Non-Nuclear, Non-Provocative Defence for Europe

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that if Warsaw Pact forces attacked NATO they would probably win the war in a few weeks unless NATO used battlefield nuclear weapons to stop the advancing Warsaw Pact forces. As General Bernard Rogers, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, put it in a recent (13 January 1983) speech to the Dutch Parliament:

NATO’s current military posture will require us — if attacked conventionally — to escalate fairly quickly to the second response of our strategy, ‘deliberate escalation’ to nuclear weapons. The plain fact is that we have built ourselves a short war; we simply are unable to sustain ourselves for long with manpower, ammunition and war reserve stocks to replace battlefield losses and expenditures. Therefore, we face the serious risk of having no recourse other than the use of nuclear weapons to defend our soil.

This means, of course, also the risk of having to use nuclear weapons on West German territory; this use would inevitably result in the death of a large number of West German civilians and great damage to property. The cost to NATO in death and collateral damage of using battlefield nuclear weapons would be so high as to make this use incredible.