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

91. Heuser, 2006, p. 212.
92. In November 2005, the Polish Foreign Minister Radek
Sikorski displayed a Warsaw Pact exercise plan from 1977, titled
“7 Days to the River Rhine” showing very large scale Soviet nuclear
strikes against Western Europe (except Britain <strong>and</strong> France),
following a posited <strong>NATO</strong> nuclear first strike. He emphasized
that “the objective [was] to take over most of Western Europe. . . .
This is crucial to educating the country on the way Pol<strong>and</strong> was
an unwilling ally of the USSR.” He called it “a personally shattering
experience” to see maps showing Soviet bloc comm<strong>and</strong>ers
assuming that <strong>NATO</strong> tactical nuclear weapons would rain down
along the Vistula to block reinforcements arriving from Russia.
“About two million Polish civilians would have died in such a
war, <strong>and</strong> the country would have been all but wiped off the face
of the earth.” It was scenarios like this, developed within a onesidedly
Soviet dominated military organization, which seem to
have changed Kuklinski’s loyalties <strong>and</strong> presumably had a wider
emotional effect, percolating through the millions of conscripts
who passed through the Polish Armed Forces <strong>and</strong> may have contributed
to their perceived unreliability towards the end of the
Cold War. Nicholas Watt, “Pol<strong>and</strong> Risks Russia’s Wrath with Soviet
<strong>Nuclear</strong> Attack Map,” Guardian, November 26, 2005.
93. Barrass, pp. 213-214.
94. Bluth, pp. 210-211.
95. Ibid., p. 234.
96. Barrass, p. 216.
97. Sheri L. Wasserman, The Neutron Bomb Controversy: A
Study in Alliance Politics, New York: Praeger, 1983, p. 134, quoted
in Jeffrey A. Larsen, The Future of U.S. Non-Strategic <strong>Nuclear</strong> <strong>Weapons</strong>
<strong>and</strong> Implications for <strong>NATO</strong>: Drifting Toward the Foreseeable Future,
Rome, Italy: <strong>NATO</strong> Defence College, 2006.
98. Barrass, p. 193.
99. Kelleher, p. 449.
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