The sealing off proceeded in stages - first with barbed wire and only later by the construction of a concrete wall, all on Soviet-controlled territory. The procedure initially served to test the West’s reaction to the violation of the agreements that allowed Berliners free movement through the whole city. Thereafter, steps were planned to block the allies’ right to move freely in and out of their sectors. For them, however, it was the boldness of the challenge rather than its residual caution that mattered, all the more so since it caught them by surprise.
Available evidence disproves the common belief that the Wall had a stabilizing effect. Moscow let its East German clients plan on the assumption that a separate peace treaty would be signed. The possibility of a Western military response continued to be taken into account. The nature of the
Conflict expected to follow may be gleaned from the Warsaw Pact exercise, codenamed "Buria," organized in deepest secrecy at the headquarters of the Soviet forces in Germany in the second half of September.
The starting point of the exercise, whose codename meant "nuclear war," was the putative signing of the treaty on October i, to which the allies would then respond by demonstrative displays of their military power. Moscow knew what form the displays might take because it was privy to their "Live Oak" secret contingency plans, spirited out by a French officer on the NATO staff. The options ranged from an attempt by the Western Allies to force their way through the Berlin autobahn by using armor to a demonstrative detonation of a nuclear bomb in the air above. The next step, according to the Buria scenario, was to be a massive thrust by Warsaw Pact forces into Western Europe, with extensive use of nuclear weapons, ending with the seizure of most of the continent within a few days.
Whatever the absurdity of such a scenario, it was believed to be feasible by its architects and remained the core of Soviet strategic planning as late as 1987 - the most disconcerting long-term legacy of the Berlin crisis. In the short term, however, uncertainty about the West’s reaction continued to exercise a restraining influence on Khrushchev, postponing his final decision unilaterally to "normalize" the Berlin situation.
On the one hand, Moscow’s ostentatious resumption of nuclear testing on September i may have been designed to discourage Western military response to the impending conclusion of the crucial treaty. On the other hand, the blasting, which climaxed in the detonation in the Arctic of the most powerful, if otherwise useless, nuclear device ever built, could also be seen as a cover-up of Khrushchev’s incipient retreat from the brink of war to which he had been maneuvering himself.
Most probably, Khrushchev was still undecided. A document prepared for, though never submitted to, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union some time in September stated revealingly: "The draft of a peace treaty with the [German Democratic Republic] is essentially ready, but it would be appropriate to return later to make precise the provisions of this treaty by taking into account discussions with the Western powers."448 No such discussions were forthcoming; instead, what resulted was a showdown with the Chinese, who regarded Khrushchev’s handling of the Berlin issue as more proof of his incompetence as a Communist leader. The manner in which the
China factor increasingly influenced his foreign policy at critical times would become an ongoing feature of how the Soviet system operated.
On October 17, Khrushchev finally announced the cancellation of his deadline for the signing of a German peace treaty at the same gathering of Communist parties in Moscow at which the Sino-Soviet rift first came into the open. To the unhappy Ulbricht, he later explained that "we achieved the maximum of what was possible."449 The erection of the barrier that prevented access to the western sectors by East Germans, but allowed it to Westerners, resolved the Berlin question in practice; the solution of the larger German problem, however, would have to wait until the end of the Cold War.
World History
