restore a stable and compliant regime on the Soviet Union’s sensitive southern borders, prompted a US boycott of the upcoming 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow (a compliment duly repaid when the Soviet bloc spurned the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984) and caused President Jimmy Carter publicly to revise ‘my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are’ (
No-one, least of all the leaders of Western Europe whose countries would have been the first to suffer in a nuclear exchange, had any illusions about the value of nuclear missiles. As instruments of war such weapons were uniquely unhelpful—in contrast to spears, they really were only good for sitting on. Nonetheless, as a deterrent device a nuclear arsenal had its uses—if your opponent could be convinced that it might, ultimately, be used. There was, in any case, no other way to defend Western Europe against a Warsaw Pact that by the early 1980s boasted more than fifty infantry and armored divisions, 16,000 tanks, 26,000 fighting vehicles and 4,000 combat aircraft.
That is why British Prime Ministers (both Margaret Thatcher and before her James Callaghan), West German Chancellors and the leaders of Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands all welcomed the new battlefield missiles and authorized them to be stationed on their soil. In his new-found enthusiasm for the Western alliance, French President Francois Mitterrand was especially keen: in a dramatic speech to a somewhat bemused Bundestag in January 1983 he impressed upon West Germans the urgent need to hold firm and adopt the latest American missiles.[283]
The ‘new’ Cold War re-opened a prospect of terror out of all apparent proportion to the issues at stake—or the intentions of most of the participants. In Western Europe the anti-nuclear peace movement underwent a revival, strengthened by a new generation of ‘green’ activists. In Britain an enthusiastic and decidedly English assortment of feminists, environmentalists and anarchists, together with their assembled friends and relations, mounted a prolonged siege of the cruise missile site at Greenham Common—to the bewilderment of its long- suffering American garrison.
The opposition was greatest in West Germany, where the Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was forced to step down after the left wing of his own party voted against the new missiles—which were then approved and installed by his Christian Democratic successor Helmut Kohl.[284] The mirage of a de-nuclearized, neutral zone in central Europe was still dear to many Germans, and prominent West German Greens and Social Democrats added their voices to official East German appeals against nuclear weapons—at a demonstration in Bonn in October 1983 former Chancellor Willy Brandt urged a sympathetic crowd of 300,000 people to demand that their government unilaterally renounce any new missiles. The so-called ‘Krefeld Appeal’ against the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in the Federal Republic gathered 2.7 million signatures.
Neither the invasion of Afghanistan nor the ‘state of war’ in Poland aroused comparable concern in Western Europe even in official circles (indeed, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s first response to Jaruzelski’s declaration of martial law was to send a high-level personal representative to Warsaw in February 1982 to help overcome Polish ‘isolation’[285]). As for the ‘peaceniks’, they were far less troubled by repression in Warsaw than by the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Washington. Although NATO’s decision to deploy new missiles had been accompanied by the offer of negotiations to reduce such weapons (the so-called ‘twin track’ approach), it seemed increasingly obvious that the US under its new president had adopted a new and aggressive strategy.
Much of the belligerence in Washington was just rhetoric—when Ronald Reagandemanded that ‘Poland be Poland’, or dubbed Moscow an ‘evil empire’ (in March 1983) he was playing to a domestic audience. The same president, after all, was initiating talks on nuclear arms reduction and offering to withdraw his own intermediate- range missiles if the Soviets dismantled theirs. But the United States was indeed embarking upon a major program of rearmament. In August 1981 Reagan announced that the US would stockpile neutron bombs. The MX missile system, in breach of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, was announced in November 1982, followed five months later by the Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’), prompting a Soviet protest on the credible grounds that it breached the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Official military aid and clandestine support to Afghanistan and Central America was steadily augmented. In 1985 US defense spending rose by 6 percent, an unprecedented peacetime increase.[286]
Back in September 1981 Reagan had warned that without a verifiable nuclear arms agreement there would be an arms race and that if there were an arms race the US would win it. And so it proved. In retrospect, the American defense build-up would come to be seen as the cunningly crafted lever that bankrupted and ultimately broke the Soviet system. This, however, is not quite accurate. The Soviet Union could ill afford the armaments race upon which it had begun to embark as early as 1974. But bankruptcy alone would not have brought Communism to its knees.
The Second Cold War, and America’s public belligerence, undoubtedly increased the strains on a creaking and dysfunctional system. The Soviet Union had built a military machine that defeated Hitler, occupied half of Europe and matched the West weapon for weapon for forty years—but at a terrible price. At their peak, somewhere between 30-40 percent of Soviet resources were diverted to military spending, four to five times the American share. It was already obvious to many Soviet experts that their country could not indefinitely maintain such a burden. In the long run the economic bill for this generations-long military build-up must come due.
But in the short run at least, foreign tensions probably helped shore up the regime. The Soviet Union might be a continent-size Potemkin village—‘Upper Volta with missiles’ in Helmut Schmidt’s pithy description—but it did, after all, have those missiles and they conferred a certain status and respect upon their owners. Moreover the ageing Soviet leaders, KGB director Yuri Andropov in particular, took the American threat very seriously. Like their counterparts in Washington they really believed the other side was contemplating pre-emptive nuclear war. Reagan’s hard line, and in particular his Strategic Defense Initiative, made the old Soviet leadership even less disposed to compromise.
The real military dilemma facing the Soviet leaders was neither in Europe nor in Washington, but rather in Kabul.
Had the occupation of Afghanistan succeeded in installing a secure, friendly regime in Kabul, the Soviet leaders could have chalked up a double success. They would have re-affirmed Moscow’s faltering presence in the Middle East while sending a ‘clear message’ to a new generation of Soviet Muslims tempted by dreams of independence. But the Soviets, of course, failed in Afghanistan. Brezhnev, Gromyko and their generals ignored not just the lessons of Vietnam, repeating many of the Americans’ errors; they also forgot czarist Russia’s own failures in the same region eighty years earlier. Instead, the USSR’s disastrous attempt to sustain a puppet regime in unfamiliar, hostile territory aroused an intransigent opposition of guerrillas and zealots (
Afghanistan, in short, was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Its traumatic impact upon a generation of conscripted soldiers would emerge only later. By the early-1990s it was estimated that one in five veterans of the Afghan wars were confirmed alcoholics; in post-Soviet Russia many of the others, unable to find regular work, drifted into far-right nationalist organizations. But long before then even the Soviet leaders themselves could see the scale of their mis-step. In addition to the cost in men and materiel, the decade-long war of attrition in the Afghan mountains constituted an extended international humiliation. It excluded for the foreseeable future any
