Military Security in Europe

The spring and summer of 1987 marked the 40th anniversary of the emergence of the cold war—the falling out among the four main Allies after their victory over Nazi Germany—which divided Europe and led to enduring political conflict between East and West.

In the intervening four decades, the NATO-Warsaw Pact military confrontation in Europe has emerged as the largest peacetime military concentration in history. It now comprises over six million men in active-duty military forces on both sides, with an additional four million in organized reserves, over 200 standing ground force divisions, over 100 reserve divisions, 65,000 heavy tanks, 20,000 combat aircraft, over 2,600 naval vessels in the seas bordering Europe, and over 10,000 nuclear warheads for tactical and intermediate-range delivery systems. Adding together the expenditures of both alliances, the European confrontation consumes roughly two-thirds of the world’s total annual trillion-dollar expenditures for armed forces.

Over the last couple of decades, much of the ideological steam of the cold war has seeped away. Moscow has lost its monopolistic position as the center of an expanding world network of communist parties, including those of Western Europe. For 30 years, despite persistent effort, the Soviet Union has not been able to convene a comprehensive meeting of these parties.

For the first 20 years of the cold war, the NATO states insisted that any improvement in East-West relations be dependent on progress toward German reunification and other manifestations of Soviet retrenchment in Eastern Europe. In 1975, however, they signed the Helsinki accords acknowledging the postwar boundaries in Eastern Europe and the incorporation of former German territory into Poland and the U.S.S.R. In the 1970s, too, West and East Germany concluded a treaty regulating their relations and even providing for consultation on security and arms control issues at the official level. The United States, the United Kingdom and France concluded the quadripartite Berlin agreement with the U.S.S.R.; it assured ground access to and from West Berlin for West Berliners, West Germans and other nonmilitary travelers, and removed the Berlin issue as a source of daily East-West political confrontation.