The Next European War
Walsh, Edward J.
"The Next European War" however, is most ominous for the future of North America is the havoc the social and political maladjustment of the leaders of the Parti Quebecois may wreak upon Canada. I was a child during the...
...Army: "Seventy to eighty Soviet divisions could augment already deployed forces in a few weeks...
...Army annually conducts ostentatious "Reforger" exercises, in which a couple of American divisions are airlifted from the United States to "forward bases" in West Germany, there to pick up weapons and supplies with which to face the Soviet juggernaut...
...5. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969...
...At the outset, Soviet armored divisions are programmed to drive into West Germany, cutting the vulnerable supply lines of the U.S...
...The European members of the Atlantic Alliance are certainly aware of the Soviet buildup...
...Isaiah Berlin writes in one of his essays...
...Moreover, the way the SALT agreements have come out, even "parity" may be chimerical...
...8) The young are betrayed, and so are we...
...However, the argument that NATO defensive preparations are adequate also persists, based on the naive and dangerous belief that the technological sophistication of NATO weaponry, aircraft, and warning systems is more than a match for the Communist hordes...
...If so, where would it end...
...Deterrence, based on the still-plausible assumption of Soviet reluctance to risk nuclear holocaust, is now the subject of intense debate among Western military experts, who ask: Will they come...
...The U.S...
...A further sobering question: Should the Americans be authorized to fire their nuclear-tipped Pershing and Lance missiles point-blank at the Russians...
...Nevertheless, in light of the consistent decline in U.S...
...Those Soviet ships clear of the choke points, after inflicting heavy casualties on NATO, could not last long...
...It is no longer certain that a conflict between East and West will lead inevitably to full-scale nuclear war...
...Since U.S...
...2. Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism (1962...
...A united Europe was being built...
...Soviet offensive doctrine suggests their use from the outset against key NATO installations...
...4. Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson (1958...
...To reach the Atlantic from their huge naval base on the Kola Peninsula above Norway, their ships must pass through a narrow channel close to the Norwegian coast, or steam farther west around Iceland...
...It dawns upon the veterans after all That what for them were agonies, for us Are high-brow thrillers, though historical...
...Tactical nuclear warheads, though not as appallingly destructive as strategic weapons, are still "dirty," and would spew deadly radioactive fallout about the blast areas...
...While it displayed a "surge power" of 80 ships during the 1973 Mideast crisis, the normal Soviet Mediterranean fleet numbers about 60 ships, mostly tenders and repair vessels...
...and one offers to the mass of people the holocaust of individual people), wrote Benjamin Constant...
...Marine Corps, works for the United States Industrial Council in Nashville, Tennessee...
...Would the Soviets fall back—or release their intercontinental ballistic missiles from submarines and silos against London and New York...
...To employ such weapons against the Russians would necessarily dictate the deaths of a large number of those civilians who have survived the Soviets' indiscriminate invasion...
...But these very real NATO advantages have spurred the Russians to greater efforts, and lulled NATO into complacency...
...A crucial problem for the Soviets is access to the high seas...
...L'on immure a retre abstract les titres reels...
...Plus ca change...
...et l'on offre au peuple en masse l'holocauste du peuple en detail (One sacrifices real beings to an abstract being...
...Seventh Army, which is based in southern Germany...
...The Russians, spending 15 percent of their GNP for defense and weapons research, have substantially narrowed the technology gap with the West, although that gap still exists...
...Army's choice for a "tank of the 80s" certainly added technological sophistication to NATO's variegated arsenal—along with cost overruns and a barely perceivable tactical edge...
...The Atlantic Alliance is preeminently maritime, as the USSR is geographically a land power, and the Mediterranean Sea has always been NATO's backyard...
...Kissinger maintained that the greater accuracy of American MIRV'd (multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicle) missiles made up for the throw-weight difference, the Soviets have achieved significant breakthroughs in MIRV technology since 1972...
...At the same time, the Russian fleet is still far from home, and lacks long-term anchorages in the Mediterranean at which to undergo maintenance and resupply...
...it has no relevance in Arnheim or Lyons or Turin...
...Last year, I toured camps on Cyprus housing Greek refugees expelled by the Turks from homes they had inhabited even longer...
...He, at least, had the charms of Coppet to enjoy, the prospect of Lake Leman, and the charms of Madame de Stael...
...It is quite possible that NATO governments will refuse to permit the use of tactical nuclear weapons, preferring instead the fiction that the Russians can be beaten without them...
...A similar dilemma confronts the Russians at the Dardanelles, a NATO command...
...I. Otto Brandt, Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins (1966...
...A compelling speculation is that, after enduring two ravaging wars in this century, they will opt for life under Soviet domination rather than continued, bloody struggle...
...On the other side, Soviet antiaircraft defenses are superior to NATO's best, and are deployed in vast numbers throughout Eastern Europe and around Soviet cities, manned by civilian "volunteers," including women, as well as specially trained military personnel...
...One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals —justice or progress or happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class," Prof...
...Throughout the Warsaw Pact force structure, as with NATO, tactical configurations are intimately linked with ideology...
...John Erickson of the United States Strategic Institute believes that the Soviets could advance seventy miles per day across the North German Plain, achieving the English Channel in ten days...
...For NATO, the implications of this shift in the strategic balance are profound...
...Still, the Admiral argues lucidly, the shift in world power is undeniable...
...and the gaps are widening still...
...Some 45 years ago, as a young reporter, I toured Greek camps housing refugees from Asia Minor, an entire Greek population expelled by Kemal Pasha from homes they had inhabited for more than 2,500 years...
...Would NATO governments then resort to nuclear weapons or opt for life under Soviet domination...
...In 1977, they have enough of them to defeat NATO...
...But they are acquiring their own, less shiny planes, and missiles, and tanks, and ships...
...The abstract "gap" between strategic and conventional ("limited") war has widened, permitting speculation that a blitzkrieg-like attack by the Soviets would result not in an all-out nuclear exchange and the destruction of civilization, but rather in the extension of Soviet hegemony to the Atlantic...
...According to Dr...
...When it was over, we believed with Sir Lewis Namier that national feeling was at long last recognized for the obsession it is...
...As Drew Middleton astutely remarked: " 'Better dead than Red' may be a viable argument in Anaheim, California...
...The Soviet naval mission, in addition to showing the Red flag in startled ports throughout the non-NATO world, is relatively uncomplicated: to be prepared to prevent the NATO fleet from protecting the vital sea lanes on which Western commercial shipping flows and on which military reinforcements must travel to Europe from America...
...Just in time, says Captain Betit, to meet the Russians arriving at the Channel...
...Should this strategy succeed, Russian submarines already at sea would be at the mercy of American antisubmarine ships and aircraft and their ability to close the sea lanes would be significantly reduced...
...7. Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies (1956...
...6. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927...
...Except for the limited Reforger force, the bulk of NATO reinforcement must come by sea...
...strategic arms policy is based on second-strike, retaliatory capability, it is conceivable that, faced with the awful consequences of being the first to unleash the Bomb, the President would choose instead to negotiate...
...The American TOW and "Dragon" antitank missiles, for example, are considered a sufficient counterweight to the huge Soviet tank arsenal...
...The interim SALT agreement of 1972 established a distinct Soviet advantage in missile throw-weight, expected to be four-to-one in 1980...
...The Seventh, NATO's strongest force, is ill-positioned in the south...
...Commander Hans Garde of the Danish Royal Navy has asked pointedly whether NATO has been preoccupied by the Central European "front" to the derogation of sea power...
...The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names At which those poets thrilled or were afraid For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games...
...The disparities in conventional forces now stand at 20,000 Soviet tanks to NATO's 7,000, 18,000 Soviet heavy artillery pieces to NATO's 6,000, and 920,000 readily available Soviet combat troops to NATO's 630,000...
...The intensity of a Soviet invasion would shortly overwhelm the forward elements of NATO, and force them to withdraw with heavy casualties...
...That strategic superiority, however, has been considerably reduced since the Cuban missile crisis...
...Could we stop them...
...And in the process some-one is betrayed...
...In addition, the centralized political control so repugnant in the West finds expression in the almost complete standardization of weapons and equipment employed by the seven armies of the Pact, an advantage NATO will never overcome...
...There is no guarantee, however, that the inevitable large-scale butchery of soldiers and civilians will deter the Soviets from making a first strike in Central Europe, should they be convinced of the certainty of victory...
...Although that umbrella still protects them, the lately-recognized sophistication, mobility, and depth of Warsaw Pact conventional forces make war 16 The American Spectator December 1977 in Central Europe suddenly thinkable...
...Nowadays, Lake Leman is polluted, and the spiritual descendants of Madame de Stael have joined Women's Lib...
...The Air Force's F-111, deployed on station in Great Britain, is faster than any Soviet aircraft, and is capable of delivering tactical nuclear weapons —a still-emphatic deterrent...
...In 48 hours, the forward elements of a Soviet attack may well have advanced 100 miles into West Germany, through densely populated, heavily industrialized towns and cities...
...Furthermore, according to Captain Eugene Betit of the U.S...
...The Soviets and their allies, preoccupied with the offensive in warfare as in politics, now mass 58 divisions, 26 of them armored, against a total of 27 for NATO...
...I was a child during the First World War, a European civil war waged in the name of similar pernicious nationalism...
...Suddenly, at the first volleys of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Eastern Mediterranean was filled with Soviet warships ominously cruising those sensitive waters, "projecting" Soviet diplomatic interests as forcefully as the American Sixth Fleet had previously expressed the foreign policy concerns of the United States...
...Throughout my adolescence and young manhood I was haunted by petty national hatreds, by the "hereditary enmity" between the French and the Germans, the Hungarians and the Slovaks, the Poles and the Czechs, the Serbs and the Bulgars, the Romanians and the Russians—most of these irrational hatreds then compounded by an equally irrational and virulent anti-Semitism...
...Currently, NATO policy calls for closing these "choke points" by aerial bombardment and deep-sea mining...
...For this purpose, according to former American Chief of Naval Operations Elmo R. Zumwalt, the Russian navy is already more than adequate...
...18 The American Spectator December 1977...
...Of course, NATO force levels in Europe have never equalled the Edward J. Walsh, who served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S...
...Soviets' ; but a change in American nuclear policy makes these widening gaps quite frightening...
...Traditionally, sea power has been NATO's undisputed strength...
...Would the governments of West Germany, France, and the Netherlands permit the introduction of limited nuclear missiles and artillery shells...
...Unfortunately, their timetable does not agree with the Soviets': There is little chance, in the event of war, that Reforger troops would find anything but the smoking ruins of their "forward bases"—and well-armed Soviet paratroops...
...With sea power, therefore, as with infantry, tanks, planes, and howitzers, it is the continuing trends that matter...
...Their new guided-missile cruisers and submarine-killing destroyers show no reluctance to pursue and harass American and other NATO vessels in the Mediterranean, risking volatile incidents at sea...
...there are few troops stationed adjacent to the choke points to resist Soviet amphibious landings...
...The Russians may be nervous about our gleaming F-14s and 13 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and about our computerized warning systems and submarine-sweeping airplanes...
...It became apparent to NATO that the growth of Soviet land power had complemented a similar, and even more rapid, expansion of Soviet naval strength...
...Navy F-14 Tomcat interceptor can locate, fire at, and hit six enemy targets simultaneously at ranges up to 115 miles...
...Traditionally, America's overwhelming strategic power provided the Atlantic Alliance with a credible challenge to Soviet ambitions and compensated for its relative weakness in conventional forces...
...Since its establishment in 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has ably carried out its mission of deterring war with the Soviet Union and its allies, and keeping their vast armies from advancing westward across the Elbe...
...And now, the same destructive nationalisms are back in fashion...
...In anticipation of a months-long conflict, the U.S...
...Nevertheless, the possibility that the West may be the first to move towards nuclearwar is disquieting in Europe...
...And while the bureaucracy of the NATO high The American Spectator December 1977 17 command demands that tactical decisions be reached by consensus, commensurate with the democratic principles the Alliance hopes to defend, the Warsaw Pact Joint Command summarily executes the Kremlin's will...
...But they are dangerously bemused by technological gimmickry...
...And all their feats quite strictly fabulous...
...Gardiner Tucker, a former Assistant Secretary General of NATO, Alliance troops now possess 31 types of antiaircraft weapons, six kinds of recoilless rifles, and, at sea, 40 varieties of guns larger than .30 caliber, while NATO governments persist in a costly and wasteful multiplication of weapons research and development programs...
...Among many Western authorities, that certainty already exists...
...Such an invasion would cost the Soviets fearfully in men and material, but it could be accomplished without resort to strategic nuclear weapons...
...The Soviet AK-47 assault rifle, popular with terrorists the world over, is universally employed by Warsaw Pact troops, and is considered by many experts the equal of the American infantry rifle, the M-16...
...Edward J. Walsh The Next European War If the Soviets were to launch a preemptive assault in Central Europe, conventional NATO forces would be unable to stop it...
...and though Mr...
...The ideologues still have not drunk enough of their victims' blood...
...These crucial roads and railroads, running south from Bremerhaven on the North Sea, are the lifelines of the Seventh Army since de Gaulle evicted NATO from France in 1966...
...In recent years, however, in the face of ominous expansion and modernization of Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces and the rapidly increasing sophistication of the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal, it has become unclear whether NATO can still protect Western Europe...
...3. Hans Kohn, op...
...But this assumption ignores the historic willingness of the Communists to sustain losses that would be unacceptable to the West, as well as the inherent advantage of momentum achieved by a highly mobile and numerically superior offensive force...
...Admiral Stansfield Turner, formerly Commander of Southern Forces, NATO, and now director of the CIA, has described his distrust of the fear-mongers who frantically compare numbers in a shallow "them versus us" campaign...
...At a crucial juncture after the initial shock, NATO leaders would face a decision on the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the massed tank formations spearheading the assault and the supply columns stretched out behind them...
...It is pointless and self-defeating to try to mimic the Soviets in every phase of armament, ignoring the broad contrasts in missions, geographical and economic considerations, and the political aversion to defense spending which permeates NATO governments...
...Thirty-two Soviet divisions are poised in the satellite countries, each operating along interior lines of communication and supply that extend directly from the munitions factories and command posts in Russia to the frontier in Germany...
...The NATO fleet sails familiar waters, in better ships, with far more capable commanders and seamen...
...For 28 years NATO governments have basked in the shadow of the American strategic umbrella, disdaining the grim proximity of huge Soviet armies...
...This forbidding vision of NATO's future is prompted by even a cursory examination of the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe...
...A mere 35 years ago—the span of a single generation—millions were slaughtered for the great historical ideal of a thousand-year Reich...
...If the Soviets were to launch a preemptive assault in Central Europe, conventional NATO forces alone would be unable to stop it...
...and NATO shipbuilding in recent years, the damage done by even an understrength Soviet fleet may prove too costly...
...Certainly, the Soviets have not...
...The recent, delay-ridden competition between the Chrysler XM-1 main battle tank and the West German Leopard "II" model as the U.S...
...Like the sign of Cain on our foreheads, ideology disfigures mankind's countenance, a sign that no cool reason or logical enlightenment can wash away...
...Conversely, NATO must depend on reinforcement and resupply from the United States...
...These forces have the capability to deploy and attack "off the march," without extensive mobilization, should the order come from Moscow...
...8. Donald Davie, Remembering the 'Thirties (1973...
...The Western world was about to reach a peak of affluence...
...Meanwhile, the Soviet T-72 medium tank, nearly identical to the XM-1, is already being delivered to the troops...
...The decision for initiating their use would therefore fall to the American President...
...At present, American strategic arms policy aims at "parity" with the Soviet Union through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks...
...Should war come to Germany, it would be isolated from the brunt of the fighting, away from the sea, with the Alps at its rear...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
