Table Of ContentTHE NORTH ATLANTIC ALLIANCE AND THE SOVIET
UNION IN THE 19808
By the same author
COLLECTIVE SECURITY (with Professor O. Pick)
W ARNING AND RESPONSE
THE NORTH ATLANTIC
ALLIANCE AND THE
SOVIET UNION IN THE
1980s
Julian Critchley
© Julian Critchley 1982
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1982
All rights reserved, No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1982 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS L TD
London and Basingstoke
Compam'es and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-05618-7 ISBN 978-1-349-05616-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05616-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
05 04 03 02 01 00 99
Contents
A cknowledgements vi
PART ONE BASIC ISSUES
1 The trial of strength 3
2 Some illusions to be dissipated 13
3 The strategie situation transformed 25
4 The myth of the Tropic of Cancer 35
PART TWO POLITICAL AND MILITARY
DEVELOPMENTS OF THE SOVIET
UNION
5 Strategy of the Communist Party 43
6 Some internal eharaeteristics and problems 55
7 The military organisation of the Soviet Union 68
8 Soviet armaments: present strength 79
9 Prospeets of the projeetion of Soviet power 90
10 Propaganda as an instrument of poliey 101
PART THREE DEVELOPMENTS OF THE NORTH
ATLANTIC ALLIANCE
11 The problem of unity amid diversity 115
12 Nuclear arms and policies 127
13 The Northern theatre of operations 137
14 The Central Front 146
15 The Southern theatre of operations 160
16 Naval tasks within and beyond the Treaty Area 172
PART FOUR SOME DEFENCE PROBLEMS OF THE
UNITED KINGDOM
17 Some aspeets of the defenee of the United Kingdom 187
Not es 198
Index 204
Acknowledgements
In the making of this book I am particularly grateful for the
co-operation and advice of John Eppstein, formerly Secretary
General of the Atlantic Treaty Association and editor of World
Survey, and for the generous help of John Poole, in the Scientific
Section of the House of Commons Library, in obtaining the
documentation which I needed.
The author and publishers would also like to thank the Controller
of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, for the extract from Written
Answers, 31 July 1980.
Part One
Basic Issues
1 The trial of strength
The purpose of this book is to trace the probable course in the
next ten years of the trial of strength, which has already lasted for
more than decades, between the Soviet Union, on the one hand,
and the United States and its allies, on the other. It makes no
prophecy. Q.uite unforeseen events may undo the most confident
forecasts, as did the Iranian Revolution and the eruption of
Islamic fervour in 1979. But it will suggest the probable evolution
of the policies and armaments of both sides, in the light of
available information, and examine the consequences of the
present correlation of power in the world.
Any credible speculation of the future must begin by taking
account of the lessons of the past. What has the experience of the
first 30 years of the strategic contest between the North Atlantic
Alliance and its Communist Russian rival to teach us? It has been
the Soviet side throughout which has been the pace-setter, with
the domination of the world by its brand of Socialism as its
constant objective, with changing tactics and with rapidly
growing military strength. Yet it has been proved that, on the
other side, a system of collective defence can be kept up and
adapted by a group of unregimented and far from bellicose
peoples for the best part of a generation, even without the
stimulus of imminent attack. This is encouraging; but there are
already many signs that the task of reinforcing the common
defensive effort with civil morale is likely to become more difficult
with the passage of time, if only because of the ever-rising cost of
modern weapons - disarmament by inflation - and the persistent
hankering for compromise, if not appeasement, which revulsion
against nuclear arms evokes. It is, of course, the sine qua non of a
successful strategy of defence that there should be a reliable
reservoir of political will upon which the government can draw. I
devote a later chapter of this book to that crucial subject. It is
important to remember that the striking success of the North
Atlantic Alliance, so quickly constructed in 1949 after the
3
4 Basic Issues
Communist conquest of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade,
in arresting the further encroachment of Stalin's military and
political power in Europe, happened before men and women now
in their thirties were born. It takes a greater historical sense than
most of them, and even more younger people, possess to realise the
significance of the peace - which, their elders would say is thanks
to NATO - that they have known all their lives. That is one reason
why defence and foreign affairs occupy so small a place today in
the minds of the majority, a fact which is of great advantage to
those who, for political motives, want to weaken the North
Atlantic Alliance.
If a growing minority has been aroused in Britain during the
1970s to the need to reinforce the defensive capacity of NATO, it
is largely thanks to the influence of television, not in recalling past
history, but in giving day-to-day news about actual developments
in the Soviet Union, its threatening military superiority in
Europe, its strategie expansion in other continents and its
repressive internal regime. It is evident that if the Atlantic
Alliance is to remain effective during a fourth decade, a far more
serious effort is needed than has hitherto been forthcoming in the
Allied countries, and in particular those of Northern Europe,
whose Socialist parties are particularly susceptible to the Soviet
propaganda of peaceful co-existence, to educate those who can
lead and inform their fellow citizens in the strategie realities
confronting the nation and its allies. No-one wants the wholesale
indoctrination and inculcation of dass hatred to which every
citizen in Soviet Russia and its satellite states is subjected from
infancy. But it cannot be said that the political leaders of the
West have, since the early days of the Atlantic Alliance, given
their peoples a very clear picture of the basic issues involved,
which are obscured rather than enlightened by arcane references
to such abstractions as 'deterrence' or 'detente' and the wishful
thinking which habitually accompanies the latter.
DISSIMILAR ANTA GON1STS
What are the basic issues? The contest between the two power
groups which we are studying is not the rivalry of similar entities,
like the nation-states or alliances of states between which in the
course of European his tory there have often been wars or threats
