American And Soviet Nuclear War

Acritical component of this strategy is reflected in the following declaration :

So long as forces committed to NATO and the external nuclear forces supporting the alliance are able to inflict catastrophic damage on Soviet nuclear society even after a surprise nuclear attack, it is unlikely that the Soviet Union will deliberately initiate a general war or any other aggression in the NATO area that involves a clear risk of escalation to nuclear war.

Flexible response remained the cornerstone of offi cial NATO strategic doctrine for the next two decades. However, there was criticism of its ambiguous nature and belief that it did not refl ect changing European strategic conditions and public opinion during the 1970s and 1980s. These criticisms were voiced in a 1988
article in the U.S. Army War College professional journal Parameters.

This article stated that strategic parity between the United States and Soviet Union had eroded the credibility of threats of deliberate escalation and detracted from NATO’s ability to use nuclear threats to deter non-nuclear attacks and halt Soviet advances if deterrence failed. This article also maintained that U.S. and Soviet acquisition of a wide spectrum of theater and strategic nuclear forces undercuts the rationale NATO uses to justify the deliberate escalation portion of its flexible response strategy and that NATO would not gain a military advantage from introducing nuclear weapons into a Warsaw pact-initiated war.

Concern over the effectiveness of NATO’s nuclear deterrent caused alliance policymakers to examine ways of bolstering the effectiveness of its conventional forces. An example of this was the Follow-on Forces Attack (FOFA) concept approved by NATO’s Defense Planning Committee in 1984. FOFA sought to build
a NATO capability to hold leading divisions of a Warsaw Pact conventional forces assault by launching effective conventional force interdiction and destruction attacks against enemy follow-on forces before their logistical and combat support could be brought to the front lines.

Explosion Nuclear - Russian/soviet - America

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War in the early 1990s and made it unnecessary for NATO to seek to implement its military doctrine against the Soviet bloc invasion it had been designed to counter. However, the collapse of the post–World War II European security architecture posed new challenges for
NATO. These would be first demonstrated when the collapse of Yugoslavia created vicious internecine ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia- Herzegovina and Kosovo, which would eventually compel external intervention.

Nuclear

An early attempt by NATO to formulate how to respond to the new post–Cold War security environment was its November 1991 Strategic Concept document. Key points of this document included containing the consequences of potential civil and interstate confl icts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; collaborative defense against any aggression directed at alliance territory but not operations in areas beyond; and ensuring the territorial integrity of member states as a means of enhancing European peace and stability.

Posted in: World War