The development of an unstable nuclear confrontation had the salutary effect of turning Europeans back towards conventional warfare. The military in the Soviet bloc always emphasized the importance of maintaining large armed forces along their wide European frontier, primed for offensive operations. Soviet military thinking remained, despite the advent of nuclear weapons, dominated by the harsh lessons of the Second World War: the primacy of the land offensive; concentration of armoured and air forces; a deep battlefield and extensive reserves. It was knowledge of the great disparity of conventional forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that encouraged a reassessment of strategy in the 1960s. But there were many other causes. European leaders came to doubt that the nuclear threat was very credible. It was inconceivable that either side would use the weapons and risk the obliteration of their entire social fabric. Rather than put the system to the test, European statesmen argued that the risk of nuclear escalation should be reduced by building up Europe’s conventional forces in order to provide an alternative means of defence. The prospect could never be ruled out that the United States might abandon Europe, or use Europe as the nuclear battlefield. Either way, conventional defence promised a safer and more believable deterrent. There were also political pressures. The traditional armed forces faced virtual extinction with the use of rocket-borne nuclear weapons. The renewed emphasis on conventional warfare ensured their survival and re-equipment. Public opinion was far from unanimous on any of these issues, but there existed throughout western Europe a vocal, well-organized lobby hostile to all nuclear weapons, but less resistant to the old-fashioned bomb and shell.
When NATO altered its strategy in December 1967 to one of ‘flexible response’ on a spectrum from conventional defence to all-out nuclear attack, the framework was set for the expansion of the conventional alternative. The model remained the Second World War. The emphasis on flexible air power, on large tanks and motorized infantry, on radar and scientific surveillance, all in use by 1945, was retained and elaborated. The technology was refined to achieve a much higher level of precision and increased destructive power—indeed modern artillery and fighter-bombers could wield nuclear warheads — but it was substantially the same. The idea of the mobile punch, delivered by armoured divisions, backed up by aircraft, self-propelled artillery, and mobile troop carriers was adopted across Europe; the traditional infantry, even the remnants of cavalry still in use in 1945, disappeared for good. At sea the aircraft carrier and the submarine kept alive Europe’s exiguous naval power. In the air, fast fighters and fighter-bombers, for tactical warfare on or just behind the battle line, were developed rather than large bombers, whose place was gradually taken by rockets.
The central purpose of NATO’s conventional forces was to block any Soviet advance on what was known as the Central Front, the long Iron Curtain frontier from the Baltic to the Austrian frontier. This was not a natural defensive barrier. On the Warsaw Pact side there stood in the 1980s over 50 divisions, 16,000 tanks, 26,000 fighting vehicles, and 4,000 combat aircraft. During the 1970s and 1980s NATO deployed a large multinational force, smaller in numbers, but allegedly superior in quality of equipment and in training. There were only half the number of divisions, tanks, and aircraft, and less than half the number of artillery pieces. Worse still, NATO forces had no very clear idea of how to defend the front if they were faced with a surprise assault. To make the conventional deterrent work, NATO forces were compelled again to look to nuclear weapons. A new generation of short-range battlefield nuclear weapons — the cruise missile, the neutron bomb, the nuclear artillery shell— were adopted to strengthen the other theatre forces. To satisfy German fears that Warsaw Pact armies would use western Germany as the ground of combat, and repeat the devastation of 1944-5, the NATO forces were deployed in a posture of ‘forward defence’, which left a thin, heavily defended front line with few reserves, and the very great risk that within hours all the NATO nuclear weapons stationed there might be captured by a quick Soviet incursion.
Conventional or nuclear, war was no longer regarded as a test of national mobilization. Soviet planners worked on the contingency of a quick strike; their enemies feared that Soviet bloc forces could reach the Atlantic in a week. A nuclear exchange might be over in a day. But it was not just the increased mobility and destructiveness of modern weaponry that made short wars likely. Modern weapons were far too expensive and technically complex to reproduce quickly. Most European states could not afford a high level of mobilization or military readiness. A modern fighter in the 1980s cost forty times the small monoplanes of 1940. For the cost of a heavy bomber, General Eisenhower remarked in 1953, a state could build thirty schools or two fully equipped hospitals. Under these circumstances it was impossible to plan the rapid conversion of the civilian economy to mass produce sophisticated armaments. Instead, the emphasis shifted to the quality of weapons rather than their quantity. It was the same story with manpower. Large conscript armies were no longer necessary if they could not be supplied with weapons. The evolution of highly trained professional armed forces, with a high level of technical and managerial skill, begun in the inter-war years, was completed in the age of missiles. Soldiers were no longer cannon-fodder, but highly specialized military workers, not easily substituted by hastily trained civilians. The prospect of a short war with the weapons and trained men to hand turned the wheel full circle, back to the situation before 1914, when war was the job of warriors, not of the civil population.
In the late 1980s the Cold War confrontation in Europe ended with the collapse of communist power throughout the Soviet bloc. For almost fifty years peace had been maintained between the major states of the continent. The obvious conclusion was that deterrence worked; fear of the unimaginable consequences of a nuclear confrontation imposed a mutual rationality. War was kept to the periphery. Britain and France fought small wars in their overseas empires in the 1950s; the Soviet Union became involved in war in Afghanistan in the late 1970s. Beyond that, violence was confined to civil conflicts. Most Europeans in the 1990s had had no experience of war beyond the television screen. Deterrence may explain this outcome. But there are other causes. After the terrible destruction and inhumanity of the war of 1939-45 no European government, east or west, relished the prospect of another. Mutual self-restraint sustained the long peace, as it had done under the Metternich System after 1815. The Second World War, not the First, was the war to end all wars, for the moment.
World History
