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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (14798)	10/6/1999 8:41:00 AM
From: MNI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

Twenty years ago today, Leonid Ilyich Breshnev announced an unilateral troops reduction at the Berlin convent honoring the 30th anniversary of the GDR. 20,000 soviet troops plus 1000 tanks of the crasnaya armiya were to be removed from GDR territory. Additionally, military exercises encompassing more than 40,000 soldiers would not take part anymore, and all military exercises above a certain threshold size would be announced to the European states 'earlier than currently'. German SPD foreign policy buff Egon Bahr, who had predicted the move on the previous evening proposed to refrain from positioning SS20 midrange rockets aiming at Western Europe instead as a sign of Soviet good will in the disarmament process (speaking aside at a local party conference concerning future SPD energy, that is nuclear power, politics). The green pacifist movement in Germany was better characterised, as I remember it, under the motive of neutrality than of low concern regarding an imminent Soviet nuclear strike. To the contrary, it was this movement who pulled the possibility of nuclear strikes back into the political focus, arguing, that nuclear war could be triggered even against rational soviet politics errandly by technical error, error in the command communication structure, wild-cat revolt of high-ranking military officers and the like. Similar likelihood of such errors was assumed for France, Britain and the U.S. and the rationale was therefore to reduce the number of warheads pointing at you, which would in turn mean that the number of warheads positioned 'in your backyard' had to be reduced. Breshnev actually played on this motive by confirming in the above-cited speech that 'countries that are not in possession of nuclear fire-power but station nuclear arms of befriended powers' were a target of soviet nuclear fire-arms. Concerning Kohl's role in making glasnost an instrument for perestroika in GDR against the will of the GDR leaders, I am not so sure about his impact, or wether he was more acting as a front for actions happening behind him due to moves in the soviet/U.S balance and strategies. What I am sure of is that Kohl wouldn't have stabilized his reign here without Reagan in a double role as a paragon and bogeyman at the sime time. Finally, the question whether U.S. midrange weapons stationed in Western Germany would point at Eastern German cities was not as central as one might assume from today's perspective. In questions of military strategy Germans of the time were quite cosmopolitan and anti-war. The question was whether peace could be better stabilised by the deterrence or by the unarmed neutrality scheme. Also, US mid-range weapons were not perceived to be the first ones aiming at Eastern Germany. Most of us were likely more concerned whether truely, like the peace movement assured as again and again, NATO allied nuclear firepower was aimed at Western Germany (the strategic rationale being that the projected fast proceeding bulk of the soviet troops should be nuked where it was, and that would be Braunschweig, Hildesheim, Hannover, Wuerzburg, Oldenburg on the first day, Munichen, Stuttgart, Hamburg on the second, Bonn, Dortmund, Aaachen on the third). You are right however, that the question of a possible threat to Germans from German ground arose and caused some trouble and awkwardness for cold warriors like F.J.Strauss and west-bound moderates like H.Kohl and H.Schmidt, the chancellor, alike. Some conservative second-row politician (I believe it was Manfred Woerner, then not yet important) even lapsed to say - in defending U.S. Midrange rocket stationing - 'we should likely be happy that older systems, by age more error-prone, are going to be substituted by modern ones now'. Regards MNI.