Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO.pdf - Program on Strategic ...

would use TNWs. 55 This seems to have been a reflection
of discussions between officials from the three occupying
powers, which had not yet crystallized into a
military plan, but was entirely in line with Kennedy’s
sentiments. 56 It seems that the disclosure of <strong>NATO</strong> discussions
of TNW use in a territorially circumscribed
crisis, involving a highly symbolic location to which
a U.S. President had tied his credibility, had a sobering
<strong>and</strong> stabilizing effect. Although Soviet forces had
been intermittently blocking the autobahns to Berlin
in August 1961 57 when Khrushchev backed Walter Ulbricht,
the leader of the GDR, in building the Berlin
Wall, he gave up his ultimatum for the Allies to sign a
peace treaty with the GDR <strong>and</strong> end the special status
of Berlin. The paradoxically stabilizing effect of the
unintended transparency of <strong>NATO</strong> nuclear plans <strong>and</strong>
deployments to Warsaw Pact espionage networks,
however, continued for years.
In September 1962, Khrushchev sent to Cuba 80 F
KR1 nuclear cruise missiles, with an anti-ship range
up to 150 km, nine warheads for Frog/Lunar battlefield
missiles, plus six atomic bombs for short-range
Ilyushin-28 bombers, to support the 40 intermediaterange
ballistic strategic missiles already secretly introduced
into Cuba. The military purpose of the TNWs
seems to have been to strike possible U.S. invasion
forces, or to attack the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo,
as the crisis deepened. The TNWs were neither
announced nor detected at the time by U.S. intelligence,
prompting a shocked response from former
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when told of
their deployment decades later, that if the U.S. forces
had come under attack from TNWs, the likely result
would have been general nuclear war. General Issa
Pliyev, the senior Soviet comm<strong>and</strong>er in Cuba, was not
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