The Cold War: A MILITARY History (67 page)

DEFENCE COSTS

The true costs of defence equipment were virtually impossible to calculate. First, the budgeting systems were complex and the costs of various elements of a programme were spread over so many individual budgets that it was difficult (as legislators in many countries discovered) to track them all down. Second, the declared cost of getting a weapons system into service was seldom the real cost of the project, since early production models frequently either fell well short of performance criteria or only just met them, as a result of which much effort had to be devoted to resolving the problems. Third, belated admissions showed that even in the most democratic of countries, such as the USA and the UK, large hidden programmes had been undertaken without any authority from the legislature.

The original British A-bomb programme and the early part of the Chevaline warhead development were hidden from Parliament for many years, and numerous ‘black’ air-force programmes, such as the F-117 ‘stealth’ fighter, were concealed from Congress in the United States. In addition, governments used differing methods and conventions for arriving at defence costs, thus making it virtually impossible to compare like with like. Some governments also had defence commitments outside the European area, the costs of which were difficult to extract from Cold War costs.

On the Soviet side, it is doubtful that even the Soviet government had any real idea of just how much its defence programmes cost, and estimates made in the West were essentially best guesses. What was certain, however, as judged by the eventual collapse of the USSR, was that the cost proved to be unaffordable.

37

The Cold War in Retrospect

THE GREATEST SINGLE
spectre haunting the political and military leaders throughout the Cold War was that of nuclear war, and it was a threat that influenced every decision of any significance. Equally, it was a threat which only a very few really understood, and it was a subject about which a great deal of nonsense was spoken.

Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact regularly rehearsed the use of tactical nuclear weapons in their exercises, treating them as some superior form of artillery. The fact was, however, that had even one nuclear weapon been used it would have created a totally new situation. And, since there was no known method of making a clandestine nuclear explosion, it must be supposed that when the first weapon was used there would have been no doubt as to what had happened. This was foreseen by the Cold War strategist Herman Kahn, who, in the early days of potential nuclear warfare, described the situation thus:

once war has started, no other line of demarcation is at once so clear, so sanctified by convention, so ratified by emotion, so low on the scale of violence, and – perhaps, most important of all – so easily defined and understood as the line between using and not using nuclear weapons … Even though the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear war may have defects from some technical point-of-view, it possesses a functional meaning or utility that transcends any purely technical question.
¹

That was written in the 1950s, but it remained true throughout the Cold War, and therein lay the danger of tactical nuclear weapons.

TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Discussions on removing intermediate-range nuclear forces took some years, but, when these weapons were eventually discarded under the INF Treaty, they all went.

These discussions did not cover the shorter-range battlefield nuclear weapons, but once the Cold War had ended these were then disposed of by mutual agreement and without either side bothering with the formalities of a treaty. Thus President George Bush announced on 27 September 1991 that all US Lance and nuclear artillery shells would be eliminated, including those nuclear warheads supplied to allies. On 5 October 1991 this was quickly followed by an announcement by President Gorbachev, who said that all Soviet nuclear artillery projectiles, nuclear landmines and nuclear warheads for non-strategic missiles (Frog, Scud and SS-21) would also be destroyed. The process was endorsed by NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, which declared on 18 October 1991 that ‘We will therefore continue to base effective and up-to-date sub-strategic nuclear forces in Europe, but they will consist solely of dual-capable aircraft.’
²
That left only the French, but in 1992 President Mitterrand announced, first, that the readiness of all his country’s nuclear forces was being reduced and, subsequently, that he had decided to disband the Pluton regiments totally; the last went in 1993.

Tactical nuclear weapons created two major areas of difficulty. First, had even one been used the ‘nuclear threshold’ would have been crossed. Second, it would have been extremely difficult to differentiate between strategic and tactical weapons. The US Pershing II, for example, had a range of 1,800 km – sufficient for it to reach targets well inside the Soviet Union’s western border – while the Soviet SS-12, with a range of 900 km, could have reached targets in south-east England or eastern France from launch sites east of the Elbe. France, the USSR and the UK would all have regarded such strikes as ‘strategic’. There was therefore a very real danger – possibly even an inevitability – that, while the side launching nuclear weapons might have classified them as being ‘tactical’, they would have led seamlessly into global nuclear war.

NUCLEAR WARFIGHTING

There was a school of thought, particularly in the United States, which considered that ‘nuclear warfighting’ (i.e. a protracted conflict using nuclear weapons) would be possible. It is, however, highly questionable whether the military forces could have continued to fight under nuclear conditions for long. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that fighting would simply have become impossible, and that at least some elements of the surviving military forces of both sides would have ceased to function as rational military organizations.

One of the features of battlefield nuclear weapons was that their use formed part of every major NATO field exercise in the 1970s and 1980s. The
customary
pattern was that the exercise would steadily build up to a climax, which duly arrived with ‘nuclear release’ and the launching of the battlefield nuclear weapons. Staff officers and troops always welcomed this, since experience showed that this was the certain signal that the exercise would end within the next two to three hours. Thus, not only did the situation of being under prolonged nuclear attack not form part of the exercises, but it appeared that the exercise planners found it simply unimaginable.

THE PLANS

There is little value in seeking to assess whether any of the strategic or tactical plans made by either side would have been successful. One of the major lessons to be derived from a study of military history is that, while a very few battles have proceeded according to the generals’ or admirals’ plan, most battles and virtually all wars have not.

The major problem in trying to predict the possible progress of battles or campaigns is that the outcome of each constituent event must be decided before progressing to consider the next event. But to arrive at such decisions involves a series of judgements about how various participants might have reacted. For example, one of the events considered by the book
The Third World War
³
was a Soviet attack, using one SS-17 ICBM, on the British city of Birmingham, which was totally devastated. In the book, the response by the UK and the USA (with French agreement) was for four SSBN-launched weapons, two from each country, to be delivered on the Soviet city of Minsk. While such a scenario is not totally impossible, it seems unlikely. This is not to say that the authors were wrong to consider a ‘demonstrative’ first strike by the USSR, followed by a ‘response-in-kind’ by the UK and the USA; it means only that the authors had to presuppose a sequence of actions and reactions in the USSR and subsequently in France, the UK and the USA which in real life either might not have happened at all or might have happened in a different way.
^fn1

Thus, it is simply impossible to estimate whether the Soviet attack plans described in
this
book would have succeeded, or whether NATO’s conventional defences, described in previous chapters, would have held out, either in whole or in part. It is similarly impossible to predict whether either side would have authorized nuclear release and, if so, when and under what circumstances. During the public debate on enhanced-radiation weapons, for example, President Jimmy Carter stated that:

The decision to use nuclear weapons of any kind, including enhanced radiation weapons, would remain in my hands, not in the hands of local theater commanders. A decision to cross the nuclear threshold would be the most agonizing decision to be made by any President. I can assure you that these weapons, that is to say, low-yield, enhanced radiation weapons, would not make that decision any easier.
⁴

It would be easy to suggest that, judging by their performance over other issues, President Ronald Reagan might have been more prepared to issue the orders to go to war or to launch ICBMs than President Jimmy Carter, and that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would have been more willing to launch the British SLBMs than Prime Minister Harold Wilson. But it is impossible to assess how any of those four might have behaved if they had been forced to come face to face with the awful reality.

It is also debatable whether the Soviets would have used nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that the Soviet forces regarded ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as an integral part of their operational doctrine, and that their plans assumed their use at a very early stage. That is not to say, however, that they would actually have used them; indeed, since they would presumably have attacked western Europe in order to capture it intact rather than to overrun a nuclear wasteland, it could be argued that they had every incentive not to use them. Thus, if their prospect of success in a conventional battle looked good, they might well have publicly eschewed their use, thus forcing NATO either to follow suit or to order ‘first use’.

There is equally no doubt that, at least in public, NATO regarded battlefield nuclear weapons either as a reasonable response to Soviet first use or as a last resort in the face of imminent conventional defeat. In addition, the West had plans to use a very small number of nuclear weapons in a demonstrative capacity.
^fn2
French plans also included a
pre-stratégique
strike, which was in effect a ‘demonstrative’ strike. As always, however, the fact that such contingency plans had been prepared did not mean that they would be implemented.

Two factors which would have been of overwhelming importance were time and communications. Leaders would have been under the most intense pressure to make decisions upon which depended the fate of their country and – this is not an overdramatization – that of the world. Not only would such decisions have had to be made, but they would have had to be made very quickly. If either the United States or the USSR had detected a massive incoming strategic strike, then, given the time taken for the news to reach the national command authorities and for any subsequent decision for a counter-attack to be transmitted (and verified) in time to be of any use,
perhaps
ten minutes at most was all that would have been available to make a decision.

Human history contains many examples of new weapons – such as longbows, gunpowder, artillery, machine-guns, chemical gas, airplanes and missiles – which have struck terror into an enemy, but they have never prevented subsequent conflict. Until, that is, the nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons were capable of inflicting more casualties and more damage in minutes than had been achieved in all the six years of the Second World War. Great cities such as Detroit, Birmingham, Paris and Leningrad could have been laid waste by just one 1 MT weapon each; sprawling megalopolises such as Greater London or the German Ruhr might have required up to six. As the tables in earlier chapters have shown, however, the two superpowers possessed sufficient warheads to devastate not only each other but many other countries as well.

Both sides in the Cold War seem to have realized that a conflict between them would almost certainly have escalated from conventional to nuclear, whether the original aggressor had intended it or not. In consequence, they kept their heads, and for forty years they kept the arms race within reason – just.

The outcome of the Cold War certainly appears to have been more propitious for NATO than for the Warsaw Pact, at least in the short term, but the fact that there is a long term to look forward to is a tribute to men of goodwill, sound judgement and common sense on
both
sides. There certainly were moments in the Cold War when some on one side or the other might have considered an attack to have been a worthwhile gamble, but, when that happened, colleagues with good sense held them back.

Even if a war in central Europe had been fought with conventional weapons, the conflict would have been extremely bloody for both sides, with a degree of devastation far exceeding any previously seen. It is highly probable that it did not happen because of the existence of nuclear weapons, the uncertainty over whether or not they would be used, and the certainty that, if they were used, the result would in all likelihood have been cataclysmic. Thus, despite its critics, the nuclear weapon did have a utility, after all.

The final word, as usual, belongs to Sun Tzu, who said that:

… to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
⁵

fn1
I would like to make it clear that this is not meant to be a criticism of a valuable and carefully written book. My only wish is to draw attention to the problems associated with depicting scenarios and the danger inherent in making assumptions.

fn2
The Berlin contingency plans certainly included ‘demonstrative’ use of nuclear weapons –
see Chapter 32
.