Chapter 1: The Buildup to War
While the third World War may seem inevitable to a modern reader, the truth is that in many ways it was completely avoidable, and in fact undesirable to both sides throughout most of what is now referred to as the ‘Cold War’ period of 1946 to 1986. The world had reached the brink of all consuming war several times beforehand, and each time had dragged itself away from the precipice. Three years earlier, nuclear war had nearly been sparked not once, but twice due to a NATO exercise and a faulty Soviet system respectively. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 had also nearly caused a full scale war to erupt between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In almost every case, skillful diplomacy and level heads had kept the United Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America from pressing the big red button and dooming the world to nuclear hellfire.
The scale of the diplomatic and espionage machines both of the superpowers used to try to determine what the other was up to was staggering. Agents in Moscow, Berlin, and all around the world stole secrets, hid or ferreted out informants, experimented with radical new techniques and equipment, and kept tabs on whoever was deemed interesting enough to watch. Summits between world leaders were commonly scheduled in order to discuss and resolve issues, while ambassadors negotiated and discussed policies and aims with each other to prevent either side from getting too nervous. The President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet Premier Mikael Gorbachev even had hotlines in their offices they could use to directly contact each other at any time. However, no matter how lucky the gamblers, eventually the dice go against them, and no more so was this evident than in the weeks following the Black Sea incident. A comparison of the history behind and the situations between the NATO powers and Warsaw Pact is really needed to understand why things this time broke down in such a devastating manner.
NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 as a defensive alliance incorporating most of the Western nations involved in the Second World War. The structure for the alliance was set earlier than that however, as it merely expanded upon the framework provided by the Treaty of Brussels a year earlier. The Treaty of Brussels was a defensive pact between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and was primarily intended to deter any expansionist actions by the USSR in the post-war towards Western Europe. The founding members of NATO included the signatories of the Treaty of Brussels, along with the United States of America, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland.
NATO was very similarly intended, though the scope grew as the escalation into the Cold War truly began. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first few articles were primarily focused on diplomatic resolutions to crises involving member nations, and for economic inter-cooperation and trade between the signatories. However, these facts are overshadowed by the fifth article. Article V stated quite plainly “The Parties [to the treaty] agree that an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all”. In short, any military attack against any one of the members, would be responded to as an attack on all of the members together. The gauntlet had been thrown down against the Soviet Union, and in no uncertain terms.
NATO’s first expansions similarly reinforced its position as standing as a barrier against the Soviet Union and the Communist Blocs forming in Europe and the world. Turkey and Greece, both surrounded by Soviet aligned nations and fervently anti-communist, joined the alliance in 1952. Strategically, the alignment of Turkey into the NATO sphere was a huge boon for the budding alliance, effectively rendering the Soviet Black Sea Fleet an irrelevant afterthought to naval planners, and along with Greece presenting a unified front in the Balkans against communist expansion. More importantly though, it set the battle lines and ideological differences that would come to define the Cold War and the escalation of it. There was no hiding the true purpose of the alliance after the Soviets were rejected from joining in 1954: NATO would not accept communist interference in Western Europe.
Early on however, NATO prospects against the Soviet Union and its puppet nations in Eastern Europe were grim, if not impossible. They were outnumbered, outspent, and in many ways technologically behind the Soviet Union in terms of armor development and to a degree, aircraft. In response, NATO decided early on that the use of nuclear devices even before the Soviets had deployed or used their own would be necessary to defeat any Soviet thrust into Western Europe. Even with the addition of the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany) to the alliance structure in 1955 did little to shift this balance of power. The German lands would become an irradiated killing zone, in the hopes of stopping or even outright destroying the Soviet Union.
This unified nuclear policy though, ran into many issues. The West Germans naturally objected to their country being a free fire zone for nuclear weapons, though the strategic and tactical necessity of their use was enough of a fact that they tended to keep their objections somewhat subdued. The French however, would have none of it. As one of the three nuclear powers in NATO (the other two being the UK and USA) they demanded far more influence on the alliance than they had been originally granted, and a modification of the ‘Special Relationship’ of the Anglo-American alliance to include the French. French President Charles De Gaulle’s demands eventually caused a fracture within the alliance structure, with all non-French NATO troops having to leave French territory, French nuclear doctrine no longer aligning with NATO’s, and the French slowly withdrawing from the command structure of the alliance alongside demanding to be able to make a separate peace with the now formed Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. While still a NATO member, and secretly having agreed to rejoin the command structure in case of conflict with the Warsaw Pact, this apparent withdrawal from NATO affairs would have dire ramifications decades down the line.
By 1986, NATO consisted of sixteen nations with the addition of Spain as a signatory in 1982, possessed a considerable nuclear arsenal, a nearly unmatchable naval force, and had reached the point where they considered a Warsaw Pact offensive in Western Europe to be stoppable without the use of nuclear arms due to technological equivalence or superiority. Over five million men were actively serving in the military's of the various parties to the treaty. Economically, NATO was humming along quite nicely with few exceptions. On the other side of the Iron Curtain however, the situation was somewhat different.
While the third World War may seem inevitable to a modern reader, the truth is that in many ways it was completely avoidable, and in fact undesirable to both sides throughout most of what is now referred to as the ‘Cold War’ period of 1946 to 1986. The world had reached the brink of all consuming war several times beforehand, and each time had dragged itself away from the precipice. Three years earlier, nuclear war had nearly been sparked not once, but twice due to a NATO exercise and a faulty Soviet system respectively. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 had also nearly caused a full scale war to erupt between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In almost every case, skillful diplomacy and level heads had kept the United Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America from pressing the big red button and dooming the world to nuclear hellfire.
The scale of the diplomatic and espionage machines both of the superpowers used to try to determine what the other was up to was staggering. Agents in Moscow, Berlin, and all around the world stole secrets, hid or ferreted out informants, experimented with radical new techniques and equipment, and kept tabs on whoever was deemed interesting enough to watch. Summits between world leaders were commonly scheduled in order to discuss and resolve issues, while ambassadors negotiated and discussed policies and aims with each other to prevent either side from getting too nervous. The President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet Premier Mikael Gorbachev even had hotlines in their offices they could use to directly contact each other at any time. However, no matter how lucky the gamblers, eventually the dice go against them, and no more so was this evident than in the weeks following the Black Sea incident. A comparison of the history behind and the situations between the NATO powers and Warsaw Pact is really needed to understand why things this time broke down in such a devastating manner.
NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 as a defensive alliance incorporating most of the Western nations involved in the Second World War. The structure for the alliance was set earlier than that however, as it merely expanded upon the framework provided by the Treaty of Brussels a year earlier. The Treaty of Brussels was a defensive pact between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and was primarily intended to deter any expansionist actions by the USSR in the post-war towards Western Europe. The founding members of NATO included the signatories of the Treaty of Brussels, along with the United States of America, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland.
NATO was very similarly intended, though the scope grew as the escalation into the Cold War truly began. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first few articles were primarily focused on diplomatic resolutions to crises involving member nations, and for economic inter-cooperation and trade between the signatories. However, these facts are overshadowed by the fifth article. Article V stated quite plainly “The Parties [to the treaty] agree that an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all”. In short, any military attack against any one of the members, would be responded to as an attack on all of the members together. The gauntlet had been thrown down against the Soviet Union, and in no uncertain terms.
NATO’s first expansions similarly reinforced its position as standing as a barrier against the Soviet Union and the Communist Blocs forming in Europe and the world. Turkey and Greece, both surrounded by Soviet aligned nations and fervently anti-communist, joined the alliance in 1952. Strategically, the alignment of Turkey into the NATO sphere was a huge boon for the budding alliance, effectively rendering the Soviet Black Sea Fleet an irrelevant afterthought to naval planners, and along with Greece presenting a unified front in the Balkans against communist expansion. More importantly though, it set the battle lines and ideological differences that would come to define the Cold War and the escalation of it. There was no hiding the true purpose of the alliance after the Soviets were rejected from joining in 1954: NATO would not accept communist interference in Western Europe.
Early on however, NATO prospects against the Soviet Union and its puppet nations in Eastern Europe were grim, if not impossible. They were outnumbered, outspent, and in many ways technologically behind the Soviet Union in terms of armor development and to a degree, aircraft. In response, NATO decided early on that the use of nuclear devices even before the Soviets had deployed or used their own would be necessary to defeat any Soviet thrust into Western Europe. Even with the addition of the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany) to the alliance structure in 1955 did little to shift this balance of power. The German lands would become an irradiated killing zone, in the hopes of stopping or even outright destroying the Soviet Union.
This unified nuclear policy though, ran into many issues. The West Germans naturally objected to their country being a free fire zone for nuclear weapons, though the strategic and tactical necessity of their use was enough of a fact that they tended to keep their objections somewhat subdued. The French however, would have none of it. As one of the three nuclear powers in NATO (the other two being the UK and USA) they demanded far more influence on the alliance than they had been originally granted, and a modification of the ‘Special Relationship’ of the Anglo-American alliance to include the French. French President Charles De Gaulle’s demands eventually caused a fracture within the alliance structure, with all non-French NATO troops having to leave French territory, French nuclear doctrine no longer aligning with NATO’s, and the French slowly withdrawing from the command structure of the alliance alongside demanding to be able to make a separate peace with the now formed Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. While still a NATO member, and secretly having agreed to rejoin the command structure in case of conflict with the Warsaw Pact, this apparent withdrawal from NATO affairs would have dire ramifications decades down the line.
By 1986, NATO consisted of sixteen nations with the addition of Spain as a signatory in 1982, possessed a considerable nuclear arsenal, a nearly unmatchable naval force, and had reached the point where they considered a Warsaw Pact offensive in Western Europe to be stoppable without the use of nuclear arms due to technological equivalence or superiority. Over five million men were actively serving in the military's of the various parties to the treaty. Economically, NATO was humming along quite nicely with few exceptions. On the other side of the Iron Curtain however, the situation was somewhat different.