The Cold War: A MILITARY History (62 page)

The first of the medium-range missiles to enter service (and also the first US army missile) was the Corporal, which was fielded in 1953, having been rushed into service as a result of the Korean War. In essence a modified meteorological rocket, Corporal carried a 60 kT atomic weapon over a range of 138 km and a fire unit was carried on a series of wheeled trucks, with the missile being launched vertically from a base-plate. It saw service only with the US and British armies, from 1953 to 1967, and, principally because of its liquid fuel, it was extremely cumbersome and manpower-intensive, requiring fifteen vehicles and 250 men per launcher. A far more serious tactical limitation, however, was that it took seven hours from entering a location to launch the weapon.

The second medium-range weapon was Sergeant, which was much smaller and lighter than the Corporal. Its use of solid fuel enabled very considerable economies to be made, since a fire unit required just three semitrailers and a standard truck, while the missile was ready to fire in thirty minutes after arriving in a location. Sergeant carried a 60 kT warhead over a maximum range of 140 km, and entered service in 1961.

The shorter-range systems began with Honest John, a small (7.6 m long) and light (2,141 kg) free-flight rocket, which was fired from a ramp fixed either on the back of a six-wheeled truck or on a ground-mounted tripod. Honest John was widely used throughout NATO from 1954 onwards, but was replaced by Lance in the 1970s, except for Greece and Turkey, who kept it in service well into the 1980s. Highly mobile, Honest John had a range of 6–38 km.

The Lance system, which replaced both Honest John and Sergeant in most NATO armies, was smaller, lighter, more mobile, more reliable and had a much greater maximum range, of 125 km. It carried either a variable 1–100 kT fission warhead or a 1 kT ER warhead, which was procured only by the US army and was never in fact deployed. Lance was designed for use against depth targets.

At one time thought was also given to two very short-range missile systems to be controlled by a battlegroup commander. Known as the Weapon System Battlegroup Lightweight M28 and Heavyweight M29,
these
had a range of 2,000 m and 4,000 m respectively. The lightweight system was more widely known as the Davy Crocket and was a 120 mm recoilless weapon, consisting of a launch tube which sat on a tripod mounted either on the ground or on a light vehicle such as a Jeep. In both cases the crew was totally unprotected. The projectile was very small, being 64.8 cm long and 28 cm in diameter, and contained a 0.25 kT warhead, which could be fired to a maximum range of 2,000 m. It did not take long, however, for it to be realized that it was singularly ill-advised for the crew to be caught in the open just 2,000 m from a nuclear explosion (indeed, the front-line ‘friendly’ troops would have been even closer), and, to the great relief of the troops involved, the system left service in 1971. The British army had shown initial interest in this system, but wisely decided not to purchase it.

Soviet Missiles

Like those of the USA, the Soviet Union’s first post-war missile was a development of the German A-4; this led to the SS-1A (NATO = ‘Scunner’) with a range of 300 km and a 750 kg high-explosive warhead. The first nuclear battlefield missile to enter service (in 1957) was the Scud-A, which was mounted on a converted JS-3 heavy-tank chassis and carried a 50 kT warhead over a range of some 150 km. This was later supplemented by the Scud-B system, which carried a 70 kT warhead over a range of 300 km. Although Scuds were supplied to many other countries, nuclear warheads were only ever issued to the Soviet army and the system served throughout the Cold War, as plans to replace it with the SS-23 were cancelled as part of the INF Treaty.

The SS-12 (‘Scaleboard’) was a road-mobile, solid-fuelled ballistic missile, which was first fielded in 1962, followed by a modified version, the SS-12B (initially designated SS-22), in 1979. The missile had a maximum range of 900 km and a CEP of 30 m, carrying either a high-explosive or a 500 kT nuclear warhead, and system reaction time was estimated at sixty minutes. The SS-12B was withdrawn under the terms of the INF Treaty, and all missiles were destroyed.

One of the significant features of both the SS-1 and the SS-12 was that later versions were transported by 8 × 8-wheel TELs. These were highly mobile for off-road driving, were air-conditioned, accommodated the full crew and all necessary equipment, and even had an automatic tyre-pressure-regulation system. All these features enabled the missile detachment to move into a new location, set up the missile quickly, launch, and then move to a resupply point – the so-called ‘shoot-and-scoot’ tactic.

All Warsaw Pact exercises made use of battlefield nuclear weapons in support of attacks. A typical scenario, as shown in Map 3 (
see here
), used some 233 weapons in the first strike, followed by 294 in the second strike. As used in these exercises, the intended purpose was to eliminate NATO
forward
troops – Area B, for example, coincided with the North German Plain. Following such a strike, the Warsaw Pact tank and motor-rifle units would have been able to advance rapidly into NATO rear areas.

Other NATO Countries

The UK made one attempt at a battlefield missile system in the late 1950s. Known as Blue Water, it was intended to replace the American Corporal, but, despite working very satisfactorily, it was cancelled in 1962.

The other west-European project, the French Pluton, was much more successful. The French operated a number of Honest John battalions in the early 1960s, but when France left the NATO integrated command structure in 1966 the units were deactivated and the missiles were returned to the USA.

There was then a gap until the French developed the Pluton system, which first flew in 1969 and entered service in 1974. The entire system – including nuclear warhead, missile, launcher, chassis and electronics – was of French design. The missile was mounted in a large, open-fronted box atop an AMX-30 tank chassis and required a crew of four. The missile could carry either a 10 kT warhead for use against targets in the forward areas or a 25 kT warhead for use against rear-area installations such as tank, vehicle or troop concentrations; headquarters; railways; or bridges. As with all missiles, CEP varied with range, and was 400 m at the maximum range of 120 km. Unlike many other systems, Pluton was purely nuclear and had no high-explosive or chemical capabilities.

Pluton was deployed only on French territory in peacetime, in five missile regiments, each with seven operational launchers. A total of seventy missiles was deployed, giving one on each launcher, plus one reload. A second-generation French system, Hades, was developed in the 1980s. Some thirty missiles were actually produced, but were then put into storage and were never fielded.

TARGET ACQUISITION

One problem affected the battlefield nuclear weapons of both sides: that of accurate and timely target acquisition.
^fn3
Static targets – a railway station, say, or a bridge, an airfield or a major crossroads – could be selected off a map. Targets of military opportunity, however – such as a concentration of tanks, a headquarters or a logistics unit – were much more difficult, especially as both sides tended to make the great majority of such units move at frequent
intervals
. The problem was fourfold: first, to have a means of acquiring a target; second, to transmit the target-acquisition information to an intelligence-gathering centre; third, a command system had to allocate destruction of the target as a nuclear task; and, finally, a control system had to find a weapon within range and task it.

The most difficult of these was the acquisition process, which became progressively more difficult with distance from the front line. Increasing resources were allocated to this as the Cold War progressed, including ground radar, aircraft reconnaissance, drones, stay-behind parties, remote sensors and the airborne warning and control system (AWACS), to name but a few.

SAFETY

A large number of battlefield nuclear weapons were deployed from the 1950s onwards, being fielded by the Soviet army on one side and by the majority of NATO armies on the other. On both sides the actual warheads were under very strict control. On the Soviet side nuclear warheads were the responsibility of special KGB detachments, who held the warheads and issued them only on orders received down an entirely separate chain of command.

The US system involved devices known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), which required a coded password to be inserted, either mechanically or electronically, in order to unlock the arming circuits. Such devices became increasingly sophisticated over the years – for example, the numerical combination increased from four to twelve digits, with the later codes being used not only for release but also to specify such factors as the permitted yield in a variable-yield warhead. Such PALs were operated by US army custodial detachments, which served with every US and NATO unit possessing such weapons.
¹

THE BATTLEFIELD-NUCLEAR-WEAPONS ISSUES

The US attitude to battlefield nuclear weapons went through several variations. During the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated that ‘The present policies will gradually involve the use of atomic weapons as conventional weapons for tactical purposes’,
²
and the field army was restructured into what was known as the ‘Pentomic’ organization. Under President Kennedy, however, the emphasis changed to ‘flexible response’, with the major emphasis on conventional forces, and it remained that way for the remainder of the Cold War.

In its Fiscal Year 1975 report to Congress, the US Department of Defense stated that:

as a practical matter, the initiation of a nuclear engagement would involve many uncertainties. Acceptable boundaries on such a conflict would be extremely difficult to establish. A nuclear engagement in the theater could well produce much higher military and civilian casualties and more widespread collateral damage than its non-nuclear counterpart … What is more, it is not clear under what conditions the United States and its allies would possess a comparative military advantage in a tactical nuclear exchange … We must recognize in our planning that the decision to initiate the use of nuclear weapons – however small, clean, and precisely used they might be – would be the most agonizing that could face any national leader.
³

However, such doubts appear to have disappeared by the time the 1982 report was written, for this stated that:

Our theater nuclear programs are designed to provide a wide range of options to respond appropriately to any level of potential attack. A credible TNF [theatre nuclear forces] capability will strengthen and enhance the links between conventional and strategic forces and is designed to convey to a potential aggressor the capability of the United States and its allies to respond across the full spectrum of potential conflict …
⁴

The 1983 the US Joint Chiefs-of-Staff made a significant addition to the possible uses of theatre nuclear forces when they stated that:

TNF are designed for use in conjunction with conventional forces to deter conventional, theater nuclear, and chemical attack … TNF may be used in the event of enemy first use of nuclear weapons, or in the event of significant failure of the conventional defense. They could also have utility in retaliation against the enemy’s initiation of widespread chemical warfare if US chemical retaliation is ineffective or not available …
⁵

Two British examples are relevant. Sir Solly Zuckerman, the government’s chief scientific adviser, wrote that:

these … conclusions are borne out by the results of war-games played by experienced commanders under proper conditions. The average pay-off for the defenders has turned out to be about one minor unit [about 250 men] per strike, and for the offensive somewhere between one and two strikes [are needed to obtain the same results] against the better entrenched defenders. A fairly consistent picture is that of between 200 and 250 nuclear strikes of average yield about 20 kT exploded in the space of a few days in an area 50 miles by 50 miles.
⁶

If this was extrapolated to cover the entire Central Front, and deep interdiction strikes were added, the number of weapons, their total yield and their effect became almost incalculable, as another British study showed. This is examined in more detail in
Chapter 35
, but suffice it here to say that this postulated
the
use by
each
side of 500 tactical nuclear weapons in the northern part of the Central Front and 250 in the south, with an average yield of 30 kT each, plus a further 250 interdiction strikes (i.e. against bridges, railway yards, and so on) averaging 300 kT each.

The effects of the use of weapons in such numbers would have been catastrophic. Within the zone where such weapons had been used, towns and villages would have been devastated, all but the strongest buildings would have been destroyed, roads and bridges would have become impassable, forests would have been razed, enormous fires would have been raging, and civilian casualties would have been vast. In addition to all this, since NATO was defending, many of the attacking Warsaw Pact forces it was targeting would have been on NATO – particularly West German – territory, while the depth attacks would have stretched well into East Germany.

On the NATO side, nuclear artillery units were allocated to army group, corps and even divisional level, but ‘nuclear release’ (i.e. the authority to start using them) was retained at the very highest level. All the weapons were US-owned and controlled by a PAL, and it would have been impossible for NATO to use them without the authority of the president of the USA, while it seems improbable that he would have given such authorization without consulting NATO. At the very least, the president would have had to consult the West German chancellor, since not only would the great majority of the weapons have been launched from West German territory but they would in many cases have landed on targets on either West or East German soil. Further, West Germany would have been a very likely target for many of the retaliatory Soviet strikes.