by John Hackett
The reason why Western leaders might be faced by this agonizing choice was briefly and bluntly that their conventional forces were not enough by themselves to be able in all circumstances to bring to a halt an attack by the more massive Soviet conventional military machine. This situation represented an unfortunate legacy of the decision of the 1950s, at a time when the United States still had nuclear superiority, that it was sufficient to threaten to use this superiority to deter — and if necessary to bring to an end — aggression of any kind in Europe. What was attractive to politicians in this formulation was not simply the overwhelming advantage of force on the Western side which was present at the time, but also the economy of means which it allowed them to enjoy in the provision of conventional forces in Europe. Long after the Western nuclear advantage disappeared and nuclear parity was accepted, with even some advantage on the Soviet side, the financial benefits of the reliance on nuclear weapons by the West persisted in the minds of short-sighted politicians, who finally persuaded themselves that the West could not afford to provide the necessary conventional level of forces and to maintain the level of social expenditure which seemed necessary in order to prevent the further dissolution of Western society.
Some unsung genius in the new Genscher-type defence secretariat managed to launch the idea and have it accepted by his European masters that the popular opposition to nuclear weapons could be fruitfully diverted into this other argument, namely that one of the most debatable not to say reprehensible possible uses of nuclear weapons by the West could be avoided if the level of conventional forces on the Western side were increased. If there was a reasonable chance that these forces could hold up or at least delay significantly a Soviet conventional attack then the choice whether to be the first to use nuclear weapons in Europe would be landed on the Soviet side and TNF would be required on the Western side in their original and proper purpose of deterring such first use by the Soviets and not in the much more unacceptable mode of possible first use by the West.
The creation of adequate Western conventional forces for this purpose clearly lay outside the scope of the possibilities of increased expenditure by individual European nations and could only be achieved both by the greater efficiency of co-operative defence efforts and by a manifestly equitable sharing of the load, such as could only be obtained through the operation of a united European defence.
This would have the further advantage that it helped greatly to bridge one of the main differences which divided Western Europe from America. The United States had for long felt it was paying more than its fair share in the defence of Western interests. For example, the concept of the rapid deployment force for use, say, in the Indian Ocean included the belief that it might involve the earmarking for operations there of forces which would otherwise have been available as reinforcements from the United States to Europe. It therefore seemed in many American eyes an obviously fair consequence of this proposal that if the United States had to use its forces in an area where the West Europeans were unable to operate militarily but where their interests were no less in need of defence than those of the Americans, the Europeans should ‘take up the slack’. That is to say that they should put themselves in a position to make good in Europe any deficiencies which might result from the fact that the US was obliged to operate in the general Western interest elsewhere. There was some West European objection to this train of thought not only because of the extra expense which would be required if European forces had to be increased in order to make good American deficiencies in Europe, but also because it seemed to give an automatic support by Western Europe to American policies in the rest of the world which might not have been adequately discussed or on which it might not have been possible to reach agreement. This caveat was reinforced by the manifest disagreement which was felt to exist between some aspects of American policy in the Middle East and that pursued by the European Community. The Americans seemed in many European eyes to be so much subject to the influence of the Jewish vote in the United States that they were unable to impose moderation on the policy of Israel, even though the latter depended on them for financial support and the supply of war material; and in particular because the United States would not accept, or could not prevail on Israel to accept, the necessity for including in a solution of the Middle East question due consideration of the rights of the Palestinians and the creation of a separate Palestinian state.
With this degree of divergence over the area in which it was most likely that the United States might have to take military action or, at least, use military force in a deterrent role, it was particularly difficult to expect that the West Europeans would, so to speak, endorse a blank cheque for American policy by agreeing in advance to take up the slack in Europe.
It was clear throughout the industrialized Western world, as well as in Japan, that if Arab oil dried up, industry would slow down — or even, here and there, come to a virtual stop. The unwillingness of successive administrations in the United States, under pressure from powerful political groups (particularly in New York) to accept the simple fact that to secure the oil flow would involve more sympathetic consideration of Arab interest in finding a solution to the Palestinian problem, was a major obstacle to progress. It also introduced further friction into US relations with Europe, where governments were able to take a rather less constrained view of the international scene in the Middle East than was easy for an American administration. To secure the oil flow and to solve the Palestinian problem, while not arousing dangerous political hostility at home, was for the United States a major problem. The attitude of European states, both to their responsibility in NATO and the possibility of joint action outside the NATO area, in defence of common interests, was to play an important part in encouraging Washington to find a way out of this involved and delicate problem.
The search for a way through this maze was greatly (and unexpectedly) assisted by no less than the Prime Minister of Israel with his virtual annexation of the Golan Heights in late 1981 and his subsequent cancellation of the strategic agreement with the United States which had provoked such outspoken European criticism. These actions and the consequent sharpening of relations between the United States and Israel at last made it possible for the former to adopt a policy with regard to the Middle East which was more in line with a reasonable interpretation of the position of the Arab countries and, at the same time, more in line with the views of Western Europe. This development removed the main obstacle to tacit acceptance by Western Europe of the doctrine of taking up the slack and thus provided yet another argument for the improvement of Western European conventional forces.
There were two other important consequences. The countries of Western Europe had been the better able to harmonize their policies towards the outside world the more these differed from those of the United States. They seemed to feel that West European positions were only to be announced as such when it could be shown that in so doing Europe was flexing its independent muscles and showing to the world that it did not necessarily have to behave as a satellite of the United States. This too had largely had its origin in the sharp opposition of the respective Middle East policies, and when that particular difficulty was on the way to being overcome it became easier for Europe to think in terms of a joint effort with the US to promote the interests of the whole Western world. But once it was decided to make the effort, the means of co-ordinating the defence of these Western interests were found to be greatly lacking. They were occasionally discussed at the so-called Western summits such as that which took place in Guadeloupe in 1978, but these meetings did not include all those who felt they should be included and moreover had no continuing machinery to see that such decisions as were made were carried out effectively. The usual answer to such criticism was that consultation within the Atlantic Alliance could take place over the whole world. This was formally true to the extent that consultation sufficed. Action, however, was another matter since the area of responsibility and operations of the At
lantic Alliance was specifically limited by its treaty to Europe and the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic area, thus excluding many of the countries and regions in which the more acute threat to Western interests was now being perceived. Here, too, new machinery was required and the need for it was partly met just in time before the onset of the Third World War.
The Western summit of 1982 not only attempted to formulate the policies to be followed by the Western world generally with regard to the safeguarding of essential supplies and the use of its economic predominance as a means of influencing world events and deterring further Soviet adventurism, but also took the first tentative step to set up a framework to which action on the lines of these decisions could be reported and further consequential decisions prepared. The mere extension of NATO’s areas, which might have seemed a simpler course, was not possible because not all its members were prepared to agree to it. So the alternative solution had to be adopted of a decision by those willing to participate in action outside the area to equip themselves with the necessary means of doing so. The Western Policy Staff was the rather cryptically-named organ to which at their summit meeting heads of government entrusted these new tasks and which in the event had just two years to begin to get into its stride before its utility was conclusively demonstrated.
The final cause of trans-Atlantic disunity — the difference in style and tempo — was more difficult to resolve. Over much of the period of the Atlantic Alliance there had been talk of completing it by an ‘Atlantic Community’, but this had never really amounted to more than conference rhetoric. The concept had been invoked when the Alliance was in trouble as, for example, after the Suez operation when relations between the United States and Britain and France were particularly strained. Resolutions were passed in favour of its creation but, in practice, nothing happened except two additions to the functions of the Alliance which were important in potential but never achieved their full impact. One of these was that the Alliance should concern itself with economic policy. This, however, was being handled in so many other international bodies that the NATO contribution to it never achieved significance. The other was more fruitful. The allies agreed that they would improve the consultation which took place within the Alliance about matters of common concern and this was extended from the original NATO area to all other areas of the world, with the severe handicap already mentioned that while it was possible to talk about out-of-area dangers it was still not possible within the Alliance, as part of the operations of the Alliance, to take concerted action with regard to them.
In later years the Atlantic Community concept had been relegated more clearly to the limbo of unrealized theories because of the growth and development of the European Community, to which the majority of the European members of the Alliance were prepared to devote much more effort than to the shadowy Atlantic concept. This dichotomy was specifically recognized by the advocacy in the middle 1960s of the ‘twin pillars’ by which it was understood that the Alliance should be composed of the United States and Canada on the one hand and a united Europe on the other hand. This, too, had not been fully realized. The proposition did little more, in fact, than serve as yet another obstacle to the realization of anything which could properly be described as a community embracing both sides of the Atlantic.
The clearest reason for the difficulty of giving reality to the ‘Atlantic Community’ was, of course, the disparity in size and power between the United States and the countries of Western Europe. The United States since the Second World War was the only country on the Western side that aspired to or had thrust upon it a world role, whereas the ex-imperial countries of Western Europe, while conscious of the loss of the world position that they had once enjoyed, had not always been able to reconcile themselves to the position of middle-ranking regional powers.
There was the further difficulty that the method of American policy-making was not geared to participation in an integrated community. It was difficult for allies to introduce their views into the agonizing process of public discussion and decision-making which was the method favoured by the United States, with its rigid separation of powers, and once a decision was taken it was difficult to expect that the Americans would be prepared to go through it all again in order to accommodate views coming from outside their own borders. The Alliance continued, therefore, with hard-headed appraisal on both sides of the outstanding value to all participants of a ‘Trans-Atlantic Bargain’, which was the phrase used by one distinguished American representative at NATO as the title of an illuminating book on the relationship. The essence of the bargain was the American guarantee that it would consider an attack on Western Europe as if it were an attack on the United States and the European assurance that Western Europe would provide an equitable share of the effort needed for its common defence. The bargain was only in danger when the Europeans seemed to be reluctant to make the same assessment as the Americans of what was equitable; or when the United States through force of circumstances felt it necessary to divert its attention and its effort in varying degrees away from Europe and particularly, as in the case of Vietnam, when this diversion was generally disapproved of by the Europeans and turned out, moreover, unsuccessfully.
The abrasive style of the Republican Administration in the early years of the 1980s and the growing United States preoccupation with the Middle East, South-West Asia and Central America coincided with the increasing volume of noise coming from Europe about nuclear disarmament. It also coincided with the kind of negative auction carried out between the smaller political parties in the Netherlands and Belgium which resulted in the reduction of their conventional defence effort and, at the same time, an expressed reluctance to allow the stationing of the new TNF on their territories. It was noted too in Europe that at a time when economic sanctions were much discussed and much advocated to show displeasure in Soviet action in Afghanistan and on the military seizure of power in Poland, the United States appeared unable to use for more than a very short period the one sanction which would seem to the man in the street to have the most possibility of success, namely to stop grain exports to the Soviet Union; and this not from any doubt as to its efficacy, but because American middle-western farmers, whose votes were so important to the US Administration, were unwilling to forgo the vast sales to the Soviet Union on which their farm economy was largely dependent.
It was fortunate for the West that the war broke out when it did and not later. The United States and Europe were to some extent on divergent tracks.
Chapter 4: Nuclear Arsenals
The early 1970s had seen the achievement by the Soviet Union of strategic nuclear parity with the United States. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) produced in May 1972 an agreement which set ceilings upon numbers of strategic ballistic missile launchers and a treaty which imposed limitations on anti-ballistic missile defence systems. Together these appeared to suggest that both superpowers had accepted the principle of mutual and assured destruction (MAD). In fact, neither had. To the USSR, deterrence lay in a demonstrable ability to fight, win and survive a nuclear war. The USA relied on a continuing technological superiority to check any Soviet confidence that this was possible. On both sides the 1970s witnessed a sharp growth in the numbers of deliverable warheads, largely owing to the introduction of multiple individually-targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV), and a marked increase in the efficiency of guidance systems and thus in accuracy of delivery. The United States had doubled the numbers of its strategic warheads from around 5,000 in 1970 to over 11,000 in 1980; in the USSR the increase was from about 2,500 in 1970 to about 5,000 at the end of 1980, though this figure was due to rise to some 7,500 in the next few years. Meanwhile, accuracy in strategic weapons had improved on both sides, from circular error probable (CEP — the radius from a target within which 50 per cent of warheads directed at it would probably fall) of two and even three thousand feet down to (for missiles launched from the ground but not, as yet, from submarines) six or seven hundred.
The technological advantage, in terms of strategic weapons, of the USA over the USSR in 1980 was much less than it had been ten years before. Moreover, the total lethality of the American strategic armoury (its counter-military potential, in the jargon, or CMP), which was almost three times that of the USSR at the end of the 1970s, was overtaken and surpassed by the Soviet Union in the early eighties. The USA had some advantages in both bombers and submarines (of the thirty or so US ballistic missile submarines constantly held in readiness, up to twenty were at sea at any one time, as against no more than ten for the Soviet Union) and in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) techniques Western navies were definitely in front. In intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), however, the USSR would remain a good way ahead until the US Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) — a very accurate missile — and the MX ICBM would become operational in the second half of the eighties.
When the Soviet Union’s much more advanced arrangements for the protection of government and industry and for civil defence were taken into account, it was clear that the first half of the eighties would indeed open what the analysts tended to call, after Henry Kissinger, a ‘window of opportunity’ for the USSR. In spite of the enormous technical difficulty of launching a fully co-ordinated strategic nuclear first strike against US land-based ICBM and the certainty that even with optimum results this would leave a considerable strategic nuclear force in the United States as well as an intact US submarine force still able to reply, the opportunity open to the USSR to use its strategic nuclear lead in the first half of the 1980s to apply political pressures in international affairs was clear. If these failed to achieve decisive results there was always the possibility of open warfare in the field against NATO in Europe. In any case, the so-called ‘window of opportunity’ would not remain open for more than a few years.
