent power of the response was enhanced by escalation to a higher level, while credibility tended in the other direction, since a lower-level response carried no inherent escalatory risks. The plans implement this strategy were promulgated in a revised version of the SIOP which became effective on 1 January 1976.

It became customary for all incoming presidents to initiate a review of the strategic nuclear-war plans, and that carried out by President Jimmy Carter in 1977–9, was expected to result in major changes. In the event, however, it led only to a refinement of the previous plan, together with the introduction of rather more political sophistication. Thus, for example, targets were selected in the Far East, not so much for their immediate relevance to the superpower conflict, but because their destruction would make the USSR more vulnerable to attack by the People’s Republic of China.

A further review was conducted when the Reagan administration came to power in 1981. This resulted in a new version of the SIOP, which included some 40,000 potential targets, divided into Soviet nuclear forces; conventional military forces; military and political leadership command posts and communications systems; and economic and industrial targets, both war-supporting and those which would contribute to post-war economic recovery. The plan allocated these targets to a number of discrete packages, of differing size and characteristics, to provide the National Command Authority (the president and his immediate advisers) with an almost limitless range of options.

The new plan also included particular categories of target for other plans, for possible implementation on receipt of an unequivocal warning of a Soviet attack. These included a pre-emptive strike, launch-on-warning and launch-under-attack. The plan also included a number of ‘withholds’, but stipulated that a reserve of weapons must be retained for possible use against those ‘withholds’ if the developing scenario so dictated.

The real calculations of strategic nuclear war – known as ‘dynamic’ assessments – were extremely detailed and were far more complex than the static measurements. One such ‘dynamic’ calculation in the period following the Soviets’ fielding of the SS-18 resulted in an assessment that, under certain conditions, a Soviet counter-force first strike would appear to be a possibility. In this assessment it was calculated that the USSR, which normally had only about 10 per cent of its SSBN force at sea, would gradually, and covertly, increase that number, and, if the US command decided to ride out the attack, the Soviets would then destroy approximately 45 per cent of the US strategic forces. As a result, the ensuing US counter-military retaliatory strike on the Soviets (who would be on full alert) would leave the Soviets with 75 per cent of what had been left after their first strike. This meant that the USSR would retain not only a reserve capable of carrying out either an urban–industrial strike on US cities or an attack on US ‘other military targets’, but also a reserve for use against another opponent (the so-called ‘nth-country reserve’) – an outcome which would have been distinctly favourable to the Soviets. If the USA managed to launch all its ICBMs under attack, however, the damage ratio more or less reversed: 40 per cent damage to remaining Soviet forces versus 25 per cent damage to US strategic forces.

Thus, argued the US planners, a credible US launch-on-warning/launch-under-attack capability was a mandatory element of an effective deterrent. These results posed a problem encountered in numerous US war games: that neither side could enhance stability by pursuing its own best interests of a secure deterrent potential, but, conversely, neither side could unilaterally lower its deterrent. For the US to do the latter gambled on a US judgement of how the Soviets treated ‘uncertainty’ and what their perceptions of relative advantage might have been.

This whole area highlighted the decision to launch as one of the major problems associated with missiles. Launching bombers for possible nuclear missions was relatively easy, since crews were under firm instructions that they had to receive a positive (and encoded) order from the ground to continue before reaching specified waypoints, otherwise a return to base was mandatory. Missiles, on the other hand, received only one order – to take off; there was then no turning back.[2] Thus the decision to launch the missile was much harder to make.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL

As outlined above, the plans made by nuclear planners on both sides during the Cold War were primarily concerned with the dispatch of missiles and bombers. But what really mattered was what happened at the far end.

During the Cold War it was not particularly difficult to discover the effects of nuclear weapons on individuals, and official books such as The Effects of Nuclear Weapons^{6} were available on the open market. Numerous unclassified assessments of the effects of nuclear war were prepared by official bodies, such as the US Department of Defense and the US Office of Technology. Similar assessments were also prepared by private bodies, such as research departments and magazines, but all faced similar problems. First, truly detailed studies inevitably required considerable time and great computing power. Second, all study findings were extremely sensitive to the initial assumptions on questions such as the military attack plan, the choice of airbursts or groundbursts, and the assessment of civil-defence measures. Third, there was the inescapable fact that all studies were looking at a situation which included an almost endless series of imponderables for which no previous human experience provided a reasonable guide.

In the British Public Record Office, however, there is a series of once highly classified studies carried out between 1960 and 1962 by a body known as JIGSAW’,[3] a group of high-level experts which reported direct to the British Chiefs-of-Staff Committee and prepared a variety of reports on the possible outcomes of nuclear wars.^{7} Since JIGSAW was working at such a high level, it can safely be assumed that its researches were thorough, that it obtained the most reliable expert inputs, and that the settings it considered were based on existing plans. The JIGSAW assessments can therefore be taken as being as authoritative as those of any other body, in the USA or the USSR.

A STRATEGIC ATTACK ON NORTH AMERICA

JIGSAW conducted a study of an attack on the United States and Canada which examined various aspects of an attack on cities. The first study assumed a Soviet attack on the 283 cities with a population exceeding 50,000 (1970 figures), each being hit by a single nuclear weapon, targeted on the geographical centre of the city. These attacks would have destroyed 30 per cent of the buildings and killed or rendered ineffective the total population of those cities, amounting to 81 million people. The study then looked at what would have happened to the remaining 149 million people in the other, smaller, urban areas and the countryside. It found that:

Next JIGSAW examined the effects of different scales of attack, from attacking the sixty-three cities with a population exceeding 300,000 to attacking all 600 cities with a population of 25,000-plus. It also compared the effects of attacks using all 1 MT weapons or all 8 MT weapons. The outcome is shown in Table 35.1. This shows that, for all levels of attack, the number of people rendered ineffective in the cities by blast and radiation was always greater than the number of those outside the cities rendered ineffective by fallout alone. It should, however, be noted that, as the weight of the attack increased, the number of rural fallout victims rose much more sharply than did the number of victims in the cities.

A STRATEGIC ATTACK ON THE UK

When JIGSAW examined a strategic attack on the mainland UK (population 53 million) it had to modify its approach, since, compared to the USA and the USSR, the area was much smaller, and the 113 cities with a population of over 50,000 were much closer to each other. In fact, according to JIGSAW’s calculations, deliveries of 1 MT weapons on all these 113 cities would have resulted in the deaths of more than 90 per cent of the total population.

JIGSAW therefore examined an attack using twenty-five weapons: six on Greater London and one each on nineteen other cities. This would have rendered 33 million people in the target cities ineffective. For the remainder in smaller towns and rural areas:

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that, had the Soviet Union decided on a heavy attack on the UK, the country would have been devastated by the use of a comparatively small proportion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

A STRATEGIC ATTACK ON THE USSR

The papers on JIGSAW’s assessment of a strategic attack on the USSR as a whole remain closed, but one study is in the public domain; this uses a slightly different approach to examine ‘the effects of a strategic nuclear attack on Soviet ground forces located in the Western USSR’. The attack was confined to the Baltic and Belorussian military districts, principally because these contained the bulk of the forces threatening the NATO Central Front.[5] The area concerned covered 400,000 km², which is 2 per cent of the Soviet land mass, and included 6 per cent of the population. The paper assumed that the remainder of the USSR was being attacked with equal severity, and that heavy (but possibly less severe) attacks would also be delivered on the satellite countries.

The paper is based on the NATO doctrine of the time, according to which the targets of a nuclear strike on the USSR would be the political and military command structures and civil targets such as communications hubs (e.g. railways). In essence, this meant targeting cities, and JIGSAW considered three scales of attack:

It was assumed that a period of escalating political tension had led to a period of warning, in which the military forces had deployed to their ‘survival locations’, where they had dug in and covered their vehicles.

This attack would involve one 1 MT weapon being dropped on each of the twenty cities with a population of over 50,000. The cities would have been devastated, with heavy casualties. The area of high contamination (a cumulative dose of 1,000 roentgens measured one hour after the explosion) from each burst would have covered some 310 km² and extended to a distance of some 48 km downwind from ground zero. For the lower-contamination criterion (450 roentgens after forty-eight hours) the area covered would have been some 26,000 km².

The outcome of such an attack would have been the devastation of every city, with very heavy casualties, leaving the survivors totally involved in the struggle for their own survival and in dealing with those casualties for whom treatment might offer a glimmer of hope. Communications within the cities would have been disrupted – and almost certainly destroyed in the area round ground zero. The normal system of supplies would have completely broken down, and the competition for the remaining stocks of food, fuel and medical treatment would have been both intense and frantic.

Because Soviet cities were widely spaced, however, the situation outside the cities would not have been so serious. Much of the rural population would have survived, and some travel would have been possible. The troops who had dispersed from the cities had a very strong possibility of survival, their chances being improved by distance from the city, by taking cover and maintaining movement discipline, and by adopting positions upwind (i.e. to the west) of the potential targets.

The second attack to be considered was one designed to kill about 80 per cent of the Soviet population, which would have required about 4,000 deliveries on the whole USSR, averaging 3 MT each, of which 250 would have been on the area under study. JIGSAW estimated that this would result in contamination of 1,000 roentgens after one hour over 350,000 km², which was 85 per cent of the area under study, while a lower level of 450 roentgens after forty-eight hours would have covered the entire area. Even for those who, through taking precautions or through chance, survived the blast effects, the prospects of survival were very bleak, since they would have had to move very rapidly to an area of insignificant fallout to continue to survive – a journey which would have been difficult, if not impossible. The transport system would have been virtually destroyed, and the areas of insignificant radiation would have been difficult to identify and, even if they were identified, might well have been on the other side of a region of high contamination. The lack of supplies and the probable breakdown of public order would have added yet further to the dismal prospects.

This attack, intended to kill about 65 per cent of the Soviet population, would have required about half the weight of strikes involved in Attack B: i.e. 2,000 3 MT deliveries on the whole of the USSR, with 120 in the area under study. In this case, a contamination level of 1,000 roentgens after one hour would have covered about 186,000 km², or 46 per cent of the area, while a level of 450 roentgens after forty-eight hours would have covered the entire area. Once again, damage would have been very extensive, and the over-lapping of the fallout plumes would have made it impossible to escape from at least the less serious (450 roentgens after forty-eight hours) contour.

ATTACKS ON CITIES

A further JIGSAW report concerned a nuclear attack on the British city of Birmingham, a highly industrialized urban area, with a population of approximately 1,800,000 people. A 1 MT airburst[6] weapon exploded over the centre of the city would have damaged virtually every building in the city, half of which would have been demolished or burnt out, the intensity of the damage decreasing with distance from ground zero. The normal functions of the city – such as transport, gas, electricity, food supplies and sewage disposal – would have been severely disrupted. There would also have been a serious local fallout hazard, extending over part of the city and for about 400–500 km² in the neighbourhood. Birmingham would to all intents and purposes have ceased to exist.

JIGSAW assessed that only cities with populations greater than several million would have required more than one 1 MT weapon to inflict a similar level of damage. London, for example, might have required six weapons, New York five, and Moscow four.

In 1980 the US Office of Technology Assessment published a study, which compared the effects of a single 1 MT weapon targeted on the US city of Detroit and on the Soviet city of Leningrad, both of which had a population of 4,300,000. The estimated casualties were 470,000 killed and 630,000 seriously wounded in Detroit, while Leningrad would have suffered 890,000 killed and 1,260,000 seriously wounded. The reason for the difference was the population density: in the US city the population was widely dispersed, whereas in the Soviet city the population was much more heavily concentrated, with the majority being housed in high-rise blocks.

All the examples given above were well within the capacity of both the superpowers.

CASUALTIES

One of the most chilling elements of these studies is the discussion of casualties of almost incomprehensible magnitude. Massive numbers of people had been killed in previous wars, and most estimates agree that the Soviet Union lost some 20 million people in the years 1941–5. These, however, were lost over a period of four years in a large number of individual actions.

Air power inflicted the four most devastating attacks in the Second World War – two with conventional bombs and two with atomic bombs. The attack on Dresden, Germany, took place on 13–14 February 1945 and involved several hundred bombers of the British and United States air forces; at least 100,000 people died. Probably the most costly attack of the war, however, was the USAAF raid on Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945, in which 334 B-29 bombers dropped 1,600 tonnes of incendiaries and the resulting firestorm killed 83,000, with a further 100,000 injured. Then came the two atomic bombs: on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, with 78,150 killed and over 70,000 injured, and on Nagasaki, on 9 August, with 40,000 killed and 25,000 injured.

In terms of casualties incurred during the attack, the conventional attacks on Dresden and Tokyo were actually more destructive than the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The former attacks, however, required many hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs, while the latter each needed only one bomber and one bomb. The atomic attacks also introduced a new and invisible killer: radiation. This ability of nuclear warheads to carry destructive power equivalent to hundreds (and later to hundreds of thousands) of conventional bombs, allied to the residual, invisible killer, was the spectre that was to haunt the planners of both sides throughout the Cold War.

One of the major problems in discussing casualties is that, not surprisingly, estimates varied wildly, not least because they were assessing something for which not even the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided a precedent. In addition, there were a large number of variables and uncertainties:

• US planners could plot population density in the USA accurately, but could only hazard guesses at the density in the USSR.

• Meteorological conditions over the target would have had a direct effect on accuracy, as well as on the direction and extent of the blast effect and of fallout plumes.

• Cities were obviously the most vulnerable targets, but an active and timely civil-defence policy of evacuation to rural areas could have substantially reduced casualties. Whether or not such a policy could have been successfully implemented was another matter.

• In addition to evacuation, civil-defence fallout shelters in the cities, coupled with timely warning to the populace to take cover, would also have reduced casualties.

In the mid-1970s one assessment of US deaths varied from 200,000 in a first-strike Soviet missile attack aimed specifically at US ICBM fields, to 20 million for an attack on all strategic forces and the related command-and-control facilities. Ten years later, another two studies showed that matters had moved on considerably. The first study analysed the civilian casualties likely to be incurred in the USA from a Soviet counter-force attack involving approximately 3,000 individual weapons. It was found that:

The same authors then conducted a study of a similar attack on the USSR, and concluded that:

In other words, a counter-value attack would have involved up to 93 million casualties, but even an attack on counter-force targets would have involved at least 12 million and possibly as many as 27 million deaths.

A BATTLE IN EUROPE

The setting devised by JIGSAW for its European study started with a ground battle in which the Warsaw Pact forces advanced into West Germany, with NATO forces’ role being to delay and hold the main thrusts until the strategic nuclear strike on the Soviet Union had taken its full effect. In the area of interest to the British (i.e. that part of northern Germany where 1 (BR) Corps would be fighting), the Warsaw Pact thrust was considered to have two main axes: one in the north, on a frontage of some 160 km across the North German Plain, against Belgian, British and West German forces; the second, in the south, through the Fulda Gap and towards Frankfurt am Main, against West German and US forces. There would, of course, have been other thrusts in the Central Region from Czechoslovakia into southern Germany and along the Baltic coast to Hamburg and Denmark, as well as in Norway and southern Europe.

The JIGSAW team prefaced its assessments by drawing attention to one of the unusual characteristics of the German rural areas, which is the very large number of relatively small villages, which are laid out as if on a grid, some 3–5 km from each other. This meant that, even if the tactical weapons were very low-yield and aimed at military targets, they would inevitably include several of these villages within their lethal area.

The nuclear battle had three elements.[7] The first was the exchange actually on the battlefield in support of operations at the operational and tactical level. The study assumed exchanges of 500 weapons in the north and 250 in the south, with an average yield of 30 kT each.

The second was a series of interdiction strikes, aimed at bridges, ferries and other crossing points, which were designed to prevent reinforcements and supplies reaching the enemy’s forward troops. The NATO interdiction strikes would have consisted of some 250 nuclear weapons, each of 300 kT yield, on a north–south line generally following the line of the river Elbe and extending from the Baltic to Prague – a distance of some 560 km. The Soviet interdiction strike would have been along a line running from Strasbourg in the south northward along the Rhine to Nijmegen and then north to the Ijselmeer, and would have been intended to prevent reinforcements and supplies reaching NATO forces in the forward area, and also to prevent those forward troops from withdrawing across the Rhine. This strike would have been of the same size as the NATO strike: i.e. 250 weapons, each with a 300 kT yield.

The third element consisted of two counter-air strikes, in which NATO would launch attacks against 115 Warsaw Pact airfields in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland. The Warsaw Pact air forces would launch a concurrent attack on 100 NATO airfields: forty in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and sixty in West Germany.

Although none of these attacks was specifically aimed at cities, some of the bridges and airfields were inevitably located in such urban concentrations.

The predicted outcome of such a battle is shown in Table 35.2. The boxed entries represent the unavoidable minimum effects. Thus, under airburst weapons (columns (d) and (e)), the figures show the area of severe blast damage in which the population would suffer some 80 per cent deaths in the inner zone, reducing to 10 per cent in the outer zone. In the groundburst case (columns (f) and (g)), the boxed entries represent the ‘Z-zone’, where it would have been necessary to evacuate immediately those people who had survived the effects of blast and fire to areas with a small risk of fallout.

If all the nuclear weapons used in this battle had been groundburst, there would have been a serious fallout hazard over 138,000 km² of the total land mass of West Germany, of which 36,000 km² would have been the Z-zone, from which any survivors would have had to be evacuated if they were not to die. In addition, 3.6 million people would have been homeless, with another 3 million homes damaged.

If, however, the battle had been conducted using airbursts alone, there would have been no residual radiation, but the immediate radiation dose (3,000 roentgens) would have been delivered over an area which, in peacetime, housed some 2 million people.

It is important to note that these figures represented the areas affected by the stated hazard and the population within those area. Thus the population figures would not necessarily have been the total casualty figures, particularly in the case of immediate radiation, where a proportion of the population would have been indoors or possibly in shelters. Similarly, many people at risk from burns might have been protected by being indoors or even, if in the open, by being in the shadow of a building. Where blast is concerned, however, the case would have been different, since in the ‘blast devastation’ area (Lines 4–5) the homes of some 5.9 million people would have been reduced to rubble and those of a further 6.6 million severely damaged.

During the Second World War the German homeland was subjected to bombing attacks during a period of some five years, in which some 400,000 civilians were killed and a further 600,000 were injured. Cities were the main targets, and across the country as a whole some 10 per cent of the residential housing stock was destroyed and a further 10 per cent was damaged. In a nuclear war, far worse damage would have been caused in a matter of minutes than during the five years of the Second World War.

Whether the campaign had been conducted using airburst or ground-burst weapons the damage would have been massive. In the airburst case the damage would have been wrought mainly by blast, with the destruction of a large number of houses and factories, and with the probability of the death of many millions of people. In the groundburst case the blast effects would have been somewhat less, but the area of the Z-zone would have been about the same as for the airburst case and almost all the 11.8 million people within that zone would have died unless rapidly evacuated. In short, airbursts would have damaged more buildings, groundbursts would have caused more casualties to people.

IF ACTUAL PHYSICAL combat never broke out, there were nevertheless some real battlegrounds on which the Cold War was fought, among them those of equipment and of technology. But these depended upon the resources made available to finance them, and the management systems which controlled them. Indeed, there are good grounds for believing that NATO eventually priced the Warsaw Pact, and in particular the Soviet Union, out of business.

EQUIPMENT

All nations expended a substantial proportion of their defence budgets on equipment, and the Cold War was a ‘happy time’ for military men on both sides of the Iron Curtain, even though they constantly complained that they were short of money and starved of resources. The fact was that public funds had never been so generously lavished on military forces in peacetime, and many of the shortages were more apparent than real.

The naval, general and air staffs and the government procurement agencies alike faced many challenges, of which the most fundamental was that, in the worst case, the Third World War might have broken out very suddenly and then been both extremely violent and very short. This would have been quite unlike the First and Second World Wars, where there had been time to mobilize national industries, to develop new equipment, and to produce it all in sufficient quantities. But, whereas those wars had lasted four and six years respectively, the indications were that, in the worst case, the Third World War would have been over in a matter of months, perhaps even of weeks. Such a conflict would therefore have been fought with whatever was available at the time – a ‘come as you are’ war, as it was described at the time. In consequence, armed forces had to be constantly maintained at a state of high readiness, with their weapons, ammunition and equipment to hand – a process which proved difficult to sustain for forty years. A second problem was that the accelerating pace of science and technology, coupled with the lengthy development time for new equipment, meant that many weapons systems were obsolescent before they had even entered service.

Inside their respective pacts, the two superpowers enjoyed many advantages: their financial and industrial resources were huge in comparison to those of their allies, and their own forces were so large that they guaranteed a major domestic market for any equipment that was selected. They thus dominated their partners, and it proved a struggle for their European allies on either side of the Inner German Border to avoid being overwhelmed.

Even for the USA, however, military procurement was by no means smooth sailing. Enormous amounts of money were expended on systems which, for one reason or another, were cancelled before they reached service. One prime example was the effort devoted by the US air force to finding a successor to the Boeing B-52, to maintain its manned strategic bomber force. First there was the XB-70 Valkyrie hypersonic aircraft, which was followed by the B-1, the B-1A (which was virtually a new aircraft) and then the B-2. The sums expended on these aircraft for what was, in the end, very little return are almost incalculable. Further, quite what purpose such aircraft would have served in a nuclear war, apart from dropping H-bombs in gaps left by ICBMs and SLBMs, is not clear. The US army had some dramatic failures, too, such as the Sergeant York divisional air-defence system and the MBT-70 tank.

The US forces were certainly not alone in having problems. The Canadians, who had little enough money for defence, undertook three massive projects, which many contemporary observers warned were over-ambitious. The first was the all-Canadian Arrow fighter of the late 1950s, which reached the prototype stage before cancellation. The second, in the 1980s, was the submarine project which grew from three replacement diesel-electric submarines to twelve nuclear-propelled attack submarines; this reached an advanced stage, though short of orders being placed, before it was cancelled. The third, in the 1990s, was an order for over fifty Westland helicopters to replace ageing anti-submarine and general-purpose helicopters; this was summarily cancelled by a new government, and large compensation payments had to be made. These three projects incurred expenditure totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, but, in the end, there was not a single aircraft, submarine or helicopter to show for any of them.

The British suffered from two problems. The first was projects reaching an advanced stage and then being cancelled. This affected numerous aircraft, such as the Nimrod AWACS, the Vickers-Supermarine Swift fighter and the TSR-2 strike aircraft, while the navy suffered a similar fate with the CVA-01 aircraft carrier, as did the army with the SP70 self-propelled gun and the Blue Water battlefield missile. In addition, some of the projects that did reach service did so only after many years in development and the expenditure of great sums of money, when a viable foreign alternative was readily available at much lower cost.

This is not to deny that some excellent equipment was produced. In the USA, the Los Angeles-class SSNs and aircraft such as the B-52 bomber, F-86 Sabre, F-4 Phantom, F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon were world leaders in their day. Among British successes were the Canberra and Vulcan bombers, the Hunter fighter and the Harrier V/STOL aircraft, the Leander-class frigates and the Centurion tank. The Germans bought most of their aircraft from abroad, but on land their Leopard 1 and Leopard 2 tanks were outstandingly successful. The French produced some outstanding fighter aircraft in the Mirage series, which sold around the world.

Indeed, some European equipment was so good that it even found a market in the United States. The US air force, for example, purchased the British Canberra bomber, while the Marines ordered hundreds of Harrier V/STOL aircraft. In the 1980s the US army bought its most important communications system, RITA, from France, while its tank guns came first from the UK (105 mm) and subsequently from Germany (120 mm).

MANAGEMENT

All equipment-producing countries knew that their procurement processes were slow, overbureaucratic and inefficient, but, while all tried a considerable number of alternative methods, none of them ever found a real solution. Projects conducted with extreme speed and then rushed into production, such as the US army’s M47 and M48 tanks and the US air force’s F-100 Supersabre fighter in the 1950s, tended to result in equipment which was simply not ready for operational use and which required years of additional work to sort out the problems. On the other hand, projects which were conducted with extreme care could take over a decade to complete, by which time the technology was out of date, and the time taken ensured that they were very expensive.

Some observers advocated an escape from this by using an incremental approach, whereby a new weapons system was created by bringing together various in-service components. Using this approach, the Soviet army achieved a major success with its ZSU-23–4 air-defence gun, but when the US army tried to do the same thing with the Sergeant York system it proved to be a time-consuming and costly failure.

It should not, however, be thought that the USSR had a better system. Because of the secrecy which was inherent in Soviet equipment procurement, the West only ever saw the equipment which had passed through the development system and had been put into service, where it could no longer be hidden. There were, however, many projects which, despite considerable expenditure, never reached service status.

DEFENCE COSTS

The true costs of defence equipment were virtually impossible to calculate. First, the budgeting systems were complex and the costs of various elements of a programme were spread over so many individual budgets that it was difficult (as legislators in many countries discovered) to track them all down. Second, the declared cost of getting a weapons system into service was seldom the real cost of the project, since early production models frequently either fell well short of performance criteria or only just met them, as a result of which much effort had to be devoted to resolving the problems. Third, belated admissions showed that even in the most democratic of countries, such as the USA and the UK, large hidden programmes had been undertaken without any authority from the legislature.

The original British A-bomb programme and the early part of the Chevaline warhead development were hidden from Parliament for many years, and numerous ‘black’ air-force programmes, such as the F-117 ‘stealth’ fighter, were concealed from Congress in the United States. In addition, governments used differing methods and conventions for arriving at defence costs, thus making it virtually impossible to compare like with like. Some governments also had defence commitments outside the European area, the costs of which were difficult to extract from Cold War costs.

On the Soviet side, it is doubtful that even the Soviet government had any real idea of just how much its defence programmes cost, and estimates made in the West were essentially best guesses. What was certain, however, as judged by the eventual collapse of the USSR, was that the cost proved to be unaffordable.

THE GREATEST SINGLE spectre haunting the political and military leaders throughout the Cold War was that of nuclear war, and it was a threat that influenced every decision of any significance. Equally, it was a threat which only a very few really understood, and it was a subject about which a great deal of nonsense was spoken.

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact regularly rehearsed the use of tactical nuclear weapons in their exercises, treating them as some superior form of artillery. The fact was, however, that had even one nuclear weapon been used it would have created a totally new situation. And, since there was no known method of making a clandestine nuclear explosion, it must be supposed that when the first weapon was used there would have been no doubt as to what had happened. This was foreseen by the Cold War strategist Herman Kahn, who, in the early days of potential nuclear warfare, described the situation thus:

That was written in the 1950s, but it remained true throughout the Cold War, and therein lay the danger of tactical nuclear weapons.

TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Discussions on removing intermediate-range nuclear forces took some years, but, when these weapons were eventually discarded under the INF Treaty, they all went.

These discussions did not cover the shorter-range battlefield nuclear weapons, but once the Cold War had ended these were then disposed of by mutual agreement and without either side bothering with the formalities of a treaty. Thus President George Bush announced on 27 September 1991 that all US Lance and nuclear artillery shells would be eliminated, including those nuclear warheads supplied to allies. On 5 October 1991 this was quickly followed by an announcement by President Gorbachev, who said that all Soviet nuclear artillery projectiles, nuclear landmines and nuclear warheads for non-strategic missiles (Frog, Scud and SS-21) would also be destroyed. The process was endorsed by NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, which declared on 18 October 1991 that ‘We will therefore continue to base effective and up-to-date sub-strategic nuclear forces in Europe, but they will consist solely of dual-capable aircraft.’^{2} That left only the French, but in 1992 President Mitterrand announced, first, that the readiness of all his country’s nuclear forces was being reduced and, subsequently, that he had decided to disband the Pluton regiments totally; the last went in 1993.

Tactical nuclear weapons created two major areas of difficulty. First, had even one been used the ‘nuclear threshold’ would have been crossed. Second, it would have been extremely difficult to differentiate between strategic and tactical weapons. The US Pershing II, for example, had a range of 1,800 km – sufficient for it to reach targets well inside the Soviet Union’s western border – while the Soviet SS-12, with a range of 900 km, could have reached targets in south-east England or eastern France from launch sites east of the Elbe. France, the USSR and the UK would all have regarded such strikes as ‘strategic’. There was therefore a very real danger – possibly even an inevitability – that, while the side launching nuclear weapons might have classified them as being ‘tactical’, they would have led seamlessly into global nuclear war.

NUCLEAR WARFIGHTING

There was a school of thought, particularly in the United States, which considered that ‘nuclear warfighting’ (i.e. a protracted conflict using nuclear weapons) would be possible. It is, however, highly questionable whether the military forces could have continued to fight under nuclear conditions for long. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that fighting would simply have become impossible, and that at least some elements of the surviving military forces of both sides would have ceased to function as rational military organizations.

One of the features of battlefield nuclear weapons was that their use formed part of every major NATO field exercise in the 1970s and 1980s. The customary pattern was that the exercise would steadily build up to a climax, which duly arrived with ‘nuclear release’ and the launching of the battlefield nuclear weapons. Staff officers and troops always welcomed this, since experience showed that this was the certain signal that the exercise would end within the next two to three hours. Thus, not only did the situation of being under prolonged nuclear attack not form part of the exercises, but it appeared that the exercise planners found it simply unimaginable.

THE PLANS

There is little value in seeking to assess whether any of the strategic or tactical plans made by either side would have been successful. One of the major lessons to be derived from a study of military history is that, while a very few battles have proceeded according to the generals’ or admirals’ plan, most battles and virtually all wars have not.

The major problem in trying to predict the possible progress of battles or campaigns is that the outcome of each constituent event must be decided before progressing to consider the next event. But to arrive at such decisions involves a series of judgements about how various participants might have reacted. For example, one of the events considered by the book The Third World War^{3} was a Soviet attack, using one SS-17 ICBM, on the British city of Birmingham, which was totally devastated. In the book, the response by the UK and the USA (with French agreement) was for four SSBN-launched weapons, two from each country, to be delivered on the Soviet city of Minsk. While such a scenario is not totally impossible, it seems unlikely. This is not to say that the authors were wrong to consider a ‘demonstrative’ first strike by the USSR, followed by a ‘response-in-kind’ by the UK and the USA; it means only that the authors had to presuppose a sequence of actions and reactions in the USSR and subsequently in France, the UK and the USA which in real life either might not have happened at all or might have happened in a different way.[1]

Thus, it is simply impossible to estimate whether the Soviet attack plans described in this book would have succeeded, or whether NATO’s conventional defences, described in previous chapters, would have held out, either in whole or in part. It is similarly impossible to predict whether either side would have authorized nuclear release and, if so, when and under what circumstances. During the public debate on enhanced-radiation weapons, for example, President Jimmy Carter stated that:

It would be easy to suggest that, judging by their performance over other issues, President Ronald Reagan might have been more prepared to issue the orders to go to war or to launch ICBMs than President Jimmy Carter, and that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would have been more willing to launch the British SLBMs than Prime Minister Harold Wilson. But it is impossible to assess how any of those four might have behaved if they had been forced to come face to face with the awful reality.

It is also debatable whether the Soviets would have used nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the Soviet forces regarded ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as an integral part of their operational doctrine, and that their plans assumed their use at a very early stage. That is not to say, however, that they would actually have used them; indeed, since they would presumably have attacked western Europe in order to capture it intact rather than to overrun a nuclear wasteland, it could be argued that they had every incentive not to use them. Thus, if their prospect of success in a conventional battle looked good, they might well have publicly eschewed their use, thus forcing NATO either to follow suit or to order ‘first use’.

There is equally no doubt that, at least in public, NATO regarded battlefield nuclear weapons either as a reasonable response to Soviet first use or as a last resort in the face of imminent conventional defeat. In addition, the West had plans to use a very small number of nuclear weapons in a demonstrative capacity.[2] French plans also included a pre-stratégique strike, which was in effect a ‘demonstrative’ strike. As always, however, the fact that such contingency plans had been prepared did not mean that they would be implemented.

Two factors which would have been of overwhelming importance were time and communications. Leaders would have been under the most intense pressure to make decisions upon which depended the fate of their country and – this is not an overdramatization – that of the world. Not only would such decisions have had to be made, but they would have had to be made very quickly. If either the United States or the USSR had detected a massive incoming strategic strike, then, given the time taken for the news to reach the national command authorities and for any subsequent decision for a counter-attack to be transmitted (and verified) in time to be of any use, perhaps ten minutes at most was all that would have been available to make a decision.

Human history contains many examples of new weapons – such as longbows, gunpowder, artillery, machine-guns, chemical gas, airplanes and missiles – which have struck terror into an enemy, but they have never prevented subsequent conflict. Until, that is, the nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons were capable of inflicting more casualties and more damage in minutes than had been achieved in all the six years of the Second World War. Great cities such as Detroit, Birmingham, Paris and Leningrad could have been laid waste by just one 1 MT weapon each; sprawling megalopolises such as Greater London or the German Ruhr might have required up to six. As the tables in earlier chapters have shown, however, the two superpowers possessed sufficient warheads to devastate not only each other but many other countries as well.

Both sides in the Cold War seem to have realized that a conflict between them would almost certainly have escalated from conventional to nuclear, whether the original aggressor had intended it or not. In consequence, they kept their heads, and for forty years they kept the arms race within reason – just.

The outcome of the Cold War certainly appears to have been more propitious for NATO than for the Warsaw Pact, at least in the short term, but the fact that there is a long term to look forward to is a tribute to men of goodwill, sound judgement and common sense on both sides. There certainly were moments in the Cold War when some on one side or the other might have considered an attack to have been a worthwhile gamble, but, when that happened, colleagues with good sense held them back.

Even if a war in central Europe had been fought with conventional weapons, the conflict would have been extremely bloody for both sides, with a degree of devastation far exceeding any previously seen. It is highly probable that it did not happen because of the existence of nuclear weapons, the uncertainty over whether or not they would be used, and the certainty that, if they were used, the result would in all likelihood have been cataclysmic. Thus, despite its critics, the nuclear weapon did have a utility, after all.

The final word, as usual, belongs to Sun Tzu, who said that: