As a central front in the Cold War, Europe became a focal point for superpower nuclear rivalries. Both Washington and Moscow deployed thousands ofnuclear weapons in Europe and their allies played integral roles in operating systems to deliver them. Both superpowers kept tight control over the weapons themselves, but Moscow’s nuclear policies toward European allies were top-down, while US policy involved the construction of a shaky NATO consensus on nuclear planning. Both superpowers came to support "flexible response" strategies to avoid use of nuclear weapons, although by the early 1970s the Soviets eventually supported "no first use," which Washington consistently rejected.
US nuclear weapons policies in NATO Europe reflected military, security, and political priorities. Unease about the size of Soviet conventional forces served as an enduring justification for fielding US nuclear weapons in Europe, even though tactical nuclear deployments was one area where the United States retained an edge over the Soviets. Although US nuclear deployments were often controversial in Western Europe, US leaders assumed that their presence was necessary to reinforce security guarantees and maintain the confidence of allies. According to McNamara, a strong US military posture was important not only for maintaining NATO cohesion, but also to check "Soviet political pressure and blackmail" and avert changes in West German policy - either a militaristic revival or the negotiation of special security arrangements with Moscow - that could disrupt the Western security system.132
The Pentagon fielded growing numbers of theater and tactical nuclear weapons during the 1960s to support security guarantees and reinforce deterrence. In 1960, the United States had deployed only a few hundred weapons in NATO Europe; by 1967, it had stockpiled over 7,000. They were designed for a variety of missions, including anti-submarine, air defense, battlefield use, and strikes on Soviet bases and command posts. In part, the deployments flowed from the decisions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to continue Eisenhower’s NATO nuclear stockpile program by negotiating nuclear-sharing agreements with European allies. To prevent unauthorized use of the weapons, Kennedy’s advisers tightened up control of the weapons by installing Permissive Action Locks (PALs) on weapons deployed in Europe.133
The danger of nuclear weapons use in a Central European confrontation shaped Washington’s search for non-nuclear options that raised the threshold for nuclear weapons use. NATO’s General Strike Plan (later known as the Nuclear Options Plan) included a wide array of "package" nuclear options for clashes with Warsaw Pact forces as well as for strikes against fixed targets. Nevertheless, during the 1960s and 1970s, senior Pentagon officials found it difficult to visualize plausible scenarios for using tactical weapons that did not involve risks of escalation and nuclear conflagration. Those dangers made the Kennedy and Johnson administrations want to strengthen the credibility of nuclear threats with a NATO capability for "flexible," nonnuclear, responses to less than all-out Soviet conventional attacks. While US defense officials rejected a “no-first-use” nuclear policy, they hoped that "flexible response” would make it possible to avoid early, or even any, use of nuclear weapons in a European conflict. This was a difficult objective, complicated by balance-of-payments pressures, French withdrawal from NATO forces, and opposition from European partners, who refused to expand conventional forces.134
A growing belief that the threat of general war had receded and US-European agreement that NATO needed conventional capabilities to deal with limited nonnuclear attacks created conditions for the formal revision of NATO strategy along “flexible response” lines. In October 1967, NATO approved MC-14/7, which emphasized the need for both conventional and nuclear options so that NATO could react “appropriately” to any level of attack. Thus, MC-14/7 straddled US support for nonnuclear approaches and British and German beliefs that deterrence required a commitment to early nuclear use. It did not, however, resolve a question that would be an enduring dilemma for military planners: just how long could alliance forces hold against Soviet attack before resorting to nuclear weapons.
The growing stockpile of US nuclear weapons in Europe raised another basic problem: how to give NATO allies a voice in nuclear use and war planning, especially so that some, such as West Germany, did not become motivated to acquire their own nuclear forces. While NATO guidelines gave “special weight” to the views of governments, and Washington made loose consultative arrangements with Bonn and London on nuclear weapons use, the United States retained final control over the weapons. NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), created in the mid-1960s, was a significant US-led effort to ensure alliance participation in the complexities of nuclear use. The NPG focused on such problems as consultation and preliminary guidelines for firing tactical nuclear weapons. That it would take the NPG nearly two decades to agree on a full statement of political guidelines on nuclear use suggests the depths of controversy over this sensitive problem.135
The Soviets saw their large conventional forces in Eastern Europe as a necessary counter to US strategic forces as well as valuable for local political
Year
Graph 1. US-USSR/Russian ICBM Launchers, 1959-2002
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Graph 2. US-USSR/Russian Strategic Bombers, 1945-2002
Control. US deployments of theater nuclear forces in NATO Europe stimulated the Soviets to field tactical nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe, but their stockpile was half the size of NATO’s, and most of the weapons were high-yield and not suited for battlefield use. Using storage sites in several Warsaw Pact countries, Moscow kept tight control of its weapons. Local Warsaw Pact forces received training from the Soviets in using them for their role in the war plan, but they would not gain possession of them until war broke out. In spite of these plans and deployments, by the 1970s, Warsaw
Pact leaders understood that even though they had advantages in numbers of troops and heavy armor, NATO had a "qualitative edge" in nuclear weapons and aircraft.136
While little is known about Soviet nuclear plans, archival releases from the former Eastern bloc show how concern about escalation also led them to raise the nuclear threshold. A Warsaw Pact Command Post exercise held during the 1961 Berlin crisis showed the Soviet bloc striking NATO Europe with a massive nuclear attack of over 1,000 weapons in response to warning of impending US and allied airstrikes. General nuclear war was expected to quickly ensue. Similar assumptions informed Pact war plans in 1964. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, the Soviets began to change their doctrine because they recognized the nuclear stalemate and saw the emergence of US flexible response strategies. The high command no longer assumed that war in Europe would be automatically nuclear and Soviet/ Pact planning anticipated fighting a conventional war first, with nuclear weapons introduced only if the Western powers used them first or threatened to do so. That the NATO powers would use nuclear weapons first remained a Warsaw Pact planning assumption.137
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