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

e concealed by the regular annual <strong>NATO</strong> November
comm<strong>and</strong> post exercise, Able Archer. Key Warsaw
Pact units went on heightened alert as the exercise
approached. <strong>NATO</strong> was unaware of these fears until
informed later by the British spy, Oleg Gordievsky, a
senior KGB officer in London. The seriousness of the
incident remains unclear, but it caused an unnerving
shock within <strong>NATO</strong> over the unsuspected risk of inadvertent
war.
What we have since learned, however, is that Soviet
military intelligence was not concerned. Soviet <strong>and</strong>
East German agents regularly drove round Western
Europe looking for warning indicators. Consequently,
as Ogarkov’s deputy explained in later interviews:
We had confidence in our knowledge of when <strong>NATO</strong>
was preparing to launch nuclear weapons. We would
detect mating of warheads to missiles <strong>and</strong> uploading
of nuclear bombs <strong>and</strong> artillery. We listened to
the hourly circuit verification signal <strong>and</strong> believed we
would recognize a release order. 104
In this case, any crisis based upon fears of surprise
attack using aircraft <strong>and</strong> short-flight-time missiles
within Europe would have been ill-founded. The size
of the <strong>NATO</strong> TNW infrastructure (estimated in the
later 1980s at around 100 nuclear storage sites in at
least seven European countries 105 ) <strong>and</strong> its openness to
Warsaw Pact espionage made it impossible to conceal
large-scale attack preparations, <strong>and</strong> so represented in
fact an unavoidably stabilizing <strong>and</strong> confidence-building
factor.
Filling in the Blanks: <strong>NATO</strong>’s General Political Guidelines,
1986. During the decade after the PPGs, intra-
Alliance differences had made it impossible to achieve
consensus on “follow-on use.” The Glenneagles meeting
of the NPG in October 1986 finally approved the
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