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European defence before and after the ‘Turn of the Tide’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Beatrice Heuser
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Extract

The last fifty years were bloody and dismal for many war-torn regions of the world. The end of the Second World War ushered in a new era of local and ‘limited’ wars throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. Hardly a day went by without a war, civil or international, claiming its victims somewhere on our planet. Yet Europe experienced a ‘Long Peace’ (J. L. Gaddis). The direct confrontation of the superpowers, the Soviet and US tanks on either side of the inner German border, immunized Europe from the plague of war. In the great wrestling match between East and West, Europe was the prime prize, and too much was at stake for all sides to allow any wars, even minor wars, to erupt anywhere on this continent.1

Type
Review article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 1993 , pp. 409 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1993

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References

1 The one exception, the Greek civil war of 1946–9, was of course ended at Stalin's command precisely because he feared an escalation of the conflict.

2 Stromseth, Jane S., The Origins of Flexible Response: NATO's Debate over Strategy in the 1960s (London, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Daalder, Nature and Practice, p. 59.

4 For an expose of British strategic preferences from the late 1970s until 1992, particularly with regard to the rationale governing any first use, stemming largely from the same pen, see Quinlan, Michael, ‘Thinking Deterrence Through’, in Woolsey, R. James (ed.), Nuclear Arms: Ethics, Strategy, Politics (San Fransisco, 1984), pp. 53–62Google Scholar. See also Sir Michael Quinlan's speech before the Soviet Chiefs of Staff on November 1990, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Abolition of War’, International Affairs, 67, no. 2 (1991)Google Scholar.

5 Daalder, Nature and Practice p. 268.

6 Particularly Michael Quinlan, as British representative of the High Level Group, played a key role, see Bluth, Christopher, Britain, Germany and Nuclear Weapons (Oxford, forthcoming 1993)Google Scholar. I am grateful to the author for letting me read his manuscript.

7 It is thoroughly surprising to read that Daalder's misperception here is shared by none other than Sir Michael Howard, doyen of British strategists, whose remarkable retrospective misinterpretation of the LRTNF decision is quoted in Daalder on p. 205.

8 Haftendorn, Helga, ‘Das doppelte Miβverständnis’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte. 33, no. 2 (1985)Google Scholar.

9 Quinlan, ‘Thinking Deterrence Through’, p. 61.

10 Quinlan, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Abolition of War’, p. 300.

11 Rühl, Lothar, ‘The Nuclear Balance in the Central Region and Strategic Stability in Europe’, NATO's Sixteen Nations, 32, no. 5 (August 1987), p. 19Google Scholar.

12 Haftendorn, ‘Das doppelte Miβverständnis’. On this issue, see also Bluth, Britain, Germany and Nuclear Weapons.

13 Nature and Practice, pp. 203ff.

14 Mey, Holger, NATO Strategic vor der Wende: Die Entwicklung des Verständnisses nuklearer Macht im Bündnis zwischen 1967 und 1990 (Baden Baden, 1992), pp. 70–71Google Scholar.

15 Ullman, Richard, Securing Europe (Twickenham, 1991), p. 63Google Scholar.