The Cold War: A MILITARY History by David Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

and announced that they had been suspended forthwith, but his Soviet opposite number, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, refused to accept this and stormed out of the 16 May Geneva summit conference in protest.
    NATO’s momentum increased as members realized that it was a source not only of military but also of political strength. The ‘Athens Guidelines’, issued in 1962, gave a broad outline of the circumstances under which NATO would consider using nuclear weapons and what political discussions might be feasible in a crisis. Later in 1962, however, the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union attempted to place nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island, overshadowed everything that had gone before. The USA and the USSR confronted each other in the western Atlantic. NATO was essentially on the sidelines, although the Alliance issued a formal endorsement of the US actions. One of the outcomes of the Cuban crisis was that in 1963 the USA and the UK assigned some of their existing nuclear forces to NATO, but a related proposal for a NATO-owned and -operated nuclear force came to naught.
    In 1963 US president John F. Kennedy paid an extremely successful visit to Europe, which included his famous ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
’ speech in West Berlin. His assassination later in the year came as a major shock to NATO, although there was muted relief when it became clear that this was not the result of some Soviet plot. Then in 1964 Khrushchev was ousted in a bloodless coup and, on 16 October, China exploded its first atomic bomb.
    The year 1966 saw a succession of problems with France culminate in the announcement that French forces would be withdrawn from the integrated command structure ( see Chapter 4 ). A corollary was that NATO had to remove all installations not under French command from French soil, which caused a major exodus of headquarters to the Low Countries, and of US military facilities to West Germany and the UK.
    In 1967 the Military Committee conducted NATO’s first major strategic review since 1956, proposing a change from the ‘tripwire’ strategy fn1 to ‘flexible response’ which was approved at a December 1967 ministerial meeting. fn2 Under this new concept, NATO devized a multitude of balanced responses, both nuclear and conventional, which, in the event of Warsaw Pact aggression, could be implemented in a balanced fashion, depending upon the prevailing circumstances. 1 That year also saw the publication of the ‘Harmel Report ’ on
Future Tasks of the Alliance
, which restated the principles of the Alliance, stressed the importance of common approaches and greater consultation, and drew ‘particular attention to the defence problems of the exposed areas e.g. the South-Eastern flank’. 2
    In 1968 Communist eastern Europe suffered yet another of its periodic upheavals, this time in Czechoslovakia, leading to an invasion by Warsaw Pact forces, which, while NATO took no overt military action, did cause the Alliance to review its responses to aggression. NATO also issued a warning about the dangers inherent in the Soviet advocacy of the right to intervene in the affairs of a fellow member of the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’, a somewhat elusive body whose existence was not recognized by the United Nations. However, by doing nothing to interfere with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, NATO members appeared to give at least tacit acknowledgement to the existence of a Soviet ‘Great Power sphere of influence’ in which the rules which normally governed the behaviour of smaller states did not apply.
    The following two years saw important diplomatic initiatives. In late 1969 the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) was held in November; this was followed in December by the launch of the West German government’s ‘
Ostpolitik
’. Chancellor Willy Brandt’s strategy proved very fruitful and resulted in a German–Soviet Treaty in August 1970 and a German–Polish Treaty four months later,