Comment on the 1965 Warsaw Pact War Game Exercise
by Leopoldo Nuti
Reading these documents while a new, sinister threat hangs over us and grips our imagination is at once scary and reassuring. Due to a bizarre twist of fate that could have been hardly imagined, the vision of a giant clash of conventional forces, preceded by a devastating exchange of nuclear strikes - the danger that menaced to engulf and annihilate large portions of the civilized world until very recently - looks today no more perilous and almost as old as, than the reconstruction of a T-Rex in a natural science museum, while we have witnessed on television scenes that until a few weeks ago we would have probably deemed excessive even for a catastrophic Hollywood movie. And yet these documents do not belong to the Jurassic era but are hardly 35 years old, and they teach us a lesson that we should learn by heart and never forget. The fact that they were simply meant as a training exercise for the Warsaw Pact staff, that they were nothing more than a sophisticated wargaming exercise, should not mislead us about their ultimate significance - and perhaps makes them an even more sinister reading than a real war plan. The bottom line, in fact, is not that they demonstrate a presumed Soviet intention to unleash a nuclear war against the West, but that they were meant to accustom Warsaw Pact officers with the impact of nuclear war, and to prepare them to fight in an environment where a serious exchange of atomic strikes had taken place just a few minutes before. It is their psychological assumption, not their content, which I find truly frightening.
A General Overview
The structure of the war game exercise that, thanks to the efforts of the PHP, is now available for our research purposes, confirms much that was already suspected about the possible scenarios for a nuclear confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In true Cold War style, the war game's scenario attributes to the enemy the beginning of the hostilities: it soon makes clear, however, that if the Warsaw Pact would only fight a defensive war, true to the strategic doctrines of the Soviet Union, it would fight it in an offensive fashion. The first step, therefore, comes from the NATO side and consists in a suspicious number of movements by NATO troops towards the borders of the Western alliance - "the direct preparation of a surprise attack against the Soviet Union and the other Socialist countries under cover of various exercises". "When the beginning of the 'Westerners'' nuclear attack has been ascertained," continues the document, the Warsaw Pact unleashes its own reaction: the first NATO nuclear strike is supposed to take place at 7:00 a.m., but in the next 25 minutes almost 7 megatons of nuclear warheads are happily distributed by the Warsaw Pact among Munich, Vienna, Verona and Vicenza - which are almost completely annihilated. Other warheads with a lower yield are used against other military targets - areas where the Western forces are being mustered, NATO nuclear sites, and so on. When the nuclear and chemical exchange is over, the Warsaw Pact swings to the offensive and both sides move their forces forward and fight a classical close combat in Austria, where the Pact divisions smash through the NATO ones and then split their forces in two directions, towards the North of Italy and Bavaria. In about 11-13 days, most of Northern Italy is seized as far as Brescia and Bologna - then a pause is enforced before deciding whether to go ahead and grasp the rest of the peninsula or switch to the defensive.
Some Technical Considerations
The first, obvious remark that springs to mind when reading these documents regards the stunning ease with which nuclear weapons are employed throughout the training exercise. The instructions do not just assume the use of tactical weapons to destroy the concentration of enemy forces on the battlefield, but allow the "Easterners" to use 10 warheads of 500 kilotons each (readers unfamiliar with nuclear lingo should be reminded that the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a yield of 14 and 21 kilotons respectively) to strike deep into the rear of the enemy and destroy its command and control facilities (COMLANDSOUTH at Verona) or its nuclear forces (SETAF in Vicenza). NATO is given a roughly equal nuclear capability - albeit the war game assumes that it would be hitting with more powerful warheads of 1 megaton each launched either from the US Polaris submarines stationed in the Mediterranean or from the US Pershing missiles in Germany.
The political assumption on which the war game is based - that of a NATO offensive - sounds a bit implausible and is not elaborated in the scenario: we only know that "as a result of the Westerners' aggressive politics, the international situation became more and more tense" and that the "Easterners" were ready to strike as soon as there was enough evidence that the enemy was advancing. Perhaps the scenario reflects the fear that Western forces might push forward to support a rebellion in one of the Eastern European satellites, perhaps it is just a excuse to train officers to take the initiative and think offensively. As for the military assumption that NATO would resort to a nuclear first strike right at the start of the hostilities, it should be stressed that in 1965, the date of these documents, NATO had not officially adopted the new strategic doctrine of flexible response yet (it would do so only in 1967); nevertheless by then for almost five years the Western alliance had been debating how to change its strategic posture from one of heavy reliance on nuclear weapons to one which tried to "raise the threshold" of atomic warfare and strengthen the Alliance's conventional forces to impose a pause on the aggressor without resorting to nuclear weapons from the early stage of the hostilities. And yet, in spite of all NATO's efforts, the exercise assumes that a clash between the two alliances would start with a rather big nuclear bang from the very beginning, revealing that the assumptions on which the Plan based its exercises were that of very limited restraint on the use of nuclear weapons.
A second reflection concerns the strategic importance of Austria in the early stages of a possible confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Without much consideration for its neutrality, the war game instructions assume that the forces of the Warsaw Pact would rush forward into Austria and then veer North and South to outflank NATO forces in Southern Germany and Northern Italy. These documents confirm, albeit only from a purely theoretical standpoint, that a successful occupation of Austria was indeed regarded as crucial to the first stage of a clash between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Incidentally, it is interesting that the war game instructions do not say a word about a possible other Pact Army group entering into Italy across the Yugoslav border - the documents only refer to other offensives taking place in the direction of Berlin and Prague.
The centrality of Austrian territory to the defense of Southern Germany and Northern Italy had long been discussed by Western strategists. When the Austrian State Treaty was signed, in May 1955, many thought that the country's neutrality had been purchased at the rather heavy price of withdrawing all the Western Allies' occupation troops and, above all, of creating a strategic vacuum in the middle of the Atlantic Alliance, separating the Central front from the Southern one. The Italian military, in particular, had long been insisting that the Allied forces in Austria, small as they were, should coordinate their initial reaction to a possible Soviet attack with the Italian armed forces on the other side of the Alps. After an initial British reluctance to envisage a redeployment of the Allied troops into Italian territory, since 1950 the CINCs of the Allied forces in Austria had begun to plan a coordinated manoeuver with the Italian forces. Then in early February, 1951, the Commanders of the Allied occupation troops in Austria and Trieste decided that an initial defense as far north and east as possible would have two main advantages, namely that "as much of Austria as possible would be retained", encouraging many Austrians to rally to the Western side, and that "it would give the greatest possible time and encouragement to the Italians to mobilize and fight on their frontiers".[1]
Subsequently the AFSOUTH commander, Admiral Carney, tried to persuade the occupying powers to build up their forces in Austria in order to defend the whole of its territory. Later on in 1952, however, SHAPE reached the conclusion that it was not possible to increase the strength of the Allied occupation forces, and that a forward strategy in Austria could not be implemented. While Admiral Carney insisted on the necessity to strengthen the occupation troops in order to make them able to hold the Austrian redoubt for the longest possible time, his suggestion was eventually rejected by NATO planners as it was clear that none of the three western countries with troops deployed in Austria would be able to divert the necessary resources from other possible theaters of operations.[2] The only alternative left, therefore, was to defend the Austro-Italian border, and this strategic approach was not replaced in the following years. From 1951 to the time of their withdrawal in 1955, Allied troops in Austria were given the task of fighting a delaying action and to provide the screen for the mobilization of the Italian army, which would join them once they had withdrawn into Italy in order to defend the Italian mountain passes.
The documents I have consulted on this subject over the years were limited to the period between 1945 and 1955. I have not seen any subsequent Western military record for the period between 1955 and 1965, the time of these new Hungarian documents. If the original Western approach remained valid for the years after 1955, however, the basic assumption of the war game exercise seems to have been based on a miscalculation. NATO plans did not envisage the rushing forward of its troops into Austria to fight an close combat. If a "forward strategy" had to be implemented by NATO in this region, it was in the Eastern part of the Italian front, namely on the Yugoslav border, where NATO troops could be rushed forward to stop the Warsaw Pact onslaught at the Ljubliana gap - with, or perhaps even without, the permission of the government in Belgrade. As far as Austria was concerned, however, it was much easier for NATO troops to take cover behind the Italian mountain passes and try to block the Warsaw Pact forces there. As a matter of fact, the Italian army had expressed its interest as early as 1953 in the possible tactical use of atomic weapons precisely with the intention of using them against the enemy forces that had to be concentrated in the Austrian alpine valleys before trying to cross the passes leading into Italy.
The introduction in Italy of US tactical nuclear weapons by the mid-1950s, therefore, made a possible invasion of Austria to halt a Warsaw Pact aggression a rather unlikely choice for NATO planners. While the Honest John had a shorter range, the Corporal (later replaced by the Sergeant) missiles at the disposal of SETAF could be used to hit Pact forces on the other side of the Alps - not to mention the nuclear bombs carried by both the Italian and the US Air Force. Besides, according to one source, in 1963 about 30 Atomic Demolition Munitions (ADMs) were deployed all along the Yugoslav border to be detonated inside prepared shafts and close the mountain passes in case of an attack[3] - which makes it at least possible that other ones might have been deployed along the Austrian border as well. As a matter of fact, in the early 1960s ADMs were being deployed by the US Army all across the European theater, and in 1964 there had been a public outcry in Germany when it became known that the Federal Republic's Minister of Defense had been thinking of deploying some 200 of these devices in a "nuclear mine belt" to stop enemy advances into German territory.[4] Nevertheless, if I have read the war game carefully enough, it seems that the possibility that NATO might use these weapons to seal off the Alpine passes was completely neglected by the drafters of the scenario, which makes no mention of nuclear mines but only of missiles, rockets, and airplane bombs.
Conclusions
With documents of this kind there is always a clear danger of either under- or overestimating them. A war game exercise is not even a plan, it is a mere speculation on how to conduct operations in one out of many possible scenarios which military planners are forced to imagine. In order to evaluate it correctly, we should at least know how many other scenarios were envisaged and if, and how, they were changed with the passing of time. Perhaps it was regarded as just a very extreme possibility amidst many other scenarios which did not envisage the usage of atomic weapons, but it might as well have been a moderate scenario among other ones which assumed an even more terrifying nuclear onslaught. We do know, however, that it must have been an important exercise and not a mere routine training since it was led by the Commander of the Southern Army Group, Colonel General K.I. Provalov, and that Comrade the Hungarian Minister of Defense, as well as some members of the Hungarian Central Committee, were warmly encouraged to attend it.
Even isolated as it is, however, the document is extremely important in the stark brutality of its aseptic bureaucratic language. It conveys the feeling of practicing nuclear war as a normal exercise, as a form of training to which cadres had to get used to - and as such it brings us back with a dramatic immediacy to the very recent past when a nuclear confrontation in Europe was indeed a real possibility, daily discussed and studied by the military planners of both sides as a normal fact of life. Maybe those who drafted these plans were not even horrified by what they wrote.
The document provides us therefore with a very vivid insight into the terrible logic of the bipolar confrontation and of its reliance on nuclear weapons, and shows how risky and dangerous was the assumption that the peace of the world could rest on the nuclear stalemate between the great powers. We have gone a long way since those days, but the road ahead is probably much longer than the one we have traveled so far.
LEOPOLDO NUTI is Professor of History of International Relations at the School of Political Science, University of Roma Tre. A graduate of the Universities of Florence (laurea), George Washington University(M.A. in International affairs) and Rome (Ph.D. in History of International Relations), Prof. Nuti has been a Fulbright student, NATO Research Fellow, Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Research Fellow at the CSIA, Harvard University, and a Research Fellow for the Nuclear History Program. With a number of other Italian Cold War historians, he promoted the creation of the Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies. He has published extensively on US- Italian relations and Italian foreign and security policy.
Notes
[1] On this subject see L. Nuti, "Italy and the Defense of NATO's Southern Flank, 1949-1955", in Klaus A. Maier and Norbert Wiggershaus (eds.), Das Nordatlantische Bündnis, 1949-1956 (München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1993)
[2] According to a study by SHAPE, the adoption of a forward strategy would have required sending into Austria about 14,700 more troops, together with the employment of the 6 battalions of military police stationed there and the enrollment of about 90,000 Austrians. Generale di brigata Guido Bertoni [Italian liaison officer at SHAPE] al Capo di Stato Maggiore della Difesa, Generale Marras, 18 December 1952, in AUSSME, I/5, 1952.
[3] Virgilio Ilari, Storia militare della prima repubblica, 1943-1993 (Ancona: Nuove Ricerche, 1994), p.62.
[4] Catherine Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp.215-217. On ADMs see also David E. Rodgers, Atomic Demolition Munitions. An Example of Confusing Development of NATO's Theater Nuclear Forces (School of Public Affairs, Univ. Of Maryland, Nuclear History Project and PUAF 798, 1988).
