The Cold War: A Military History

1

When attending the dedication of France’s new, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which is named after the general, I enquired about the correct spelling of the name. The general’s son informed me that his father had wished the ‘De’ to be capitalized, and I see no reason not to follow this advice.

2

The official description of the defence organization is given in Appendix 1.

3

Finland was permitted 34,000 in the army, 4,000 in the navy, and 3,000 in the air force (including any naval air arm), while equipment limits included 10,000 tonnes of warships and sixty aircraft. Submarines and bombers were totally prohibited.

1

These talks were classified Top Secret, but as a junior British representative was the notorious spy Donald Maclean it seems probable that the Soviet leadership knew as much of what was discussed as did London, Ottawa and Washington.

2

The full text of the North Atlantic Treaty is given in Appendix 2.

1

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

2

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

3

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

1

This was the public position. There are, however, strong reasons for believing that there was a degree of covert co-operation. France, the UK and the USA, for example, would have needed to ensure that their ballistic-missile submarines’ patrol areas did not clash.

2

Earlier in the year (18 April 1983) Catholic bishops in West Germany had issued a similar pastoral letter, in which they stated that nuclear weapons were a necessary but regrettable method of maintaining peace in Europe.

3

In 1946 the three western Allied commanders-in-chief exchanged liaison missions with their Soviet opposite number. Such missions continued until the end of the Cold War.

4

‘Snow’ is a form of radar jamming created by a combination of electronic means and aircraft dropping short strips of metal foil.

5

The author was serving in Germany at the time and well remembers that virtually every unit was at a very low state of readiness, since August was, by custom, the period when summer holidays were taken. Most units were thus down to the absolute minimum manpower permitted under NATO rules, and many of the troops theoretically ‘present’ on duty had been sent away on official training and would have taken several days to return to barracks before starting deployment.

6

An intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) was a land-based missile with a range between 1,500 nautical miles (2,780 km) and 3,000 nautical miles (5,560 km).

7

A 1 MT (1 megaton) warhead is equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT; a 1 kT (1 kiloton) warhead is equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT – see Chapter 7.

8

Mach 1 is the speed of sound, which is approximately 1,200 km/h at sea level, but varies with temperature and pressure.

9

Pershing I, the original version, was carried on a tracked launcher. The Pershing IA system consisted of the same missile but mounted on a wheeled launcher, enabling it to be carried in a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.

1

The chief-of-staff was the senior serving military officer in the national armed forces – i.e. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff (US), Chief of the Defence Staff (UK), etc. When the chiefs-of-staff attended in person, the committee was designated the NATO Military Committee in Chiefs-of-Staff Session.

2

The top rank structure and the NATO ‘star’ system are explained in Appendix 4.

3

A full list of NATO and Warsaw Pact commanders-in-chief is in Appendix 5.

4

To this day (1998) there is a large UK military staff in Washington and a slightly smaller US staff in London who continue to provide this unique ‘Anglo-Saxon’ link.

5

As always, there were exceptions to every rule. Thus, Commander UK Air Forces was actually known (incorrectly) as CINCUKAIR and, although an MSC, reported direct to SACEUR and not through a PSC. Similarly, Commander-in-Chief Channel (CINCHAN), although nominally a PSC, was actually treated as an MNC – an anomaly which ceased after the end of the Cold War.

6

This command was intended to be the operational headquarters for US navy long-range anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft, which would be allocated in war.

7

It did not become fully operational until March 1953.

8

UKAIR was also unusual in that it was the only single-service (i.e. all air force), single nation MSC.

9

PTT (Post, Telephone, Telegraph) was the generic term for the telecommunications agencies, which almost to the end of the Cold War were government-owned – e.g. the Bundespost (West Germany) and the General Post Office (UK).

10

Infrastructure-funded projects were paid for out of a commonly agreed annual NATO budget; the only alternative source of funding was national.

11

A NATO IV system was ordered in the late 1980s but did not come into service until after the Cold War had ended.

12

ACE HIGH was built at a time when France was part of the integrated military structure and several stations were, therefore, on French territory. The French continued to provide a full service at these stations through to the end of the Cold War and beyond.

1

The text of the Warsaw Treaty is given in Appendix 3.

2

A full list of both Warsaw Pact and NATO commanders-in-chief is given in Appendix 5.

3

Note that Soviet ‘armies’ were equivalent in size and combat power to a NATO ‘corps’.

4

All Warsaw Pact aircraft taking part in the operation had red stripes around their rear fuselage and on their wings, to differentiate them from Czech aircraft.

5

Rokossovsky had been imposed as minister of national defence by the USSR in 1949. Following his dismissal in 1958 he was replaced by a Polish general and then returned to Moscow and retirement.

6

In 1982 the Soviets and East Germans started work on a totally new port at Neu Mukran on Rügen island. This was intended as a safeguard against future disruption of the overland route through Poland; however, such a sea route would have been disrupted by ice in winter and would have been very vulnerable to hostile action in war.

7

There were occasional command-post exercises in the mid-1980s.

8

It was classified by the Romanian navy, with typical exaggeration, as a ‘battlecruiser’.

1

A list of nuclear-weapons ‘firsts’ is given in Appendix 6.

2

Trinitrotoluene (TNT) is the ‘standard’ chemical high explosive.

3

For practical purposes, this means that the bottom edge of the fireball is 20 m above ground level.

4

Ambient pressure is approximately 1 kgf/cm².

5

Ground zero (GZ) is the point on the earth’s surface vertically above or below the centre of a nuclear explosion. At sea, the equivalent is surface zero (SZ).

6

Two units are used to measure radiation: the roentgen measures exposure and the rad measures absorption. For the purposes of this book, the two are essentially synonymous (i.e. 1 roentgen = 1 rad) and the rad will be used. The absorbed radiation can be expressed either as a dose rate (rads per hour) or as an accumulated figure (total rads over a specified time). To confuse matters further, NATO recently redesignated the rad as the Grey, but, since it was the term commonly used throughout the Cold War, the term rad will be used here.

7

The main NATO communications system in Europe, designated ACE HIGH, used tropospheric scatter, whose value in the aftermath of a series of nuclear explosions would have been questionable, to say the least.

8

In a well-documented event, the street lighting on the Hawaiian island of Oahu suffered thirty separate and serious failures due to the EMP from a test which took place at Johnson Island, some 1,300 km distant.^{3}

9

In the NATO Central European Command, for example, all military units were required to make and to practise plans to deploy from their peacetime camp to a ‘survival location’ at some distance from their barracks. Such emergency deployments were to be implemented on receipt of a codeword (originally ‘Quicktrain’, later ‘Active Edge’).

10

Such facilities included ‘crisis management centres’ (operations rooms), ‘hardened aircraft shelters’ (HAS), ‘hardened equipment shelters’ (HES), pilot briefing facilities (PBF), etc.

11

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), the small town of Guernica was heavily bombed by German aircraft operating in support of General Francisco Franco. This was the first example in Europe of ‘modern’ bombing, and led to many false conclusions about the effect of such bombing on civil populations.

1

A ballistic missile is one launched by a motor which then cuts off, so that for the rest of the flight the missile follows a trajectory in which the predominant forces are gravity and aerodynamic drag.

2

The German Second World War missiles had both a designer’s designation and a Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance Weapon) designation. The V-1 (Fieseler Fi-103). was a pulsejet-powered, winged missile. (Fieseler was a German aircraft design and manufacturing company). The V-2 (Aggregat A-4) was a rocket-powered long-range missile. (All ballistic missiles designed at the Kummersdorf and Peenemünde development centres had an ‘Aggregat’ or ‘model’ number, starting with the A-1 in the early 1930s.)

3

There was also a third plan, which involved mounting a V-1 missile in a container atop the hull of a diesel-electric submarine, which would surface for the launch. This was the forerunner of the cruise missiles which were operational for a short time in the 1950s and 1960s, and again from the 1980s onwards.

4

This explains why Moscow was a ‘withhold’ in most US nuclear plans.

5

Extensive research by the author has failed to unearth a single example of a general or admiral proposing that his own service or branch of service should be reduced in size since national defence would be better served by an increase elsewhere.

6

Hegel postulated that all progress is the outcome of a conflict of opposites, or that thesis and antithesis interact to produce a synthesis. From this some twentieth century thinkers have suggested that everything is organized in a threefold system: e.g. earth, air, water.

7

In The Third World War; August 1985, the war depicted by General Sir John Hackett culminates in a single Soviet strike on the British city of Birmingham, to which the USA and the UK immediately respond by launching two missiles each at the city of Minsk.^{4}

8

See here.

9

It should be noted, however, that a withhold in a US nuclear plan might not also have been withheld in British, Chinese or French national targeting plans.

10

Thus, if a missile with a maximum range of 10,000 km with a CEP of 1 km is fired at a target 8,000 km distant, the CEP will be 1 × (8,000 ÷ 10,000) = 0.8 km. It should be noted, however, that the CEP has always been a fairly uncertain figure, not least because neither the USA nor the USSR was keen to reveal the CEP of its own warheads with too great a degree of precision.

11

The ablative shield is designed to ease the RV’s re-entry into the atmosphere and is constructed of materials which are intended to erode.

1

A cruise missile flies within the earth’s atmosphere, using aerodynamic lift to overcome gravity and an engine/motor to overcome drag. It is essentially an aircraft with some form of guidance system to replace a human pilot.

2

The specifications of German and US land-based strategic missiles are given in Appendix 7.

3

ERCS involved placing a communications package on the missile in place of the warhead. The missiles could then be launched to provide communications relay facilities between national command posts and nuclear forces in the event that all other means of communication had been lost.

4

The specifications of Soviet land-based strategic missiles are given in Appendix 8.

5

This missile served in the Red Army for many years, and developed versions are still in wide-scale use in the 1990s in Middle Eastern and Asian armies.

6

Cryogenic fuels are liquified gases which need to be kept at low temperatures and are therefore difficult to handle.

7

This explains the brevity of Thor’s operational life with the UK air force.

8

It was estimated that among the requirements of the racetrack scheme would be: cement – 600,00 tonnes; sand – up to 48 million tonnes; liquid asphalt – 954 million litres; petroleum fuels – 568 million litres; water – 81.3 billion litres. In addition, thirty-five federal laws would have impacted on the land-acquisition process, and the scheme would have required the fourth largest city in Nevada to be built from scratch and then maintained.^{4}

9

A mesa is a type of high, rocky tableland with precipitous sides, found in certain parts of the USA.

1

The specifications of US and Soviet sea-based strategic missiles are given in Appendix 9, and of US and Soviet strategic submarines in Appendix 10.

2

There were, in fact, three sub-groups, with relatively minor differences between them: the Lafayette class (nine boats), the James Madison class (ten boats) and the Benjamin Franklin class (twelve boats).

3

In the mid-1990s a Russian agency was marketing the ‘Surf’ system for civil use; this involved a missile being taken to sea in an amphibious ship and then dropped into the sea for a ‘Hydra’-type launch. Using a combination of SS-N-20 and SS-N-23 missiles with new fourth and fifth stages, it would place a 2,400 kg payload into a 200 km near-earth orbit.

4

At around the same time, in the early 1950s, the British were working on a similar concept, in which a miniature submarine (known as an ‘X’ craft) delivered a nuclear mine to the entrance of a Soviet harbour. Several ‘X’ craft were built, but the idea was then abandoned.

5

Unfortunately, after the ship had undergone a very protracted development period, the Soviet navy changed its surveillance system, making Challenger completely redundant.

1

The first operational H-bomb, the US Mark 17, weighed 19,050 kg.

2

Specifications of US and Soviet strategic bombers are given in Appendix 11.

3

Specifications of various tanker aircraft are given in Appendix 12.

1

Specifications of British nuclear bombs and bombers are given in Appendix 13.

2

Specifications of British, Chinese and French SSBNs are given in Appendix 14.

3

Specifications of French nuclear weapons are given in Appendix 15.

4

A ‘retarded’ bomb deploys a small braking parachute to delay its fall, thus enabling the aircraft to fly clear before the nuclear weapon explodes.

5

MSBS = Mer–Sol Balistique Stratégique (sea-to-land ballistic strategic missile).

6

Specifications of Chinese ballistic-missile submarines are given in Appendix 14 and of Chinese missiles in Appendix 16.

1

The wide ranges resulted from taking a variety of assumptions for the attack pattern and for weather and other environmental factors at the time of the attack.

2

In the United Kingdom, civil-defence responsibility was split: the Home Office (equivalent to an interior ministry in most other countries) was responsible for England and Wales, while the Scottish Home and Health Department and the Northern Ireland Office covered civil defence in their particular areas.

3

The Royal Observer Corps was established during the Second World War to spot, identify and report approaching enemy aircraft; it converted to its nuclear-war role in the early 1950s. Its personnel wore a distinctive uniform, but were part-time, unpaid volunteers.

1

The figures in Tables 14.2 to 14.4 are derived from the detailed tables in Appendix 17.

1

Rickover (1900–86) was on the verge of retirement as a captain in 1946 when he joined the atomic-energy programme. He subsequently became chief of the Nuclear Power Division of the US navy. An extremely influential figure, with many friends in Congress, he eventually retired at the age of eighty-two, with the rank of four-star admiral.

2

A further eleven Ticonderoga-class cruisers and sixteen Los Angeles-class SSNs were completed after the end of the Cold War.

3

Albeit after the end of the Cold War, both STANAVFORMED and STANAVFORCHAN were deployed to the Adriatic during NATO operations after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

1

During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), its Pacific Fleet having been virtually eliminated by the Japanese, the Imperial Russian Navy dispatched its Baltic Fleet, commanded by Rozhdestvensky, to the Pacific. It left its home ports in October 1904 and sailed via the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Near the end of a desperate voyage, on 27 May 1905 the Russians met the Japanese fleet, commanded by Admiral Togo Heihachiro, at Tsu-shima, where they were decisively defeated.

2

Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov was commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy from January 1956 to December 1985.

3

The second British battleship was retained by the Soviet navy. It was broken up at Sevastopol in 1957.

4

‘Flag’ facilities are the command, control and communications facilities and the additional working and living accommodation necessary to enable a ship to embark an admiral and his staff and to serve as the flagship of a group.

5

The term ‘battlecruiser’ dated back to the early years of the twentieth century, when battleships optimized firepower and protection at the expense of speed, while the equally large battlecruisers had firepower equal to that of a battleship, but achieved rather greater speed at the expense of protection. The term was resurrected in the West as being the only appropriate designation for the Kirov class.

1

The snorkel tube was actually invented by the Dutch navy in the 1930s, to enable submarines in East Indies waters to recharge their batteries without exposing themselves to the tropical heat.

2

The Soviet navy carried out experiments in the late 1930s with the Kreislauf air-independent propulsion system, which used liquid oxygen as the source of oxygen for submerged propulsion. It was later used in a class of post-war submarines.

3

With the loss of the original name-ship, the class was then officially redesignated the Permit class.

4

There was also a sub-limit of eight on Tomahawks.

5

A body of revolution is one which is symmetrical about its main axis – e.g. an Indian club or a baseball bat.

6

Specifications of Soviet SSNs are given in Appendix 20.

1

Specifications of Soviet diesel-electric submarines are given in Appendix 21.

2

A measure of the boats’ popularity can be gauged from the fact that Explorer and Excalibur were known to their crews as Exploder and Excruciator respectively.

3

The Upholder class in fact proved to be the last British diesel-electric class, being retired after a very brief spell of front-line service following the end of the Cold War.

4

The Type XXI was restored to fully functioning order, but, in the event, was used only for experiments and trials and did not actually become operational.

1

The ordnance load was reduced to 1,985 tonnes from the third-of-class onwards, to compensate for the new Kevlar protective lining over the ship’s vital spaces.

2

The Sea Control Ship design was eventually sold to the Spanish navy, which, having modified and updated it, built it as the Principe de Asturias. The V/STOL Support Ship project also lives on, as the new Wasp-class amphibious assault ships have a secondary role as Harrier/ASW helicopter carriers.

3

This plan was a virtual rerun of the raid led by Lieutenant-Colonel James Doolittle against Tokyo, Nagoya and Kobe in Japan on 18 April 1942. In this raid, sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers were loaded aboard the carrier USS Hornet and were successfully launched at a distance of some 1,250 km from Japan. One bomber made an emergency landing at Vladivostok, while the others flew on to China, where the crews bailed out.

4

Some authorities suggest that this may have been the result of an inability to develop a reliable steam catapult rather than the ‘ski jump’ having been developed on its own merits.

5

The Dutch carrier was later also sold to Argentina.

1

In Greek mythology, the aegis was a short cloak, later a shield, which protected Zeus from harm.

2

The four Kidd-class ships were ordered by the shah of Iran, but, following the shah’s overthrow, the new government cancelled the order and the US navy bought the ships. They were, in essence, anti-aircraft versions of the Spruance class.

3

A fourth was greatly delayed during construction by the ending of the Cold War, and was eventually commissioned into the Ukrainian navy in 1995 with the name Vilna Ukraina.

4

This rate of fire was theoretical; in practice there were many stoppages, which reduced the rate considerably.

5

The Italian ships were two cruisers and four destroyers, which were allocated to France under the terms of the 1948 peace treaty with Italy.

1

Details of sea mines laid in the Second World War and the damage they caused are given in Appendix 23.

2

Details of the MCM programme and specifications of the ships involved are given in Appendix 24.

1

WIG craft fly at a height of between 5 and 15 m, taking advantage of the increased aerodynamic lift that occurs when a wing operating near the ground experiences a reduction in induced drag.

1

This equipment was known as ‘POMCUS’ – Pre-positioned Materiel Configured to Unit Sets.

2

This idea was adopted by the British army (at considerable expense) in the late 1970s and discarded (at further expense) after six years.

1

GSFG was redesignated Western Group of Forces on 1 July 1989, at the very end of the Cold War, but as the term GSFG was used for the greater part of the Cold War, it will continue to be used here.

2

‘Guards’ and ‘Shock’ were honorifics awarded for exceptionally distinguished service during the Second World War.

3

An eighth division was responsible in peacetime for training.

1

In the 1960s, by the then British secretary of state for defence, Denis Healey.

2

The minimum-range requirement arose from experiences of massed attacks by Chinese infantry in the Korean War and was met by canister shot, consisting of several hundred steel slugs.

3

For example, NATO’s STANAG 2805E laid down that, for unrestricted travel by train in continental Europe, a tank must not exceed 3.050 m in width.

4

Specifications of NATO and Warsaw Pact main battle tanks are given in Appendix 25.

5

The use of a projectile with a smaller calibre than that of the barrel enabled higher velocities to be obtained. The sabot was a segmented jacket which held the projectile in place as it travelled up the jacket but then fell away immediately after leaving the muzzle.

6

Also known as high-explosive squash head (HESH) in the British army.

7

The technical term is ‘trunnion tilt’, the trunnion being the bearings upon which the barrel is mounted.

8

The principal British armoured-vehicle research centre was located at Chobham in Berkshire.

9

It should not be assumed, however, that logistical problems did not exist. Warsaw Pact tanks, for example, used four different calibres of ammunition: T-34 – 85 mm; T-54 and T-55 – 100 mm, T-62 – 115 mm; T-64, T-72 and T-80 – 125 mm.

10

Italy also had a design capability, but no tanks were sold to NATO armies. Other countries had a capability to construct tanks under licence, but did not undertake design work.

11

Italy joined the project in 1958, but did not attempt to enter the design competition. It eventually selected the West German Leopard.

12

A version of the West German Leopard 2 was developed specifically to meet the US staff requirement. Designated Leopard 2(AV) (AV = Austere Version), this was tested by the US army but was rejected in favour of the Chrysler version of the M1.

13

It was also exported to a number of non-NATO countries, including Australia.

14

The AMX-30 was also bought by Spain, but well before that country joined NATO.

1

‘6 × 6’ indicates that it was a six-wheeled vehicle with all six wheels powered. A 4 × 2 vehicle has four wheels with only two powered (as in a standard civil automobile).

1

Specifications of the principal artillery pieces are given in Appendix 26. To the purist, there is a difference between a gun and a howitzer: the gun can be elevated between zero and 45 degrees and the latter up to about 70–80 degrees. Most self-propelled weapons (SPs) are therefore strictly speaking howitzers, but, for ease of reference, this book uses the generic term ‘SP gun’.

2

The experience of the Coalition air forces in the Gulf War is relevant: they found Iraqi air defences very powerful, especially at very low levels.

3

ZSU = Zenitnaia Samokhodnaia Ustanovka (self-propelled, anti-aircraft gun); ‘23’ denotes the calibre in millimetres; ‘4’ indicates the number of barrels.

1

Before condemning NATO for a lack of equipment standardization, it should be pointed out that many nations failed to achieve internal standardization. To give just two examples in the US forces: the navy and the Marine Corps used one type of ejector seat, the air force another, while in air-to-air refuelling the navy and the Marine Corps used probe-and-drogue and the air force the ‘flying-boom’ method.

2

One of these squadrons was based in the Netherlands and was under the operational control of the Dutch air force.

3

Based in southern England.

4

The four E-3 As did not arrive until after the end of the Cold War.

5

Such collaborative projects included the SEPECAT Jaguar strike aircraft with the UK, and the Alphajet trainer and Transall transport with the FRG.

1

These firms were the forerunners of the contemporary British Aerospace (BAe), Daimler-Benz Aerospace and Alenia, respectively. Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands also took part in the initial feasibility study. The first two did not join the consortium set up in March 1969, while the Dutch did, but then withdrew in July 1969.

1

Western pilots flew many Soviet aircraft following the end of the Cold War. In general, their comments were that reliability and serviceability were poorer than had been thought in the West, but performance and capability were much better. The German Luftwaffe, for example, initially decided to sell the MiG-29s it inherited from the East German air force, but once it had taken full measure of their capabilities (and had solved the maintenance problems) it decided to retain them.

2

Not all Warsaw Pact aircraft were of Soviet design. All Pact air forces used the Czech L-29 Delfin trainer, for example.

1

FALLEX = Fall [i.e. Autumn] Exercise; CIMEX = Civil/Military Exercise. Both were normally suffixed by the year – e.g. FALLEX84.

2

Reserved circuits were those which had been identified for NATO use and pre-booked with national telecommunications authorities (e.g. Deutsches Bundespost (the German Federal Telecommunications Authority)) for activation in a crisis.

3

These contingency plans are fully described in Chapter 32.

1

The EAC was formed by order of the Conference of Allied Foreign Ministers (Moscow, November 1943) and consisted of representatives from the UK, the USSR, the USA and (from November 1944) France.

2

‘Berlin’ was defined as ‘Greater Berlin’ as delineated in the German Law of 27 April 1920.

3

The shortest distance was 177 km, between Helmstedt and West Berlin, for the British, and much further for the Americans and French.

4

A problem arose somewhat later when the US and the British wished to operate helicopters in Berlin. Helicopters had been in their infancy in 1945 so they were not mentioned in the 1945, agreement, as a result of which the Russians refused to allow them to be flown into or out of the city. Thus they had to be dismantled and moved into the city either in a transport aircraft or by road.

5

A West German Land is a constituent state of the Federal Republic, with its own parliament, government and local administration. It is approximately equivalent to a US state.

6

The Berlin City Assembly sent eight representatives to the Bundestag and four to the Bundesrat.

7

These are estimated to have been six months’ supply of coal and gas and one year’s supply of food.

8

Before this the currency throughout Berlin had been the Allied Military Mark, which was printed by the Soviet authorities in East Berlin.

9

Originally Comets, later Centurions, and finally Chieftains.

10

The same man served as a NATO commander (SACEUR) served by NATO staffs, as a US national commander (CINCEUR) served by an exclusively US staff, and as a tripartite (French–UK–US) commander for Berlin, in which he was served by a tripartite staff with its own headquarters. Such ‘double [or triple] hatting’ was quite usual in NATO.

11

Despite being placed within a NATO compound, Live Oak was never a NATO unit and access to its building was restricted to British, French and US people with business there.

12

Contingency planning frequently gives rise to misunderstandings among those not familiar with the way the military operate. Headquarters exist in peacetime to plan and train for war, so that, should war break out, they are familiar with their roles, their missions and the units under their command. A certain amount of their time is spent in peacetime administration, but the bulk is devoted to planning. The existence of a plan does not mean that an HQ wishes to carry it out, or even that it is considered likely that it will have to, but simply that there is a remote possibility. Thus, if an HQ has a contingency plan for a nuclear attack, that does not mean that it wants to carry it out, but simply that it might have to and so the plan considers what factors might be involved in doing so.

13

The Douglas RB-66 was a highly specialized photographic- and electronic-surveillance version of the B-66 twin-jet bomber. It carried a crew of three.

14

The T-39 was an air-force version of the North American Sabreliner executive aircraft. It was powered by two turbojets and carried a crew of two. Military transport versions carried up to nine passengers, but the type was also used as a radar trainer and may also have been used for electronic surveillance.

15

The Bundesversammlung was a special body which was convened only to elect a new president.

16

This covered formal meetings of the Bundesversammlung, the Bundesrat and the Bundestag, although committees could continue to meet in West Berlin.

17

One senior Western officer went to sleep in his staff car on the autobahn between Helmstedt and Berlin. He awoke to discover that he was deep in the GDR, his driver having taken a wrong turning, and that his car had been stopped by a Soviet patrol. An English-speaking Russian officer was sent for, who, with only the slightest hint of a smile, politely enquired whether the Western officer was trying to defect. On being assured that this was not the case, he personally escorted the chastened Westerner back to the autobahn and sent him on his way to Berlin with a salute.

1

Specifications of the main types of battlefield nuclear weapon are given in Appendix 27.

2

This would have enabled the warhead to penetrate a considerable depth into most soil types before detonating, giving the resultant sub-surface explosion a considerable capability against underground bunkers.

3

The problem affected all weapons, including aircraft, conventional artillery, mortars, and so on, but was most acute for nuclear weapons.

1

These would almost certainly have overrun West Berlin very rapidly, and then, having handed over mopping-up operations to a reserve formation, moved westward to reinforce one of the northern fronts.

1

In the early 1960s the author attended two separate study periods in Malaya on the conduct of nuclear war in the jungle. In the first, the basic assumption made by the team running the study was that nuclear weapons would have swept away vast swathes of jungle, making movement by both vehicles and men relatively easy. In the second, the opening assumption by a different team was that the nuclear weapons had created an impenetrable obstacle, making movement impossible.

2

From the mid-1970s onwards it was possible to retarget Minuteman missiles in flight, but it was not possible to terminate the flight.

3

JIGSAW was the (doubtless carefully chosen) acronym for the Joint Inter-Service Group for the Study of All-out Warfare.

4

Note that JIGSAW gave radiation doses in roentgens and that, for the purposes of this book, the roentgen and the rad are synonymous – see the note on see here.

5

The second reason given in the paper is that the JIGSAW staff were advised by the director of military intelligence that ‘there was a lack of precise information on the location of Soviet forces in other areas of the USSR’. This is a most surprising admission at that stage of the Cold War.

6

This would have been some eighty times more powerful than the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

7

The European battle was based on the following assumptions:

1 The prevailing wind was 37 km/h knots from the west.

2 In tactical areas and on the interdiction lines, the weapons were uniformly spaced and burst simultaneously.

3 Where blast pressures from separate explosions overlapped, the damage done was that caused by the higher overpressure only.

1

I would like to make it clear that this is not meant to be a criticism of a valuable and carefully written book. My only wish is to draw attention to the problems associated with depicting scenarios and the danger inherent in making assumptions.

2

The Berlin contingency plans certainly included ‘demonstrative’ use of nuclear weapons – see Chapter 32.

1

The Preamble has been omitted; it sets out the overlying principles and identifies the national representatives at the meeting.

1

From 1949 to 1963 the NATO Military Committee in Chiefs-of-Staff Session was chaired by one of its members for a year each, rotating in order of the initial letters of the countries’ English names. From 1963 onwards it was chaired by the chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

2

The Military Committee in Permanent Session and (from 1963) the NATO Military Committee are constituted from officers representing their chiefs-of-staff and who are permanently located in Brussels. The NATO Military Committee in Chiefs-of-Staff Session still meets and is chaired by the chairman of the Military Committee.

1

Source: Conway’s All The World’s Fighting Ships: 1947–1995 (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1995).

1

All data in this table refer to the initial service version of each type. Virtually all types went through many modifications, which resulted in increases in speed, range or payload.