nded to be able to fight. Viewed in a broader context, of course, the very fact that no such war ever took place may be regarded as a resounding demonstration of NATO's success.
A military alliance that is entered into in wartime, or on the verge of a war, when the conflict is regarded as more or less inevitable, is intended to fight. A military alliance that is entered into in peacetime, however, implicitly has a deterrent role, to dissuade a prospective enemy from attacking by confronting him with the prospect of facing the alliance's combined forces.
The word deterrence achieved its great currency in the nuclear age, but the idea is an ancient one, at least as old as the Roman maxim "to have peace, prepare for war," and doubtless very much older. Certainly, however, the deterrent role of NATO was starkly underlined by the nuclear age in which it came into being. Indeed, NATO's war-fighting plans always had a certain air of unreality about them.
This writer once saw (but cannot now trace) what was reputed to be a US military officer's thumbnail characterization of the planned NATO response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe: "We will fight with conventional weapons until we are losing; then we will fight with tactical nuclear weapons until we are losing; then we will blow up the world." Analysts might and did compute the predicted effects of various nuclear war-fighting scenarios, but it was clear that any general nuclear exchange would be a cataclysm beyond historical experience.
For the European partners in NATO, the sequence outlined by the US officer was even shorter. A tactical nuclear exchange would be cataclysmic for Western Europe, since "German towns are only two kilotons apart." Some of the greatest internal strains in NATO's history, in fact û in particular the Persing II controversy of the early 1980s û stemmed from the perception that use of tactical nuclear weapons would be as catastrop...