There Goes Brussels …
WILLIAMSON MURRAY
Let us play a counterfactual game, and suppose for a moment that the one-sided crisis of 1983 had gotten out of control. What if, for example, on the night of September 26, a Soviet officer in a bunker outside Moscow had not had doubts about what he was seeing on a computer screen—first one incoming missile, and then another, five in all. Had Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov followed regulations, he would have telephoned his superiors to warn them that the Soviet Union was only minutes away from a nuclear attack. Petrov hesitated, convinced that something had gone awry in the computer system. The minutes passed. Nothing did happen. That night one man's hunch may have averted World War III.
“The terrible ifs accumulate,” as Winston Churchill said of the opening moves of World War I. Those same terrible ifs might have been the story of 1983. What were the most likely possibilities of an armed confrontation? What form might it have taken? A best-case scenario in the crisis that the Soviet leadership had created for itself might have seen the normally overcautious Yuri Andropov ordering some sort of demonstration, a shot across Western bows, as it were—perhaps rocketing a nuclear bomb to explode harmlessly in the South Pacific or the Indian Ocean. (Such a warning missile would have avoided the polar regions, where it would have set off American radar.) But Andropov was an ill man— he died the following February—who had increasingly ceded decisionmaking to the ancient hard-liners in the Kremlin. One would have had to expect an immoderate response from them. Chances are that they would have precipitated either a limited or, worst case, a full-scale nuclear war. They didn't, but as we know now, they came close enough.
There is one other scenario that we might consider, and as Williamson Murray writes, it is the most likely one: an attack on Western Europe. Indeed, the Warsaw Pact nations always assumed that they would take the offensive—just as NATO, “an alliance committed to protecting the status quo” (the historian Lawrence Freedman's phrase), would rely on defense. NATO planners had spent years preparing for conventional mass armored attacks. Pact armies, they surmised, would probably head across the North German plain to Hamburg and beyond, or west through the Fulda Gap to Frankfurt. Could NATO fight a holding action until American reinforcements made it across the Atlantic? (That explains why NATO placed such emphasis on antisubmarine warfare, to protect shipping.) But NATO totally miscalculated the form the Warsaw Pact attack would take. The Soviets, we now know, were planning nothing less than a nuclear blitz of Europe. Yet they forgot to take one thing into account: the other side's response.
WILLIAMSON MURRAY, a senior fellow at the Institute for Defense Analyses, is a professor of history emeritus at Ohio State University and, with Allan R. Millett, the author of A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War.
WITH THE COLLAPSE of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came the overturn of the entire strategic framework within which European politics had run from the end of World War II. For the first time, the West learned what NATO's opponents, the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact, had in mind if war broke out in Europe. This new knowledge came as an extraordinary surprise, since it underlined the level of miscalculation in most Western theorizing about Soviet military plans for the last two decades of the Cold War.
We now know that the Soviet Union's military planners had no intention of beginning a major war in Europe with a conventional attack. There was no debate in the Soviet Union about first use of nuclear weapons. Military operations would begin with a massive barrage of between three and four hundred nuclear weapons against a variety of NATO targets. Not only did the Warsaw Pact possess no defensive plans in this period, a revealing fact in and of itself, but it had no plans for conventional offensive operations.
How the evidence about Soviet military plans fell into Western hands is an interesting story. When the Soviet empire disappeared into the dustbin of history, Russia's military forces returned to their own territory. The commanders and staffs of the former Red Army took along with them virtually everything on Soviet military installations that was not nailed down, and that included sensitive documents. Had the Soviets been the only ones involved in planning for offensive operations, we would know only as much as Russian authorities deigned to tell us—not much, if anything.
But the Soviets could not avoid leaving a paper trail of planning dictates with the military forces of the other Warsaw Pact nations. When the German Democratic Republic collapsed, and when the Communist governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia yielded to democratic regimes, a considerable number of documents on planning fell into the hands of the new rulers. The change happened so quickly that the ousted administrators had no time to destroy the documents. The Germans in particular proved interested in what the evidence suggested—and more than willing to publish the results. Though Western intelligence agencies have probably not yet reconstructed the full Soviet plan, the available evidence has allowed them to sketch, in considerable detail, the framework for what would have happened if a great European war had occurred.
D-Day for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe would have started with nuclear holocaust. Soviet missiles and, in some cases, bombers would have attacked virtually every major air base, nuclear storage area, communications center, and headquarters with tactical nuclear weapons. Such an attack not only would have devastated much of NATO's conventional and nuclear power, it would have caused enormous collateral damage to the towns and cities that lay near the military bases that the Soviets targeted.
The strikes would have ranged across Germany to the United Kingdom and would have fallen impartially on U.S., British, French, and German bases. The aim would have been straightforward: to destroy NATO's command-and-control system and its ability to respond with nuclear weapons before the immensely superior (in terms of numbers) conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact rolled over the wreckage. Soviet plans also make it clear why they placed such emphasis on nuclear protection of their combat vehicles and troops, and why they trained their conventional forces to fight in areas contaminated by nuclear weapons—they knew that nuclear weapons, their nuclear weapons, would be used right from the first in a NATO–Warsaw Pact military confrontation. The rigorous training that the Soviets received to survive on a nuclear battlefield, especially in contaminated areas, was a major feature of Warsaw Pact exercises. Soldiers operated for extensive periods in their nuclear protection gear; tanks and armored personnel carriers remained buttoned up for long periods of time; and air bases practiced operations in which all personnel wore rubberized suits and washed down constantly. All of this was done with utmost seriousness and under the most stringent discipline. There were no shortcuts.
Not all of the targets for Soviet strikes are known, but enough information has surfaced to suggest how extensive the collateral damage would have been. Attacks on command-and-control sites such as Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg and other West German bases would have practically destroyed many cities. NATO's central headquarters, near Brussels, was targeted, and not much of the Belgian capital would have remained. Major ports would have been attacked: Hamburg, Bremen, and Antwerp would have gone up to prevent U.S. and British reinforcements from reaching the continent. Air bases such as Rhein-Main also would have been hit, adding to the collateral damage in nearby areas. Though London probably would have been spared, American air bases in Britain would have received their share of tactical nuclear weapons: The nuclear capability of aircraft on those bases threatened the massed conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact.
After the first devastating nuclear strikes, Warsaw Pact forces then would have advanced against an opponent whose ability to resist had been thoroughly disrupted, whose command and control no longer functioned, who possessed relatively little airpower, and who had few nuclear weapons left on the continent with which to attack the Warsaw Pact's conventional forces. Increasingly, from the mid-1960s on, Soviet military planners treated the possibility of war in Central Europe as an isolated event. They never seeme
d to pay attention to the probable strategic response from North America. In many ways, they were as out of touch with the political and strategic realities of the Cold War as the Schlieffen Plan had been with the realities of 1914. Then, no one of influence on the German general staff seemed to have reckoned with the full political consequences of invading Belgium.
This new picture of Soviet intentions explains why the political leadership in the Kremlin chose not to go to war, despite the overwhelming conventional superiority of its armed forces in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not so shortsighted as the military. In the largest sense, of course, students of the Cold War have understood why there was no World War III. Despite the fact that, for much of its duration, the Cold War represented, for both sides, a struggle of hostile ideologies of good versus evil, of truth versus lies, the specter of nuclear war introduced an element of enormous caution into the international arena. The mere existence of nuclear weapons prevented the replication of the war against Nazi Germany that had involved the destruction of most of Europe's major cities and the expenditure of resources and blood on an unimaginable scale. (The forty million deaths suffered by the Soviet Union alone suggests the immensity of the disaster.) Yet one of the many ironies of the Cold War may be that, in the end, deterrence, the talisman that provided tenure for whole generations of political scientists, worked—but only in a way that none of the theorizing academics understood.
The Soviet military plans represented a military solution to a narrowly defined operational problem: how to conquer Western Europe without suffering catastrophic damage themselves. But one must also understand that Soviet military planners analyzed NATO's operational and strategic options and worked entirely within the context of their own perceptions. It was mirror imaging of the worst sort. From their perspective, were they in NATO's position, the sole response to a massive Soviet invasion of Western Europe with conventional forces would be an immediate use of tactical nuclear weapons to break up and wreck the Soviet military juggernaut—in other words, to achieve an operational balance, or what they called the “correlation of forces.” The Soviet planners regarded discussions among Western political leaders and academics about conventional defense, forward defense, and no first use as nothing but a massive campaign of disinformation, a smoke screen hiding the true intentions of NATO.
Once Soviet commanders and planners had made the assumption that NATO would use tactical nuclear weapons from the outset—just as they would do in similar circumstances—their response seemed obvious. They determined to eliminate that threat by blasting NATO's nuclear capabilities to smithereens. Then their conventional forces could move west to police up the rubble. (In fact, NATO's first-use plan came into play only if it was faced with the collapse of its forces in a conventional war.) The Soviet plans make it clear why they were so worried about the new generation of U.S. weapons introduced in the early 1980s, in particular the Pershing and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that the Reagan administration deployed to Britain and Germany. Those fears took shape in the deception campaign that resulted in movements such as the nuclear-freeze group.
The operational problem for the Soviets was that the new American weapons systems were mobile, and with even minimal warning, they could be set up in areas not targeted by Soviet nuclear planning. Thus, even after the Soviet tactical nuclear strikes, NATO would have retained substantial means to launch a series of devastating nuclear counterstrikes against Soviet conventional forces and their command-and-control systems.
But it was probably not Western military planning and new nuclear capabilities that exercised the most effective deterrent on the Soviet Union's military and political leaders. Soviet plans by their very nature were self-deterring. They created a host of problems for those in Moscow who had to consider such a contest within the larger context of Soviet-American strategic confrontation. And Soviet leaders, considering that wider context, had to believe that an attack on NATO that opened with a barrage of three to four hundred nuclear weapons would result in an American reply with all the nuclear forces at the U.S. president's disposal. From the Soviet point of view, the Americans would have no choice but to move a tactical nuclear war in Europe to the strategic level. No Soviet leader could fail to believe that the nuclear destruction of NATO would lead immediately and catastrophically to an American response that would destroy the Soviet Union.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my special thanks to Byron Hollinshead, Sabine Russ, Marleen Adlerblum, and Matthew Ashford at American Historical Publications, and to my old and good friend Robert D. Loomis at Random House, for their assistance and encouragement in all aspects of this book.
ROBERT COWLEY is the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He has edited three other anthologies— The Great War; No End Save Victory, about World War II; and With My Face to the Enemy, about the Civil War—as well as several volumes in the popular What If? Series. He lives in Connecticut.
Copyright © 2005 by American Historical Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
“Truman Fires McArthur”: Adapted with the permission of
Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Truman by David McCullough.
Copyright © 1992 by David McCullough. All rights reserved.
“The Evacuation of Kham Duc”: Adapted with the permission of Free Press, a division of
Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam.
Copyright © 1993 by Ronald H. Spector. All rights reserved.
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