It was the only realistic way of dealing with an all-out attack by the Warsaw Pact, given the levels of conventional forces available to NATO.
I’ve always been puzzled by the fervent desire of many people to make the world “safe for conventional war”.
The way I’ve seen it phrased was that the NATO countries had a choice between:
No idea if that is accurate or not, but it represents one point of view
It was more a case of manpower than materiel; without conscription, Europe and the US simply couldn’t put as many men in the field as the USSR. They could have built more tanks* quite easily; there just wouldn’t have been enough people to operate them.
*or, at least, a more effective army
Thanks. I always thought Communism was a bit of a red herring.
Well, and the fundie Christians; many of them specifically want a nuclear holocaust. Jerry Falwell spent some time trying to convince Ronald Reagan to start a nuclear war, because he and his thought that when the Russians fired back they’d be Raptured into Heaven and the bombs would only kill sinners. I’d consider the fundie Christians a greater danger than the Islamists, since the Christians seem more concerned with destroying the world than changing it, and a greater chance of getting hold of enough nukes to pull it off.
It tends to be based on the idea that conventional war isn’t as likely to destroy civilization. The same argument is used to say that the present nuclear situation is better, because while, say, India and Pakistan nuking each other would be horrible, it wouldn’t lay waste to a hemisphere of the planet.
Can you support this with objective evidence? Relative levels of conventional forces were always reasonably evenly matched in the short term, and in the long term (if a conventional war didn’t go nuclear) NATO had a very large advantage in industrial might and population. I’m puzzled as to why anyone thinks the Warsaw Pact had some sort of advantage in population; that is just flatly untrue. There was never any point between 1945 and 1989 when the Communist bloc had a population advantage over the West.
NATO put nuclear weapons at the forefront of its military strategy for a long time because, for a long time, they had a really big advantage in them. Once the odds evened out and the reality of virtually inevitable MAD became apparent, that’s when you had arms reduction talks.
Remember too that this was in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Many US leaders were opposed to the idea of rebuilding large conventional forces in western Europe, for fear of reconstructing the same old enmities. Hence the semi-facetious description of the purpose of NATO being to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.”
Well, the Soviets always claimed this was the case, while western analysts generally believed that the USSR had a large advantage in the number of tanks, artillery pieces, and aircraft. The USSR eventually agreed to asymmetrical cuts in conventional forces, which many in the west took to be an acknowledgment of a previous advantage.
No, but as I pointed out to a friend who is thinking about signing up for a third tour in Afghanistan, I don’t think I’d want to be within 5,000 miles of nuclear warheads attached to totally untested delivery systems if there’s any chance they’ll start going off. Not that I think they will - people are making much more out of this India/Pakistan thing than they ought - but still.
Levels of conventional forces were reasonably matched if you simplify things to “all NATO forces v. all Warsaw Pact forces”, but 95% of the US (and Canadian) Army and Air Force were not in Europe and wouldn’t have gotten there in any kind of time to make a difference. Most of the nations Western Europe besides Britain and France maintained militaries which were more like honor guards than anything else, even then.
You’re quite right that the West had a big population advantage, but the West also had all-volunteer militaries, other than France. The Soviet Union simply had a greater percentage of its population under arms.
I hadn’t considered that, thanks.
Less likely, sure, but a large enough conventional war could do a pretty good job of destroying civilization.
Again, I’d have to see the objective evidence this is true. Much of the SOVIET military wasn’t in Europe, either; it’s not like the border with China and Mongolia was guarded by Cub Scouts.
Excuse me, but you cannot be serious. I am certain you know the United States had a draft until 1973, so in fact they did not have an “all-volunteer” army for much of the period we’re discussing, and many NATO countriues had compulsory military service. The Netherlands had compulsory service until 1991, Belgium until 1994, Italy until just four years ago, Portugal until 2004, Spain until 2001, and Norway still does, Greece still does, Turkey still does, as does Germany (and did West Germany.) Indeed, MOST NATO countries employed conscription during the Cold War, and many do now.
And the claim that “most of the NATO countries besides England and France” were maintiaining only nominal armed forces is absolutely ludicrous. It’s a complete falsehood. If you didn’t know most employed conscription you might not know that either, I guess, but aside from Iceland, all NATO countries maintained armed forces of substantial capability with good equipment and some were pretty big. The West German armed forces was quite substantial. None were as big as the USA, but then, who is?
Can you say at what point that switch happened? E.g., during the cuban missile crisis, were US hawks thinking, “we’d love to go to nuclear war with the USSR because we’d easily win”?
Mostly I get hits for “Doctor Strangelove” and “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”.
Not that I don’t consider a war between talking apes and psychic mutants worshiping a cobolt bomb serious business.
Some may have, but at that point it was apparent a strategic nuclear war would involve somewhere between way too many deaths and everyone dead. NATO acceptance of MAD doctrine happened, generally speaking, in the 60s and early 70s.
I’m simplifying enormously for brevity, and there’s factors I haven’t gone into, such as the difficult position the UK and France having nukes put the US into. Dyer’s “War” has a very well written explanation of the history of Western nuclear strategy, and I recommend it highly.
Really? What difficulties were those? I was under the impression that France and UK having their own arsenals was helpful overall; that it meant the Soviet Union couldn’t overrun or nuke France or the UK, then bluff down the US against escalating, without retaliation.
The existence of British and French nuclear arsenals meant that the UK and France could essentially force the United States into nuclear war. The possibility that the US would concede a Soviet conventional victory was one that frightened European leaders considerably; after all, if the initial Soviet breakthrough were successful and the war lost quickly, the USA might rationally decide to negotiate a peace and avoid nuclear holocaust.
But if the UK and France could start a nuclear exchange, the USSR would be forced to retaliate with all its nuclear might, or else face the prospect of destruction of much of its nuclear strength and being hopelessly outgunned by the USA. The only appropriate Soviet response would be to attack all Western nuclear forces. So once the UK and France launched, the USA would have to as well.
As Gwynne Dyer puts it:
(Parenthetical mine.)
code_grey, I think you have a firm grasp on the subject. Thanks for the reply.
Observing the effects of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, it occurs to me that you don’t really need to exterminate the entire world. It wouldn’t take more than the nuking of a few major cities to screw things up royally for a lot of people. And the US and USSR had more than a few nukes.
I disagree. A highly centralized command economy is fine until the central command or lines of communication to the rest of the economy are destroyed - as is likely to happen in a nuclear war.
As I alluded to above, an even bigger problem than the people killed is the sudden lack of infrastructure or services or the mechanisms to coordinate them. I have trouble believing that the Soviets in their wildest dreams believed that they would be able to evacuate millions of citizens from the target areas in a coordinated manner and then establish any sort of organized society for them in the aftermath any more robust than refugee camps made from tents and shipping containers. It sounds akin to our using school desks to protect children from fallout and shockwaves.
Sure cities can be rebuilt and countries repopulated. But I have to think the Soviets knew as well as we did that while the world wouldn’t be destroyed, our countries would be too damaged and weakened to spread anything anywhere.