In such a vast organization which endured over such a long period and was composed of such disparate nations, most of whom had fought each other at least once in the twentieth century, there were inevitably a number of stresses and strains. Never once, however, did they lead to a member leaving the Alliance, either of its own volition or as a result of expulsion.
The most critical of these strains involved France’s departure from the integrated command structure. The reasons for this were grounded in recent French history. France had been totally humiliated by the rapidity with which the German forces overran the country in 1940. These problems were exacerbated by the split between the Vichy government, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, and the Free French, headed by General Charles De Gaulle. Although the latter participated in the Allied successes in 1944–5, it was always as a junior partner to the USA and the UK; but in the final days of the war De Gaulle’s personality was so strong that he managed to secure a French zone of occupation both in western Germany and in Berlin.
Following De Gaulle’s resignation as president in January 1946, France suffered from a succession of governments in the late 1940s, from a substantial degree of antipathy between former Vichyists and those who had served in either the Free French forces or the resistance, and from a powerful Communist party. Despite these problems, the French rebuilt their armed forces rapidly (with substantial aid from the USA and, to a lesser extent, from the UK), and they also reimposed control over their colonial empire.
The French quickly appreciated that, if their country was to regain its position as a Great Power, it had to possess its own atomic-energy programme. The British had come to the same conclusion, but France was in an infinitely worse industrial position than the UK and, unlike the British, its scientists had not been involved in the United States’ Manhattan Project during the war. Nevertheless, the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA) was established as early as October 1945 and, in an essentially civil programme, the first nuclear reactor went critical in December 1948.
The French military monitored CEA’s progress, but it was not until the early 1950s that they began to take a serious interest in building a bomb. Their interest was increased by two events in the middle of the decade. The first of these was the disastrous war in Indo-China, which culminated in the siege of Dien Bien Phu (December 1954 to May 1955), where a remote French garrison was surrounded and cut off by the Communist Viet Minh. With disaster staring them in the face, the French appealed to their American allies for help in the form of a bombing raid against the Viet Minh forces surrounding Dien Bien Phu, preferably involving the use of atomic weapons. Congressional leaders stipulated that they would support such a US operation only if it had British support, but this was not forthcoming, the proposal was dropped, and the French garrison was defeated.
Two years later came the Anglo-French fiasco at Suez, where France was the junior partner in an ill-fated attempt to wrest control of the Suez Canal back from the Egyptians. The two allies drew opprobrium down upon themselves from both the United States and the Soviet Union, and were forced into an ignominious and humiliating retreat.
These two events convinced the French that they must become self-sufficient in defence, develop their own nuclear weapons, and reduce their dependence on allies to the absolute minimum; this led to setting up the Comité des Applications Militaire (CAM) under the CEA in 1956. Matters were proceeding with a fair degree of priority, but when De Gaulle returned to power in May 1958 he gave new impetus to the programme, although the date of the first successful atomic explosion (February 1960) had been set well before his re-election and development of France’s strategic bomber, the Mirage IV, had already been started on 11 April 1958.
Between 1958 and 1962 President De Gaulle made several proposals to both the USA and the UK with a view to enhancing the French role in NATO, but when these were rejected he turned his attention to a ‘French’ solution, which involved the gradual reduction of French participation in NATO’s affairs and which would, as he saw it, liberate France from possible subjection to foreign decisions. Accordingly, in 1966 the French government gave its NATO allies notice that it intended to withdraw its forces from NATO’s integrated command structure and requested that NATO should move all headquarters and installations not under French control from French soil.
This demand involved NATO in considerable expenditure. Numerous headquarters had to be completely uprooted and moved, most of which had been originally located in France either at France’s direct request or to satisfy French sensibilities. Thus, SHAPE moved to Mons in Belgium and Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) to Brunssum in the Netherlands, while the NATO Defence College moved to Rome.
US armed forces were even more severely affected and were forced to undertake Operation Freloc (France Relocation). Under this, the greater part of the logistic system supporting US forces in Germany had to be reorientated from a west–east axis through the French Atlantic ports to a north–south axis through West German North Sea ports. This not only involved the US in considerable expense but also meant that the supply chain for US forces in the FRG would be much more vulnerable in the event of war. Equally serious was that the US nuclear depots had to be located in West Germany, which meant that if the Warsaw Pact carried out a surprise attack these depots might be overrun before their weapons could be out-loaded. Other elements were moved to the UK, including most of the logistic facilities not moved to West Germany, as well as a number of squadrons of USAF aircraft.
Despite causing all this upheaval, the French most definitely did not leave the Atlantic Alliance, but they were highly selective as to which parts they chose to participate in. Because it remained a member of the Alliance, France took part in the meetings of the North Atlantic Council and played a full part in the Economic Committee, the Council of National Armaments Directors and the Science Committee, among other bodies. Having left the integrated military structure, it no longer participated in top-level bodies such as the Defence Planning Committee, the Military Committee and the Nuclear Planning Group, nor did it contribute to the Military Agency for Standardization or the NATO Integrated Communication System. On the other hand, it still participated in the NATO Air Defence Ground Environment and the Allied Command Europe communications system, known as ACE HIGH, and, by some curious anomaly, it continued to participate in NATO’s civil-defence programmes. The French armed forces established liaison missions with those NATO headquarters with which they might become involved in the event of war, such as Central Army Group (CENTAG) and Northern Army Group (NORTHAG).
The one task to which France remained totally committed was the occupation of Berlin and the arrangements for its defence, where it never wavered for a second in its commitment to the Allied position. It should be noted, however, that everything to do with Berlin was totally outside the NATO structure.
Some elements of the post-1966 French position were quite clear: for example, no NATO units were allowed on French soil without specific permission, nor was there any automatic Allied access to French airspace. Other areas were more ambiguous – perhaps deliberately so. France always maintained that it had total freedom of action where its nuclear forces were concerned and such co-operation as it was prepared to offer concerned only conventional forces.* France also maintained that the commitment of French forces could never be assumed, and that any forces committed in support of NATO allies would always remain under French command. Thus, at least in public, it was always open to question as to whether or not the First French Army, located in south-west Germany, would participate in the defence of the Federal Republic.
It was, of course, implied in the ‘no automaticity’ concept that France might have remained aloof from a European conflict, provided there was no perceived threat to French national territory or sovereignty, although this did not exclude action if the approaches to French territory were considered to be under threat. It was a matter of French policy to avoid giving explicit definitions of a variety of terms, including what could be regarded as the country’s ‘vital interests’ and the specific circumstances in which the French government would sanction the use of nuclear weapons.
Unlike the United Kingdom, the French had scarcely any domestic opposition to the possession of nuclear weapons. Even the Socialist François Mitterrand, who in earlier days was, at best, lukewarm about such weapons, became an ardent supporter once he was in power, and during his presidency he did more than any almost any of his predecessors to ensure that France’s force de dissuasion remained strong and up to date. In fact there was a remarkable national consensus on the issue of nuclear weapons, and the French Catholic bishops even published a pastoral letter, in November 1983, in which they declared that nuclear deterrence was totally consistent with the Catholic Church’s doctrine of the ‘just war’. Indeed, they went so far as to state that an argument for ‘peace at any price’ would result in a situation in which the West would not have the means to defend itself, thus effectively encouraging aggression.†
It is a splendid contradiction, but it was the very fact of NATO’s existence that enabled France to leave it. Had the Warsaw Pact forces been standing on the other bank of the Rhine, as was the case in 1914 and 1939, then France would perforce have had to seek allies. But the existence of West Germany and its strong buffer of NATO troops on the line of the river Elbe gave France that element of physical security that enabled it to act semi-independently. Further, by holding the Alliance at arm’s length and refusing to commit themselves, instead of being just one among fifteen or sixteen allies, the French were always treated as a special case and were constantly courted by those seeking their support. This especially applied to the question of the First French Army, where both CENTAG and NORTHAG competed for its support as a counter-attack force.
NATO proved exceptionally able to contain numerous strains between its members. The Anglo-French attack on the Suez Canal caused considerable debate within the Alliance, as some other members felt very strongly that they should have been consulted, but there were many other tensions. The traditional hostility between Greece and Turkey made their relationship in NATO difficult at the best of times, although matters became even more tense when Turkey invaded northern Cyprus in 1974. There were also numerous disputes between the two countries in the Aegean, both at sea and in the air.
The UK and Iceland were involved in a short, bitter (and ultimately pointless) fisheries dispute (known as the ‘Cod War’) in 1974.
NATO, founded as a bastion of democracy, managed to accommodate a number of military coups d’état among its members. General António Spínola led a military takeover in Portugal in 1974, while in Greece Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos seized control in 1967 and kicked out the king six months later. There was also a mutinous seizure of power by a group of French generals in Algeria in 1956, which almost led to a military coup in Paris.
The Hungarian uprising in 1956 (see Chapter 6) inspired much vocal support in the West, especially from newspapers and American-run radio stations in Europe. This, however, was the limit of the support the Hungarians received, and when the North Atlantic Council convened in December of that year all it could say was that it had:
followed the course of events in Hungary with shock and revulsion. The brutal suppression of the heroic Hungarian people stands in stark contrast with Soviet public professions. The Council reaffirmed the conviction of its member governments that the United Nations should continue its efforts, through the pressure of world opinion, to induce the Soviets to withdraw their forces from Hungary and to right the wrongs done to the Hungarian people …1
In other words, NATO did nothing.
Although NATO took certain low-level precautionary steps, the Alliance’s reactions to the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis (see Chapter 6) were again mainly vocal. Advance signals of a probable invasion were received in the West for many months before the event. In early May, Western intelligence services, using radio monitoring, aircraft equipped with long-range optical and electronic devices, and satellites, detected signs of troop concentrations on such an ominous scale that the Federal German foreign minister informed the Federal Cabinet and issued a press statement on 22 May. The Warsaw Pact troops conducted an exercise called Böhmerwald in Czechoslovakia, but Western observers then discovered that route signs leading towards the Czechoslovak border and within the country itself had been left in position, and that some of the Soviet troops taking part in the exercise had remained inside Czechoslovakia instead of leaving.
Then in late July a considerable amount of detailed information became available, reporting large troop movements in the southern part of East Germany, in southern Poland, and along those parts of Poland and the USSR bordering on Czechoslovakia. In an effort to try to discover more, USAF SR-71 Blackbird spy planes were brought in from the United States to fly along the line of the Inner German Border to observe the activity up to 100 km beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’. Another valuable intelligence source was the Allied missions to the Soviet commander-in-chief,* and the British mission reported on 22 July that the Soviet army’s 71st Artillery Brigade and 6 Motor Rifle Division had completely vacated their usual barracks at Bernau and that an East German army barracks at Halle was similarly empty, while on 29 July one of their patrols saw the Soviet 19 Motor Rifle Division actually deploying from its barracks.2
Even without such classified sources, the Federal German News Service was able to establish that by the end of July some twenty Warsaw Pact divisions were lining the Czech frontiers and that their plan was to drive a wedge straight across the country, with the aim of dividing the fourteen divisions of the Czech army into two.
The evidence of a probable invasion accumulated rapidly, and on 18 August Western radio monitoring units reported that all Warsaw Pact units near the Czechoslovak border had gone on to radio silence – usually an accurate portent that something was about to happen. Then, at 2311 hours precisely on Sunday 20 August, Western radar monitors detected that Prague airspace had suddenly been blanked out on their screens by artificial ‘snow’.* The situation was made worse for the West because the whole of eastern Europe was also being protected naturally by a dense and widespread layer of cloud, which could not be penetrated by the sensors aboard US spy satellites.
A major external factor, which affected the US forces in western Europe closely, was the situation in South Vietnam, where the war was at its height; the US armed forces had some 530,000 troops deployed there, and suffered 14,437 deaths during 1968. That year was the year of the Communist Tet offensive (30 January to 29 February), which was subsequently shown to have been a major Communist defeat, but at the time it had a very adverse political and public-relations impact in the United States. Having failed at Tet, the North Vietnamese mounted a second, short-lived, offensive in May, and then a third, which involved attacks all over South Vietnam, on 17 August. That this came just four days before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia may well have been more than mere coincidence. However, the fact was that in Washington the attention was predominantly on events in Vietnam, while in western Europe many individuals and units had been withdrawn from the US Seventh Army to serve in Indo-China.
NATO appears to have ignored all these warnings; for example, SACEUR (General Lemnitzer) departed to visit exercises two days before the invasion and was in Greece on the day it took place. One possible alternative, supported by unconfirmed rumours at the time, is that the commander of the Warsaw Pact operation, Soviet general I. G. Pavlovsky, warned Western commanders of the forthcoming operation and gave them a believable assurance that there was no hostile intent towards the West.
Even if this report were true, the fact is that some forty Warsaw Pact divisions were on the move; had they simply kept moving and rolled across the Czechoslovak border into the Federal Republic, NATO was in no position to have resisted. NATO troops in western Europe were on the lowest stage of alert, and it would have taken US reinforcements several weeks or more to have reached Europe from the USA, by which time the fighting might well have overrun the airfields they were intending to use.†
Publicly at least, the NATO reaction was merely one of words, with the North Atlantic Council, for example, stating in November 1968 that:
World opinion has been profoundly shocked by this armed intervention carried out against the wishes of the Government and people of Czechoslovakia. … The contention of the Soviet leadership that there exists a right of intervention in the affairs of other states deemed to be within the so-called ‘Socialist Commonwealth’ runs counter to the basic principles of the United Nations Charter, is dangerous to European security and has inevitably aroused grave anxieties …3
Internally, however, NATO carried out a serious and deep analysis of its failings. It revised its crisis-management procedures, both within the organization itself and in the national capitals. It also reviewed its force structure, its force strengths and its mobilization and reinforcement procedures. It also had to face a major change in the Warsaw Pact’s deployments, because a number of Soviet divisions remained in western Czechoslovakia, where there had been none before.
The INF (intermediate-range nuclear forces) crisis was one of the most important ever to hit NATO. It started in about 1974, when NATO members began to see a steady build-up of a new Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile,* the SS-20. This was seen to be a major attempt by the USSR to alter the balance in this field in its favour and thus pose a major threat to western Europe. In consequence, the Alliance reacted with a vigour some had begun to doubt it possessed; indeed, the SS-20 played a key role in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
Intermediate-range nuclear forces had not been a major issue up to that time. NATO itself had deployed some US IRBM systems in Europe between 1959 and 1965, comprising sixty Thors in the UK and sixty Jupiters, thirty of which were based in Italy and thirty in Turkey. Their operational lives were, however, very brief, since all were phased out in 1965: the British Thors because they were sited in the open and were too vulnerable to a Soviet first strike, while the withdrawal of the Jupiters from southern Europe was part of the Cuban Missile Crisis settlement.
The Soviet IRBMs remained, however, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s NATO seemed tacitly to accept the existence of a large number of IRBMs sited in the USSR’s western military districts and clearly targeted on NATO countries. These missiles were of two types, the older being the SS-4, which entered service in 1957 and carried a single 1 MT warhead,† while the SS-5 entered service in 1961 in two versions: Mod 1, with a single 1 MT warhead, and Mod 3, with three 300 kT warheads. Most of these were deployed in missile fields just to the east of the Soviet–Polish border, and at their peak in the late 1960s some 700 were in service, reducing to approximately 400 in the mid-1970s. The SS-4 had a range of some 2,000 km, while that of the SS-5 was 4,100 km, which enabled both missiles to cover the whole of western Europe, although their relative inaccuracy (the SS-4 had a CEP (see Chapter 7) of 2.4 km, while that of the SS-5 was 1 km) meant that they could be targeted only against cities or other area targets.
The existence of two new missiles, the SS-16 and the SS-20, became known in the West in the late 1960s. Both could be launched either from silos or from wheeled transporter–erector–launcher (TEL) vehicles, but there was an even more significant relationship between the two, since they shared two identical missile stages. The SS-20 was a two-stage missile with a range of 5,000 km and carrying three 150 kT warheads with an accuracy (CEP) of 400 m. The SS-16 carried a single 1 MT warhead and was essentially an SS-20 with an additional third stage, giving it a range of 9,000 km. This range meant that the SS-16 was classified as an ICBM and was covered by the SALT treaty, whereas the SS-20 was an IRBM and thus was not covered by SALT.
The SS-20 was road-mobile, using a single twelve-wheeled TEL vehicle, housed in a purpose-built shelter with a split roof which could be opened to allow the missile to be launched. Later, when they signed the INF Treaty in December 1987, the Soviets admitted that they had deployed 650 SS-20 missiles, plus a further forty-two for training. These had been operated by ten missile divisions: six in the western USSR and four in Asia. These divisions included forty-eight regiments, each with its own operating base, which included a number of individual missile shelters with a number of pre-surveyed launch sites in the surrounding area.
These two missiles posed three problems for NATO. US concern centred on the fact that it would be possible for the Soviet Union to manufacture two-stage missiles (i.e. SS-20s) and, quite separately, to also manufacture and store third stages. The verification measures then under discussion would not have been able to differentiate between them, meaning, so the US argued, that at a time of crisis it would be possible to bring these two elements together to create SS-16 ICBMs and thus directly threaten the USA. Following intense discussions in the SALT II negotiations, the agreement included the termination of both testing and deployment of SS-16s.
As a separate issue, however, the SS-20 posed a new and serious threat to western Europe: first, its launcher was highly mobile and thus difficult to detect and destroy; second, it had three accurate MIRV warheads, which could be targeted against military targets; and, third, it increased the number of Soviet warheads from some 400-odd on SS-4s and SS-5s to 1,950 on 650 SS-20s.
To deal with this threatening situation, and in an attempt to avert an arms race in Europe, in 1979 NATO agreed on two new approaches to the problem. It decided, first:
to modernize NATO’s LRTNF [long-range tactical nuclear forces] by the deployment in Europe of US ground-launched systems comprising 108 Pershing II launchers which would replace existing US Pershing IA, and 464 Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles [GLCM], all with single warheads. All the nations currently participating in the integrated defence structure will participate in the programme; the missiles will be stationed in selected countries and certain support costs will be met through NATO’s existing common funding arrangements … Ministers agreed that as an integral part of TNF modernization, 1,000 US nuclear warheads will be withdrawn from Europe as soon as possible. Further, Ministers decided that the 572 LRTNF warheads should be accommodated within that reduced level, which necessarily implies a numerical shift of emphasis away from warheads to delivery systems of other types and shorter ranges.4
In parallel with this, however, in what was known as the ‘twin-track’ approach, NATO ministers also:
fully support[ed] the decision taken by the United States, following consultations within the Alliance, to negotiate arms limitations on LRTNF and to propose to the USSR to begin negotiations as soon as possible …5
The diplomatic track included three major offers to the USSR: a reduction in strategic-nuclear-force levels within the SALT framework, and new initiatives in both the MBFR and the CSCE processes. The military track involved fielding ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing IIs.
The timing of the problem coincided with a general resurgence of public concern in Western countries over defence matters. This involved increased interest in some countries, but there were also small but highly vocal groups which were opposed to most forms of defence and to nuclear weapons in particular. When they found themselves faced with Soviet rejection of the ‘diplomatic’ element of the ‘twin-track’ approach, NATO members were therefore faced with a difficult choice. But, despite many predictions that they would lack the nerve, they went ahead and authorized the fielding of the new counter-systems in 1983.6 The greatest opposition came from Denmark, where the parliament not only voted against deployment of Pershing II or GLCMs there, but also voted to withhold that element of Denmark’s contribution to NATO which would have gone towards the infrastructure costs of such missiles. In the UK there were repeated demonstrations against deployment of GLCMs in southern England, but the government brushed these aside. Helmut Schmidt, the West German chancellor, faced greater resistance from within his own Social Democratic Party than from the official opposition and threatened to resign if the parliamentary vote went against him. (He won the vote on 26 May 1981.)
Despite the opposition, US-operated GLCMs began to arrive in western Europe in November 1983, whereupon the Soviet Union withdrew from the INF Treaty negotiations in Geneva. Several weeks later it also effectively withdrew from the SALT and MBFR talks, as well.
NATO’s response to the Soviet threat posed by the SS-20 centred on the BGM-109 GLCM, a Mach 0.7* missile which carried a variable-yield nuclear warhead (10–50 kT) over ranges up to 2,500 km. It flew at very low altitude, using a computer-controlled navigation system, and was extremely accurate, with a CEP of some 30 m. Four missiles were carried on a single TEL and were launched at an angle of 45 degrees. In this demonstration of NATO solidarity in the face of the SS-20 threat, no less than 116 launchers (464 missiles) were deployed to Europe, starting in November 1983 and with deployment completed in 1988. The bases were in Belgium (12 launchers), Germany (24), Italy (28), the Netherlands (12) and the UK (40).
The other element of the NATO deployment was the Pershing II missile. The Pershing IA had been deployed in West Germany since the 1960s, with 108 operated by the US army and 72 by the West German air force.† The Pershing IA had a maximum range of 740 km and carried a 400 kT nuclear warhead with an accuracy (CEP) of 400 m. The Pershing II used the same launcher and appeared generally similar, but was quite different internally. The main difference was in its warhead, which not only was much more accurate (with a CEP of 45 m), but had a special ‘earth penetrator’ which could drive through most types of soil to a depth of some 30 m before detonating its 250 kT nuclear weapon, thus destroying most types of command bunker. This warhead, coupled with its range of 1,500 km, posed a major threat to Soviet and Warsaw Pact buried headquarters, including those in the western military districts of the USSR.
It appeared that the Soviet authorities thought that the West would not have the nerve, solidarity or popular support necessary to achieve these deployments, because they continued with their SS-20 programme, which by late 1985 had reached a total of 441 launchers with 1,323 warheads.7 When General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko died in March 1985, however, he was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, and the atmosphere immediately began to change. Diplomatic progress became more rapid, and in December 1987 the INF Treaty was signed, under which not only would 670 Soviet missiles (including 405 SS-20s) and 400 US systems be withdrawn and destroyed, but the whole destruction programme would be subject to on-site verification by the opposite side.
The treaty laid down a three-year period for the elimination of all intermediate-range weapons and launchers (GLCM, Pershing, SS-20, SS-12 and SS-4), in two phases: deployed warheads were to be reduced to 180 on each side within twenty-nine months, with total elimination after three years; shorter-range nuclear weapons were to be totally eliminated within eighteen months. The treaty also included on-site inspections between twenty and ninety days after signature, to verify numbers, with further inspections up to the year 2000.
* This was the public position. There are, however, strong reasons for believing that there was a degree of covert co-operation. France, the UK and the USA, for example, would have needed to ensure that their ballistic-missile submarines’ patrol areas did not clash.
† Earlier in the year (18 April 1983) Catholic bishops in West Germany had issued a similar pastoral letter, in which they stated that nuclear weapons were a necessary but regrettable method of maintaining peace in Europe.
* In 1946 the three western Allied commanders-in-chief exchanged liaison missions with their Soviet opposite number. Such missions continued until the end of the Cold War.
* ‘Snow’ is a form of radar jamming created by a combination of electronic means and aircraft dropping short strips of metal foil.
† The author was serving in Germany at the time and well remembers that virtually every unit was at a very low state of readiness, since August was, by custom, the period when summer holidays were taken. Most units were thus down to the absolute minimum manpower permitted under NATO rules, and many of the troops theoretically ‘present’ on duty had been sent away on official training and would have taken several days to return to barracks before starting deployment.
* An intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) was a land-based missile with a range between 1,500 nautical miles (2,780 km) and 3,000 nautical miles (5,560 km).
† A 1 MT (1 megaton) warhead is equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT; a 1 kT (1 kiloton) warhead is equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT – see Chapter 7.
* Mach 1 is the speed of sound, which is approximately 1,200 km/h at sea level, but varies with temperature and pressure.
† Pershing I, the original version, was carried on a tracked launcher. The Pershing IA system consisted of the same missile but mounted on a wheeled launcher, enabling it to be carried in a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.