Western Europe between Soviet Threat and American Guarantee

Abstract

This was the premise of all defence planning of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), as stated here in a ‘Top Secret Cosmic’ document (that is, hardly a public propaganda document but the foundation of serious planning) of 1954. By extension, the successive strategies of NATO have been reactive, defensive, and this is true also for NATO’s nuclear strategies. Both have been a function of the perception of a threat. The North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) was signed in April 1949, and NATO with its integrated military structure was formed in 1950 as reaction first to a political, and then to a steadily growing military threat, perceived as emanating from the Soviet Union and its satellite states.2 While another power’s force superiority alone is no reason for fear, in conjunction with a political or ideological conflict it becomes a cause for concern. At the latest from 1949 (when it became clear that Stalin was rearming his satellites3) until the Treaty on the reduction of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) in November 1990, NATO felt numerically inferior to the conventional forces of the Eastern Bloc. (NATO’s perception was acknowledged as valid by the asymmetric reductions conceded by Moscow in the CFE Treaty.)