Strategic choices: Their roles in NATO's defence planning and force modernization: Part I

Abstract

To the extent that ‘strategic choices’ implies choices among a broadly conceived set of alternative objectives, means and employment of means to achieve objectives, NATO has essentially no choices at this time. NATO’s principal strategic problem is the declining credibility of nuclear escalation threats to deter Warsaw Pact conventional aggression. But political, technological, fiscal and manpower constraints foreclose strategic choices which would decisively alter this situation and sharply limit the range of realistic choice to quite modest changes in NATO’s conventional defence posture.