War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War

Threat Perceptions in the East and West

Vojtech Mastny, Sven S. Holtsmark, Andreas Wenger, Vojtech Mastny, Sven S. Holtsmark, Andreas Wenger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136011900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This essential new volume reviews the threat perceptions, military doctrines, and war plans of both the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, as well as the position of the neutrals, from the post-Cold War perspective.

Based on previously unknown archival evidence from both East and West, thetwelve essays in the bookfocus on the potential European battlefield rather than the strategic competition between the superpowers. They present conclusions about the nature of the Soviet threat that could previously only be speculated about and analyze the interaction between military matters and politics in the alliance management on both sides, with implications for the present crisis of the Western alliance.

This newbook will be of much interest for students of the Cold War, strategic history and international relations history, as well as all military colleges.

 

 

 

Part I
Threat perceptions and
war planning

 

1 Imagining war in Europe

Soviet strategic planning

Vojtech Mastny

The Cold War was by definition a potential real war in the making, and imagining such a war was what the belligerents' military strategy was about. It concerned their respective threat perceptions, military doctrines, and war plans which, however, were very different in East and West. Focusing on the Soviet side, this essay tries to explain why they differed and what with consequences. In doing so it centers less on the US—Soviet rivalry than on the potential European battlefield. Although the two theaters of conflict were interrelated, there was always an air of unreality about the intercontinental confrontation whereas on the Old Continent long memories made war all too imaginable.

We still cannot tell how close the seemingly unreal may have actually come to passing, since the high-level evidence of the superpowers' nuclear planning remains scarce, but we now have abundant evidence about the confrontation of the two military groupings in Europe. Some of this record casts a new light on the old questions that during the Cold War seemed to be those of life a death but could only be speculated about. In the happy absence of such an existential predicament, the answers to them may be less consequential today but more likely to be accurate. There are also new questions, those arising from the different post-Cold War perspective, which make the Cold War experience particularly relevant. This is especially true about questions made topical by the emergence of international terrorism and the ensuing crisis of the Western alliance.

The evidence now available about the Cold War's military dimensions is vastly better than it used to be but is still incomplete as well as asymmetrical. It tells us more about internal decisionmaking on the western than on the Soviet side but only up to the time limit of thirty years back from now imposed in most western archives; by contrast, former communist records are often open, if unevenly, for the entire Cold War period. On the military side, we have documents from exercises and even war plans of the Warsaw Pact — much more than we have from NATO. What we do not have are the files of the Soviet general staff, where those plans were made. But since their implementation depended to a significant degree on the participation of the Warsaw Pact allies, what remains in Moscow under lock and key can be largely substituted for by documents from the more readily accessible Eastern European archives.

The resulting picture is necessarily different from that which can be drawn by using mostly English-language sources, as has been the case with much of the literature about the Cold War written by mostly monolingual specialists on US foreign policy, often with the intention of making a case for or against it. Drawing on multi-archival evidence, the discussion that follows tries to avoid this pitfall by interpreting Soviet strategy in Europe in its own terms and judging it accordingly. The judgment gives its architects the benefit of the doubt though not necessarily absolution.

Stalin and his legacy

There is no doubt anymore that early western estimates of Soviet military threat, summarized since 1950 in NATO's annual assessments of the enemy's “strength and capabilities,” were wildly exaggerated. Those images of 175 “active line divisions,” ready to strike at a moment's notice simultaneously in central, northern, and southern Europe, against the British Isles and Africa, the Middle East and Far East, even Alaska, while still leaving enough reserves to defend the Soviet homeland, were products of both fear and ignorance. They rested on the dubious assumption that a division “existed unless there were three pieces of evidence to the contrary.”¹

Although the Soviet forces facing the West in Stalin's lifetime were not nearly so large as NATO feared, they were still much larger than their western counterparts. However, the two documents from the Cold War's formative period that the Russian authorities have thus far chosen to release show a strictly defensive posture. If this was so at that time, then the failure to release any further such documents from later years may indicate that, once the Cold War started in earnest, the posture was no longer so benign. Or, in view of America's overwhelming nuclear superiority, Stalin's contingency plans may have embarrassingly called for appeasement. He had been capable of it before.²

The dark Stalin years still leave us much in the dark about what Soviet strategy really was at that time. The weight of the fragmentary evidence lends support to its defensive rather than offensive character. According to a retrospective description by Czechoslovak military experts from 1968, it was “based on the slogan of defense against imperialist aggression, but at the same time assuming the possibility of transition to strategic offensive with the goal of achieving complete Soviet hegemony in Europe” — just as the West feared. The plans prepared under Stalin that have been found in Eastern European archives were nevertheless unequivocally defensive. The 1951 operational plan of the Polish army, then under direct command by his favorite Soviet marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovskii, did not mention an offensive, but only defensive operations leading to the defeat of western invaders within the home territory rather than beyond. The same was true about contemporary Czechoslovak plans.³

According to western critics of NATO, the Soviet Union had reasons to fear its aggressive intentions. The most perceptive of the critics, George F. Kennan, wrote in 1952 of a “cosmic misunderstanding” in suspecting the Soviets “precisely of the one thing they had not done, which was to plan, as yet, to conduct an overt and unprovoked invasion of Western Europe.” In his view,

Observing … that the [NATO] pact was supported publicly by a portrayal of their own intentions and strength that they did not recognize as fully accurate — it was no wonder that the Soviet leaders found it easy to conclude that the Atlantic Pact project concealed intentions not revealed to the public, and that these intentions must add up to a determination on the part of the Western powers to bring to a head a military conflict with the Soviet Union as soon as the requisite strength had been created on the Western side.⁴

Although the hypothesis is persuasive, there is no evidence that Stalin actually thought that way. The creation of NATO in 1949 did not elicit a significant Soviet military response, only political countermeasures. Despite his monumental suspiciousness, at least Stalin was in a position to know from his well-placed spies that no western attack was imminent. By providing him with this critical margin of reassurance, the unintended transparency of the western plans may thus have been a blessing in disguise at a time when Western Europe remained militarily most vulnerable and the deterrent effect of America's atomic supremacy at best uncertain.

Ruminations about the inevitability of war figured prominently in Stalin's private and public pronouncements. Their ambiguity, however, was suggestive of a muddle in his mind. He never made it clear whether the looming war was the one among capitalist powers that Lenin had prophesized or a Soviet—American war. If the latter, the Soviet prospects were bound to be discouraging because of the enemy's vast superiority in resources — a good reason for trying to postpone the inevitable war, perhaps indefinitely, by political means. These included Moscow's sponsorship of the massive “peace” movement calculated to undermine western will to fight. Ultimately, Stalin placed his bets on the “general crisis of capitalism” that might take its course before war would become topical.

As most generals are said to do, Stalin imagined the next war could be like the last one. His theory of “permanently operating factors” attributed the decisive importance in warfare to the factors that had supposedly allowed him to lead his country to victory in the Second World War — superior command, firepower, and equipment, besides the high morale of the troops backed by a supportive home front. Because of his discounting the importance of nuclear weapons, sophisticated western observers chided the theory as simplistic and naive. Ye t the American plans from that period, too, followed the Second World War model in assuming that the few atomic weapons the United States had could not prevent Soviet conquest of Western Europe, which would only be reversed later by its liberation from overseas. If Stalin knew these plans his doctrine was actually “quite perceptive and realistic.”⁵

Short of the test of war, Stalin's reputed realism nevertheless left much to be desired. Although he had every reason not to provoke the much more powerful United States, this is precisely what he did by turning the originally political and ideological conflict into a potentially military one. He acted as if he were ready to risk a military confrontation when he imposed the 1948 Berlin blockade, which prompted the creation of NATO and US commitment to the defense of Europe. A year later, when he gave the green light to the communist invasion of Korea after much hesitation, he took the calculated risk that the Americans would not intervene but miscalculated again.

The Korean War did not have a sobering effect on Stalin. In successfully prodding the reluctant Chinese to enter the war against the United States, he asked their supreme leader Mao Zedong rhetorically: “Should we fear this?” He answered that “we should not, because together we will be stronger than the USA and England, while the other European capitalist states … do not present serious military forces. If war is inevitable, then let it be waged now.”⁶ Although the statement was self-serving, it was consistent with Stalin's disposition to take greater risks in Europe when the military situation in East Asia looked unfavorable to the United States.

From the first-hand record of Stalin's secret meeting with Eastern European party and military leaders in January 1951, whose aggressive thrust had previously been imperfectly documented, we now know what exactly he told his minions at a time when the Americans seemed to be on the verge of defeat in Korea. In a reversal of his previous neglect of Eastern European armies as insufficiently reliable, Stalin ordered their massive expansion, to be accomplished within the two years during which he expected the United States to become bogged down in a loosing war in Asia. He referred to the need to exploit to communism's advantage the favorable situation he believed would develop in Europe, and although he did not explain — nor did he necessarily know — how this should be done, the massive buildup, sustained by growing militarization of the economy, ensued.⁷

The favorable conditions Stalin expected to occur in Europe never materialized, as the Korean War prompted the Americans and West Europeans to rally and transform NATO from a paper alliance into a military force to reckon with. Stalin underestimated its vigor, particularly its ability to integrate West Germany, and showed contempt for American guts. After the unexpected setbacks of US forces in Korea and Washington's similarly unexpected failure to press for victory after their subsequent successes, he told Chinese premier Zhou Enlai that

Americans don't know how to fight. … They are pinning their hopes on the atomic bomb and air power. But one cannot win a war with that. One needs infantry, and they don't have much infantry; the infantry they do have is weak. They are fighting with little Korea, and already people are weeping in the United States. What will happen if they start a large-scale war?⁸

Tantalizing bits and pieces found in Russian sources suggest that during Stalin's last sickly years his propensity for risk-taking and possible catastrophic miscalculation may have grown into bizarre proportions. He is said to have ordered the production of 10,000 Il-28 long-range bombers, to be stationed on the Arctic ice and ready to take off to drop atomic bombs on US targets, ...