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14. Concluding Remarks: Warfare in the Central Sector
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239 14 Concluding Remarks Warfare in the Central Sector Gregory W. Pedlow More than two decades have passed since the end of the Cold War, and for younger readers the subject of this publication must seem like ancient history , and a history that fortunately never happened. But I know that for me and anyone else over the age of fifty, the Cold War was deadly serious and had a major impact on our lives, even if we were not professional soldiers. I don’t know what it was like in Europe during the 1950s, but I certainly recall taking part in atomic bomb attack drills during elementary school in the United States, as we hid under our desks and covered our heads. As a high school student in the early 1960s, I prepared plans for converting our basement into an emergency fallout shelter and hoped that when—not if—the Soviet nuclear attack came, it would be when I was at home with my parents, not at school. During high school and later at university I was an active war gamer, playing historical simulations of the great battles of history. But we also looked at battles yet to come—between NATO and the Warsaw Pact—in some very detailed war games published in the 1960s and 1970s. To us this seemed like “future history”—something that would eventually happen but had just not yet arrived. Our preparations for a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact were not limited to sitting around a table and playing war games while drinking beer and eating pretzels. During the 1960s compulsory military service was a reality for almost all of us in Europe and the United States, and I suspect that many if not most of us over the age of fifty spent some time in uni- 240 Gregory W. Pedlow form. I know that in my case I was beginning my third year of the United States Reserve Officers Training Corps program in 1968, and two years later I was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Training as an infantry officer and then as a military intelligence officer followed, and in those days I was very well acquainted with Soviet military tactics and equipment. Although I served only two years on active duty, I spent another twenty-six years as a reserve officer and participated in a number of major exercises in Europe during the late 1970s and early 1980s, preparing for the big war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that never came, thank heavens! So for me, and I suspect for many readers, this subject is not just dry academic speculation about something that never happened but a discussion about a period that had a major impact on our lives. Let’s look now at what we have learned from these contributions about the planning and preparations for this war that never happened. First of all I am struck by the centrality of the debate over the use of nuclear weapons for both sides in the Cold War. Lawrence Kaplan has described NATO’s growing reliance on nuclear weapons in the 1950s to make up for the alliance’s failure to achieve anything near to the very ambitious force goal of fifty divisions set at the Lisbon Conference of 1952. Later in the 1950s there was a growing demand on the part of the Europeans to acquire their own nuclear weapons, a goal that Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), General Lauris Norstad attempted to head off with his proposal to make NATO a nuclear power. The United States soon watered down this proposal by converting it into the Multilateral Force (MLF)—a naval force with Polaris missiles, but with control of the nuclear warheads remaining in U.S. hands—and this halfway measure never came into effect as NATO grew increasingly disenchanted with the doctrine of Massive Retaliation and replaced it with Flexible Response in 1967. What strikes me here is the growing move away from a massive early use of nuclear weapons in the United States during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations , a trend that had begun even earlier in NATO under SACEUR Norstad, while at the same time the Warsaw Pact was changing its doctrine in favor of a massive initial nuclear strike, as Matthias Uhl has shown. I must admit that my hair stood on end when I read of Warsaw Pact exercises that envisioned the use of 2,200 nuclear weapons in a war against NATO! I...