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

slowly changing deterrence ethos was a politically
irreversible move away from the stern nuclear warfighting
assumptions of the 1950s.
Hidden Consequences of <strong>Nuclear</strong> Disillusion within
the Warsaw Pact. There was no equivalent ferment
within the Warsaw Pact, where all nuclear weapons
were retained under the direct control of KGB detachments,
<strong>and</strong> where the nearest to an alliance debate
was a single Czechoslovak request in 1983 for an unprecedented
Warsaw Pact training schedule devoted
to an actual Warsaw Pact defense—before practicing
the inevitable counteroffensive in Exercise Shield 84. 91
But there were slow, intangible, <strong>and</strong> sometimes covert
consequences for planning exchanges of weapons as
fateful as TNWs in such an atmosphere. The intensely
risky offensive orientation which Russian strategies
imposed led to a demotivated <strong>and</strong> fatalistic view
among minor Warsaw Pact allies, aware of the inevitable
scale of losses in the scenarios for which they
trained. One Polish officer in Warsaw Pact headquarters,
Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, became a defector-inplace
(later called “the First Polish Officer in <strong>NATO</strong>”)
partly because of his concern over the ruthless <strong>and</strong>
entirely offensive nature of Warsaw Pact plans, which
would unhesitatingly sacrifice Polish blood on “a Red
Altar.” <strong>NATO</strong>’s conventional inferiority would force
it to respond to a Warsaw Pact invasion with TNWs,
which would leave Pol<strong>and</strong> a wastel<strong>and</strong>. 92 To avert that
future, he became an immensely valuable early western
intelligence source on the strategy of deep operations
which the Soviets began planning from the late
1970s to mid-1980s. His revelations, along with those
provided by the equally disillusioned Russian General
Dmitri Polyakov, were crucial to <strong>NATO</strong>’s early
recognition of <strong>and</strong> answer to that strategy. 93
49