In keeping with the theme established in an earlier blog post, I would be remiss if I did not clarify something from the maritime dimension. The idea that the increased accuracy of a missile system convincing the Soviet Union to back off in the Cold War is controversial, a little too monocausal, and requires some explanation. The crucial aspect of the Reagan years, and their underpinnings in certain defence policies initiated under Carter, was the idea that strategy itself supported with high-quality tools would have a psychological and economic impact on the opposition. Those strategies had to visibly and, most important, credibly, counter Soviet strategies. In effect, force them into a strategic cul-de-sac, force them to spend money that they didn’t have, generate a sense of futility in their leadership, and frustrate their system until it cracked. Which is essentially what happened.

The constituent components of this approach included:

1) SDI. (I refuse to call this ‘star wars’) The Strategic Defense Initiative was a key component.

2) The moderninzation of the intermediate-range nuclear forces in Western Europe, that is, GLCM and Pershing II missiles (see last post).

3) AirLand Battle: the strengthening of NATO conventional forces in West Germany so that the nuclear button did not have to be pushed too early.

4) Strategic nuclear force modernization: Trident submarine-launched missiles, B1-B bombers, Peacekeeper ICBM’s

5) The Maritime Strategy.

And what was that? This was the build-up of quality American naval capacity to challenge the huge Soviet submarine force at sea and their support structure in the Kola Peninsula, mop up anything that the enemy could float, and to provide conventional support to NATO forces in key peripheral areas like Norway. The critical part was keeping the sea lines of communications from North American to Western Europe open. And, as the strategy evolved, it appeared that threatening and targeting Soviet ballistic missile submarines had merit. As naval historian John Hattendorf pointed out, “conventional forces played a key role in deterring nuclear war, even after a war had broken out and could be used as a lever to persuade the Soviets to terminate a war.”

Some time ago a friend of mine, Captain Peter Swartz, USN worked for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell. Peter showed me a map on the wall of Powell’s office. It was a gift from his opposite number in the Soviet Union and as you can see it depicts range gates for cruise missiles launched from ships on the periphery of the Soviet Union into the interior. The missiles they were concerned with were not just the GLCMs: by the 1980s the US Navy was mounting Tomahawk cruise missiles on every ship it could. TLAM was similar to the GLCM and had the same extreme accuraccy, and it  had several conventional as well as nuclear variants. BUT….you could never be EXACTLY SURE what those deck cannisters were loaded with. In the 1950s the size of nuclear weapons meant that the only way they could be deployed from forces at sea were from large aircraft carriers of which there were 12-15 operational at any one time. The Soviets put a lot of effort into tracking and targeting those carriers with nuclear weapons. Now that every frigate, destroyer, and cruiser could now carry long-range nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and there were nearly 600 ships, this significantly degraded the Soviets’ ability to keep track of and target them all. Former USN officer William Brinkley captured this in his 1988 post-Apocalyptic novel, “The Last Ship”:

“Its history had been a curiously sly one. It was with the Tomoahawk cruise missiles, sometimes it seemed with scarecly noticing the fact, that matters began to get beyond all hope and control. It was almost as if they grew and flourished while people were looking the other way, attention focused on th emore glamourous showcase ICBM’s due to their enormous size, its silo fixed residence, and its far more smaller treaty-restricted numbers quite easily verifiable, while all the time, in the back shop, these little things, free of any limitations whatver were being turned out like sausages, by the thousands….By now cosily in place inside hundres of movable ships, it had become impossible to count, let alone verify, by any system, any more than you could verify the number of chaff launchers, torpeados, five-inch rounds, or for that matter, loaves of bread in the fleet; no way even to determine which Tomahawks were conventionally armed, as many were, which enclosed nuclear warheads, or which of the two a particular ship was carrying….The astonishing thing was how little appreciation existed for what all this meantl for what Tomahawk could do. As if it had not penetrated human understanding that each of them could transposrt a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, and that ships carried them by the score…..”

So when you add the GLCM and the TLAM together, the answer to the equation is a swarm of extremely acurrate missiles launched from mobile, hard to find and destroy launchers that are capable of decapitating the Soviet command system. The cost of countering that while continuing to enslave Eastern Europe with 60 armoured and mechanized divisions and export Communism to Africa and Latin American AND keep up with the quasi-mythical Strategic Defense Initiative was just a little too much for them, methinks.

No wonder the Sovs wanted a Doomsday Machine…..

How do you pronounce “Say hello to my little friend” in Russian?

I watched the pseudo-comedy film “Air America” the other day. It essentially repeats the assertion that the CIA was heavily involved in the narcotics trade in south east Asia during the Vietnam War via its proprietary airline, Air America, and that the ‘contras’ in Nicaragua were supported with drug money facilitated by the CIA. This meme has been in play for decades. It is not new. The ‘classic’ work on the subject by Alfred McCoy, “The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” (1972) continues in publication in its latest edition in 2003, its assertions virtually unchallenged by professional historians. (Almost, but that’s another story-the Air America alumni are pretty pissed at all of this. See their website and James Quigley’s review). What I really want to look at here is yet another imbalance I see in Cold War history. To the uninitiated, one would think that that only country involved in illicit narcotrafficking was the United States. How come there is no Wikipedia entry for “KGB Drug Trafficking”, yet there is one for “CIA Drug Trafficking”? Hmmmm….why is that?

That should change. Read Matt Potter’s “Outlaws Inc.” Matt spent a few years flying around as a passenger in clapped out ex-Soviet air force Il-76 CANDID transports flown by clapped out ex-Soviet daredevil pilots and got to know the shady side of the air transport industry after the Cold War. The book is mostly focused in what was going on in Africa in the 1990s and in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, BUT there are some relevant Cold War gems here that bear follow up by specialists. 

1) Cold War-era IL-76 CANDID transports were all built with secret compartments. This was for SIGINT or other recce gear as well as for illicit cargoes that needed to moved about during Soviet covert operations. Potter estimates 15 tons can be carried in these compartments.

2) Narcotics from Afghanistan were smuggled out of the country via IL-76 squadrons in the 1980s. There were two streams involved. The illicit, profit-making side of the house on an individualist basis, and, more interestingly, the KGB who smuggled narco out deliberately to distribute it in Western Europe as a ‘social attack.’ Sometimes these two streams crossed over. Now, if the CIA was working with HiG to sell opium to fight a war against the Soviets, and it was bought by the KGB and then resold in Paris and London to undermine the West, then THAT would be weird….but not impossible.

3) The Cold War network of KGB and GRU support structures in the Third World, especially Africa, Asia, and Latin America, remained in place, unpaid, as the Soviet Union collapsed. These networks were re-activated by various entities for the purposes of arms and narco trafficking and went into business. After all, ex-spies have to pay the mortgage too…. as do ex-Soviet air force transport pilots with no more Cold War to fight. Connections were made, and business is done. Especially in former Soviet client-states like Angola. Oh and Cuba. Oh, and Nicaragua. Etc.

Now, the idea that the Soviets and allies were using the drug trade to undermine the West in the 1980s is not a new idea. It was a common theme in some Cold War paperback thrillers from the period (like Moss and de Borchgrave’s “Monimbo” if I recall). Indeed, one book suggested that Fidel Castro was involved in the narcotics trade (shock). However, the bulk of American popular culture believes wholeheartedly that this was either Cold War propaganda and, as usual, the usual rogue’s gallery of ex-CIA bad guys was paraded through “Miami Vice” every week.

Potter is on to something, but as he points out, he doesn’t want to be pushed out of an IL-76 at 10 000 feet without the benefit of a parachute. I think it’s high time that there be a little fairness in the public domain. I’m, frankly, tired of hearing about how the CIA was in bed with HiG in Pakistan and it’s all the CIA’s fault, all of the time. I’m equally tired of hearing so many people mindlessly repeat the same crap, all of the time. Certainly there is plenty of room to explore KGB malfeasance in this field? Anybody speak Russian and has a pair of brass ones? I don’t speak Russian beyond “ “Give me another shot of your excellent hydraulic fluid from your marvelous Mi-24 parked on the ramp at Pristina airport, please!” or I would.

This may, or may not, be a picture of one of Viktor Bout’s IL-76’s at Kabul International Airport (picture credit: me).

What is peace worth? In past posts on this blog I’ve highlighted the apparent paradox regarding the construction, training, and deployment of military forces to deter the opposition from even thinking about starting a war, nuclear or otherwise. That paradox underpins the whole Cold War. The constant competition to improve military capabilities from tanks to missiles so that there is no technology or capability gap in the deterrence system that might prove to be destabilizing was related to this. One of the most important expressions of this state of affairs was the US Air Force’s BGM-109G Gryphon, better known as the GLCM (GLICK-EM). Deployed in NATO countries in Western Europe from 1982 to 1991, these missiles were targeted not just by Soviet SS-20 SABER nuclear IRBM’s but also by Soviet-bloc covert operations operating under the guise of the so-called ‘peace movement.’ The Soviets tested and deployed the massively destabilizing SS-20 missiles in 1979. When NATO powers announced they would deploy the GLCM and Pershing II missiles, they were greeted with a roar of  “GLCM and PII are DESTABILZING!” opprobrium that only the Soviet propaganda machine could generate through its useful idiots in the West. Anti-nuclear protests at GLCM bases in the UK, with their wild collection of characters became a staple of the media in the 1980s. Now, of course, nobody in the left-wing media tried to cover anti-SS-20 protests in the Soviet Union…THERE WERE NONE. Anybody who even committed a thoughtcrime about doing so found themselves in an Arctic lumber camp or digging uranium in a Siberian mine without protective gear. 

But I digress.

The annoying thing to those of us in the know (historians with long memories) was that the GLCM deployment was in many ways merely the updating of an earlier capability that was technologically immature. If you go near the form USAF base at Bitburg in a united Germany you will find a bunch of empty concrete buildings in the forest nearby. These once housed, back in the 1950s the early USAF cruise missiles, the TM-61 MATADOR and the TM-76 MACE. One had an 80 kt warhead, while the other had a 2 MT yield warhead. These ‘pilotless bombers,’ as they were called, supplemented the large NATO nuclear striking force based on F-104 aircraft. There were a few problems, however. MATADOR and MACE were technologically immature, that is, they were conceptually ahead of what they were actually capable of doing. And the main weakness were their guidance systems. The first MATADORS were flown from the ground, like a UAV today. It could be jammed, or the control site, which was line of sight, could be attacked. Another version used SHANICLE (Short Range Navigation Vehicle) , essentially an electronic grid of beams. The missile was pre-programmed to follow the grid, the missile was launched and it self-guided to the target like a drone. Again, the grid transmitters were the system’s primary vulnerability. (For Second World War aficionados, the similarity between these systems and what the Germans used to assist them bombing Great Britain in the 1940 is not coincidental.) MACE used something altogether different: ATRAN (Automatic Terrain Recognition and Navigation). MACE had a radar in its nose that looked for landmarks between its launch site and the target. The missile’s memory consisted of film of those routes. The radar fed a computer that compared the two and adjusted course as required. Innovative, but there were problems. It could not be used over water. The missile’s limited memory meant that the missile actually had a greater range that its mapping system allowed it to go. It was replaced with an inertial guidance system, but that meant that the missile had to be fired from a fixed point, which in turn made it vulnerable. These were all factors that limited MACE and MATADOR’s capabilities and reduced their potential effectiveness in nuclear war, which reduced their effectiveness as deterrents. Indeed, the accuracy of each system was compromised which meant that the shift from 40kt to 80 kt to 2 MT warheads were required. Key equation: the more accurate the missile is, the less collateral nuclear destruction there is, and there is less loss of life. Important equation, so hold on to that. By the later 1960s-early 1970s, MACE and MATADOR were taken out of the deterrent system because of their deficiencies. New thought was given to a new generation of cruise missiles. The US Navy had its own cruise missiles, some of which were versions of MACE and MATADOR, others which were their own design. A new system called Tomahawk was under development for shipboard use. This was the basis for GLCM. Designers and planners looked at the problems with MACE and MATADOR and concluded that any new cruise missile system in Western Europe had to be mobile if it were going to survive attack. Holding the Transporter Erector Launchers (TELs) in a bunker to protect them from surprise attack or ground attack by Soviet special forces (Spetsnaz) and then dispersing them from the bunker if the alert level increased was one way of protecting them. Somehow some means had to be found so that once the missiles were dispersed they did not need to rely on any other infrastructure to get the missiles on target once fired. GLCM had to have a navigation system that was independent. McDonnell Douglas engineers came up with TERCOM or Terrain Contour Matching. TERCOM combined inertial navigation with what was an updated ATRAN. GLCM’s TERCOM compared radar inputs to satellite maps that it carried. Those maps were of a significantly smaller resolution that the film used by MACE. That meant that GLCM was exponentially more accurate: less than 100 feet Circular Error Probable compared to nearly 3000 feet with the other missiles. It could also fly closer to the ground and was less vulnerable to enemy action. More accuracy, less collateral destruction. Ahhh but this is where it really gets interesting. The W-84 warhead was “dial-able” from .2 kt to 150 kt. Quite different from the three 150-kt yield warheads, MIRV mounted on the SS-20 missile. Very different. How horrible it was for NATO members to update an inaccurate missile with a huge warhead and replace it with a more accurate missile with a smaller warhead. How destabilizing. I understand from some colleagues of mine that the Soviets were scared of cruise missile accuracy in that they believed that their opponents (that’s us) now had the ability to destroy the Soviet command and control system with a swarm of 300+ GLCMs which, with some speed and precision, would have crippled their nuclear blunderbusses before they could even be launched.   Ahhh well.   There aren’t too many left as the systems had to be destroyed by treaty. We traded off the GLCM’s for the SS-18’s and in the end it was a bargain. We win.

One set of GLCM launch systems that remains is located at the Pima Air Museum in Arizona, located next to the Davis-Monthan AFB storage facility. I shot some pictures there of the GLCM monument for your edification.

Take a look at the 38^th Tactical Missile Wing HERE.

And don’t miss “TAC Missileers” HERE.

You like the shirt? Go HERE.

Here’s a great Air War College study of US cruise missiles by Lt Col Randall L. Lanning, USAF

Thanks to Military Russia for the pic of the SS-20

And…for a look at wall art from the abandoned GLCM bunkers, go HERE.

I watched this bizarre but….bizarre film the other night called “Riders of the Storm” (sometime later the name was changed to “The American Way).  It featured a bunch of whacked-out Vietnam vets flying endlessly over the United States in a B-29 bomber (“Uncle Slam”) modified as a pirate media enterprise named “S&M TV” broadcasting ‘the truth’ to those beguiled by mainstream media. (Note: this film came out in 1986 and takes place before the internet existed). The plot, such as it is, is these guys have the dirt on Presidential candidate Westinghouse that they believe is planning to initiate a war in Latin America once elected and they don’t want another Vietnam. Of course, they are led by Dennis Hopper who essentially reprises his role from “Apocalypse Now” (sorta, kinda) and then there is Ace, a wheelchair-bound Stranglovian TV tech. US Air Force sypathizers routinely vector a SAC KC-135 tanker to aerial refuel the B-29 so the plane never lands and the broadcasts never stop.

It’s like Commando Solo on acid.

Moviet tagline: They Came from the Past to Save the Future

Weirdest coincidence: Actor Al Mathews, and a real Vietnam vet who plays an excellent Space Jar Head in ‘Aliens’, at one point must exit the B-29 on a tether while it is flying so he can repair an engine.

Now, here’s where it gets historically interesting. The scriptwriter Scott Roberts MUST have heard, seen, or or grown up with a little thing called “Stratovision.” The Glenn Martin Company and Westinghouse Electric Corporation (!) planned to modify a Martin 202 airliner to act as an aerial tranmitter in 1945. At the time there was an issue with coast-to-coast programming and the curvature of the earth. Having high-altitude platforms that could provide line-of sight was seen as one solution (today we use satellites….) With plenty of surplus B-29’s around after the war, it was easy to attach a 28-foot fold down antenna and take her up to 30 000 feet. In 1948 Stratovision broadcast the Republican national convention from Baltimore. Once AT&T laid enough coax cable, there was no more need for Stratovision and it was mothballed.

During the Vietnam War, however, the idea was revived to disseminate propganda to those South Vietnamese that had television sets and to the US forces deployed there. US Navy C-121 aircraft used similar technology in this role. Oh yeah…there were spooks aboard from time to time that did PSYOPS work for the ‘Studies and Observation Group’, that is, the Special Operations Group.

HERE is an original article on Stratovision from 1950.

(Thanks to the guys at ARC Forums)

(For an excellent academic treatment of the subject, see James C. Foust’s “The Atomic Bomb of Broadcasting: Westinghouse’s Stratovision Experiment, 1944-49” in Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media)

and thanks to the Project JENNY website

As you have seen I’ve highlighted from time to time exotic Soviet vehicles and equipment in Atomic Express. Time for a little balance. One aspect of the Cold War that intrigues me is the development of weapons systems, in particular the ones that did not get ‘used’ in a traditional sense. We go from Second World War equipment, to the next generation of armoured fighting vehicles in the 1950s, followed by another in the 1960s and ultimately to the 1980s and today. Now, we are familiar with the capabilities of Second World War vehicles and we are familiar with the performance of the last Cold War generation of vehicles like the M-1 Abrams main battle tank because we saw them used in DESERT STORM in 1991 and in IRAQI FREEDOM in 2003. In some cases, the 1960s generation of equipment was used in Vietnam or influenced how we might have fought in the 1970s (I’m thinking anti-tank missile armed helicopters). M-48 tanks and M-113 Armoured Personnel Carriers were used in Vietnam in a non-traditional role against insurgent forces, and then by the Israelis in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

However, there was a whole generation of equipment that only was deployed to serve with NATO forces in Western Europe and generally not used elsewhere. These systems were deployed as part of the deterrent system and, over time, forgotten. A lot of effort went into designing, prototyping and building them, and then training their crews and their units to use them. This were vast industrial and institutional processes that over time led to better machinery and then obsolescence, demobilization, and scrapping. All without having fired a round in anger. And paradoxically, that was a good thing given the situation in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Expensive and cheap at the same time. In the calculus of time, the expenditure of resources, and money to produce a fleet of M-103’s or Conquerors or a few thousand SS-11’s and train their crews was cheaper then having to re-build, say, New York, London, or Berlin, from atomic dust.

How would these vehicles and systems have fared in combat against their Soviet counterparts? That is unclear, and possibly something to be explored in the new online game “World of Tanks.”

Along with the forgotten heroes of the Cold War, here is some of their forgotten equipment…..

Conqueror heavy tank (UK)

120mm gun armed heavy tank, exclusively in service in West Germany from 1955 to 1966. 185 made.

M-103 heavy tank (US)

Same gun as the Conqueror, a battalion of 88 vehicles served in West Germany from 1958 to 1963. The USMC also used the vehicle until the 1970s.

Bobcat MICV (Canada)

A revolutionary prototype mechanized infantry combat vehicle family from the 1950s that was eventually cancelled before it could be produced in numbers.

M-388 Davy Crockett tactical nuc (US)

A small tactical nuclear weapon with a yield of less than a kt. Deployed in West Germany in numbers from 1961 to 1971. Test fired live in 1962.

SS-10/ SS-11 Anti-Tank Guided Missile (France)

Based on advanced Nazi German designs for a wire-guided missile, the SS-10 and SS-11 and their successors like ENTAC were the first guided anti-tank missiles. Deployed by the French in the 1950s (on everything from jeeps to helicopters to AMX-13 tanks) until the advent of more advanced systems like Milan. Later used by a variety of NATO and non-NATO countries, including Israel.

KanonenJagdPanzer (West Germany)

A tank-destroyer built by taking 90mm guns from phased-out M-47 tanks and adding it to an APC hull. 1000 built and deployed from 1966 on and served in West German and Belgian service throughout the 1970s. Later the gun was removed and a SS-11 ATGM system added.

Davy Crockett nuc test video.

Best site on Davy Crockett that doesn’t mock it.

Really cool site on early ATGM’s like SS-10-SS-11. If you read Russian, that is….

See Jody Harmon’s site for exceptional armour art (and thanks for the use of the M-103 pic).  Also thanks to Rufus Priddy’s posting of M-103’s in transit.

Tanks for your service!

How many people in North America have ever  heard of Joachim Gauck? Everybody’s heard of Nelson Mandela I bet, maybe even Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. But Gauck? Better get to know him: he’s now Germany’s new president. I first heard of the “Gauck Organization” while I was serving in a newly-reunified Germany. The infamous East German secret police organization, the Stasi, was being rolled up at this time and its insanely detailed records on German citizens were being brought together and archived. (To see just how insane the Stasi behaved, read Timothy Garten Ash’s chilling memoir,  The File…) After pro-democracy demonstrators overran Stasi headquarters, it was recognized in a variety of circles that protecting this vast record was a useful proposition. Gauck, a prominent pro-democracy leader from Rostock who was regularly harassed by the Stasi because of his views on freedom and religion, was put in charge of this process.  His father at one pint disappeared into the Gulag system when Gauck was a child, so he had first hand experience with the injustices of Soviet-style communism from an early age. As Der Spiegel put it, “The [Gauck] agency provided the nation with a kind of therapy. It gave eastern Germans a gentle push to confront their past instead of suppressing it, and to face up to the suffering, the injuries and the filth to which a system of repression had subjected them.” Indeed, another article noted that “He also has a message for eastern Germans. He wants them to jettison their tainted view of the past. He deplores Ostalgie, nostalgia for the East German era. The eastern Germans should be proud of the revolution of 1989, he tells them. “We 89ers will be the last ones to strike our colors. When the others fall down, we will still be standing. I personally believe that I will spend longer having faith in freedom and the resilience of democracy than anyone else in Germany.” Coming from anyone else, such lofty words would seem embarrassing. With Gauck they sound believable.”

If anybody seeks to understand the end of the Cold War, they should understand what motivated a man like Joachim Gauck.

Up here in the Great White North were are re-visiting veterans and their affairs. Our situation is very different from the American situation. We have recognized veterans from the First and Second World Wars, but after that it gets dicey. Our merchant marine sailors were not recognized as Second World War vets for some time because of Cold War politics: the merchant marine unions were Communist-dominated and the senior bureaucracy told men who sailed in unarmed ships carrying ammo and fuel to Murmansk to get stuffed. Eventually Russia recognized their service but only after the Cold War and shamed Canada into doing so as well.

With the winding down of our war in Afghanistan, Canada now has several thousand young men and women who were participants in a shooting war. Canada hasn’t been a participant in a shooting war since Korea. Canadian soldiers did participate in a variety of UN-led peace observation and interpositionary peacekeeping operations during the Cold War, and then UN and NATO-led stabilization and armed humanitarian intervention operations in the immediate post-Cold War period. Those men and women were shot at, mined, rocketed, held hostage, and so on but for a long time they were not ‘veterans.’ That changed back in the 1990s. There were peacekeeping medals and veterans status conferred.

But what about thousands of men and women who served in NATO and NORAD during the Cold War? They are covered, up to a point, by a broadening of veterans status in Canada to anybody who served for more than three years or in an overseas posting. But they are not recognized. There is no Cold War medal or other specialized recognition of the service era. (Yours truly hold the Special Service Medal with NATO Bar, which we all got for serving in Germany under NATO, but nothing denotes Cold War service at all).

In the United States, the VA recognizes Vietnam War veterans and there is a category called ‘Vietnam-era veterans’ that recognizes men called up but who served in West Germany and other places and not Vietnam. Several of my high school teachers in the US were Vietnam-era veterans: one guarded nuclear weapons in Turkey and nearly had to render them inoperable during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus in the face of hostile Turks.

I understand that attempts have been made in the United States to create and award some form of Cold War Victory Medal. A number of Cold War veterans organizations have emerged, (American Cold War Veterans is one, Germany Defense Veterans of America is another Europe Defense Veterans of America is a third)  The GDVA website is interesting:

Who We Are

     5500 KIA    -   Over 300 by Hostile fire

    19 MIA/POW                          WIA-Classified

  KIA-Classified         POW/MIA Classified

 WIA Classified

“We suffered more casualties than Grenada, Panama,Bosnia, Desert Storm/Shield where a service medal and or campaign medal was given.

We are Defense Veterans who served on a average of 2-3 Alerts per month with full battle gear, gas mask, appropriate ammunition and constantly countered the Warsaw Pact forces.

We are veterans who kept the Peace, who suffered casualties from terrorist attacks, served along the worlds most dangerous border, suffered casualties to prevent all out war , confronted by hostile forces, but told to stay quite as not to create a International Incident.

We are veterans who Freed over 400 million people from communist enslavement.”

Unfortunately, none of them seem to have the momentum needed to force the issue politically. Indeed, there are a plethora of organizations that are Cold War unit-based, but they are exclusive in nature (rightly so-especially if you served aboard nuclear submarines or in the spook field).

The odyssey of the Cold War Service Medal is an interesting one. In 2009 three US senators sponsored a bill, “The Cold War Service Medal Act.” The press release was stirring and essentially accurate:

“From the end of World War II to dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War veterans were in the vanguard of the Nation’s defenses,” said Senator Snowe. “Although long overdue, this legislation will honor and recognize the American patriots who for nearly half-a-century defended the Nation against the advance of communist ideology in the form of the Cold War Service Medal. The commitment, motivation, and fortitude of these brave service members was second to none and their actions should be recognized in a long-standing military custom befitting their patriotism and service.”

“The millions of Americans who served in uniform in the armed forces during the Cold War, spanning more than four decades, were the living embodiment of our nation’s strategy of deterrence,” said Senator Webb. “In their efforts to preserve peace, hundreds died during isolated armed confrontations when the Cold War flashed hot at remote locations around the world. This legislation will appropriately honor those who served in an effort that resulted in the largest single expansion in the number of democratically elected governments in world history.”

But it didn’t happen. Wikipedia doesn’t elaborate on the specifics:

“All medal bills have been vehemently opposed by the U.S. Department of Defense.”

Why, exactly?

Then there is the pseudo-official Cold War Victory Medal (members of the Alaskan and Louisiana’s National Guard forces are eligible…) which is a commercial product not issues by the United States.

The British have a similar problem: see the British Cold War Veterans site.

I would be curious to see if Russia recognizes Cold War service: the Czech Interventionist Medal for Valour? The Internationalist Duty Medal with Angolan or Ethiopian Bar? At least the East Germans had the Von Seydlitz medal for the Third World War had it occurred (Yours truly saw them for sale at the Brandenburg Gate in 1992). 

A NATO veterans organization has recently stood up here and are in the process of defining themselves. I wrote a letter to them, laying out why I think distinctive recognition is important. Food for thought.

There are a lot of books out there dealing with advanced German technology during the Nazi era. These books range from aircraft modelers looking to something new to build and paint to the ‘tin foil hat’ brigade who believe that there is an armada of Nazi Flying Saucers led by a cryogenically preserved or cloned Hitler waiting to pour out of bases in Antarctica. Or the Moon.

Try as I might, I find that the equivalent literature (in English) dealing with bizarre Soviet-era advanced and prototypical technology is nowhere near as vast. We can speculate why. It is evident that the Soviet Union and its crimes against humanity are underreported and taught compared to their Nazi equivalents. So goes their technology which, we must not forget, was forged under similar conditions of death and secrecy.

Fear sometimes breeds innovation. So does an economy based on bullshit (See my review of Francis Spufford’s book Red Plenty on this website) where nothing really costs money…or nothing costs real money as the case may be. I must, however, tip my hat at creative innovation, especially in this case, the Soviet’s attempt to defy gravity by using ground effect to great effect.

During the Cold War, we heard rumours of a…vehicle, I guess, dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster. Why was it called that? The int guys weren’t sure if it existed or not at first (kinda like the Loch Ness Monster or BC’s ripoff, Ogopogo). Then there were sat shots of something being tested in the Caspian Sea.

The Russian word for the vehicle was the Ekranoplan and the technical term is ‘Wing in Ground Effect’ vehicle or ‘Wing in Surface Effect’ vehicle. Its flies just above the surface of the water on a cushion of air created by the forward motion of the vehicle which is shaped with a low-slung wing. It’s not a hydrofoil, and its not a hovercraft. The military aspects are interesting:

-it can skim above naval mines

-you can’t torpedo it while it is in motion

-it is as fast as an airplane

-it can carry as much as a transport aircraft

-one version carries six very large anti-ship missiles (SS-N-22 SUNBURN)

The main issue: weather and sea state. The Ekranoplans would have been limited to littoral waters or large lakes like the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. But if your plans for world domination include seizing Constantinople quickly or raiding NSA facilities in pre-revolutionary northern Iran, this is your toy. I’m not sure which it would be more vulnerable to: an anti-ship missile like Harpoon or an anti-aircraft missile.

Unlike some of the other technologies we’ve explored at Atomic Express, the Ekranoplans were built, tested, and entered service towards the end of the Cold War. At least three of the A-90 Orlyonoks went into service, and a single Lun missile carrier started trials.  The numbers planned (over 150 of the transport version) were never realized, obviously, with the end of the USSR. 

Here it is in ‘flight’

This is, you have to admit, pretty freakin’ cool, at the very least. More video.

BIG thanks to English Russia and Aeronewsline for some of the pics : Check out the rest of them!

Forget Tom Clancy. If Sir John Hackett did not invent the techno-thriller, he certainly perfected it in the service of the NATO deterrent system and helped shepherd in a more humane strategy that edged us away from near-immediate nuclear weapons use in the Central Region [which in those days was West Germany]. Those books, The Third World War: August 1985 (1978) and The Third World War: The Untold Story (1982) were best sellers in the West and demonstrated to a variety of audiences, including the Soviets, that a modernized conventional NATO (backed up, of course, with nuclear weapons but not as wholly reliant on them as NATO was in the 1960s) might be able to withstand gross Soviet adventurism but that it would be a close call….and only if NATO re-thought how it would fight such a war and re-equip itself. 

In 1993 I was serving in a unified Germany as the historian for 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade, the Canadian Army’s primary NATO commitment. During the course of my research into what would eventually be published as War Without Battles: Canada’s NATO Brigade in Germany 1951-1993, I learned that Sir John Hackett, when he was commander of NATO’s Northern Army Group (or ‘NORTHAG’ as it was known in those days) in 1968 publicly criticized NATO members on the over-reliance on nuclear weapons and pushed for stronger conventional forces. Nations were loathe to do so because of the cost. Nucs were, at that time, a cheaper means of cancelling out the Soviets and their allies crushing conventional superiority in Europe and nobody wanted to pay for this. He was nearly cashiered but was able to avoid that by arguing he was wearing his NATO ‘hat’ not his British national ‘hat’ when he published his op ed piece.

NORTHAG was, at one time, the headquarters that the Canadian forces worked under and for the time he was commander, he had a close relationship with the Canadian forces. In the spring of 1993, I contacted Sir John and asked if I could visit and interview him. He replied in the enthusiastic affirmative so I made my way from Lahr in Germany to Cheltenham in the UK,  I was met by a car and taken to a refurbished country mill that served as his home.

We spent that afternoon talking about the whole problem of deterrence in Western Europe and the process by which Third World War and its re-imagining in 1982 came from. In essence, there were a cluster of generals who believed in the 1970s that certain technologies would eventually emerge that could make up the conventional short-fall, but governments and armies had to be convinced to move away from tactical nuclear weapons, especially the French.

These technologies were mostly improved anti-tank weapons like TOW missile systems but the idea of ‘Follow On Force Attack’ or FOFA as it was called, was also pinging around. FOFA was novel in that it involved the use of combinations of attack helicopters, multiple-rocket launch systems, long-range mobile missiles and air strikes all cued with new intelligence systems like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and something called ‘JSTARS’ to find where the enemy’s tanks and other armoured vehicles were massing in Czechoslovakia and East Germany and kill as many as possible before they could even get across the border, where the rest of them would be destroyed by agile armoured forces. Almost all of today’s US Army systems were developed as part of FOFA and it’s successor strategy, AirLand Battle: the M-1 Abrams tank; the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter; the MLRS rocket launcher; the ATACAMS/HIMARS missile; and the E-8 aircraft.

Sir John explained to me how he and General Bernard Rogers conceived of the idea of a novel to explain how a conventional defence of Western Europe might work. Others were brought in on the project; indeed, the first book’s authors are “General Sir John Hackett and Others.” The project grew beyond just Western Europe and a full-blown war scenario emerged. Almost all of the participants were unable to use their names because of career reasons and, in another case, a Soviet defector whose pen-name was Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun) was being debriefed by the intelligence agencies at the time. The Westerners who contributed to the books were all convinced that NATO nations had to replace their decaying conventional forces in order to deter Soviet aggression. Keep in mind that the decrepit ex-Soviet Union that we are all familiar with in games like “Call of Duty” and movies like “The Russia House” did not yet exist. The Soviet armed forces and those of the Warsaw Pact were massive in numbers, far beyond those necessary for defence purposes, far beyond anything we deployed in West Germany. The KGB really believed in the 1970s that “The world was going our way.” And it was (see the Mitrokhin Archive Volume II for a full accounting). Two years after the publication of the first book, particularly during the Iranian Revolution and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the global situation started to resemble the first book’s scenario.  I first read a serialized version of the book in The Albertan when I grew up in Calgary and, when a mass market paperback came out, people were talking about it.

Of course Sir John was also an authentic Second World War hero who survived Operation MARKET GARDEN and the destruction of the 1^st Airborne Division by an SS Panzer Korps in 1944. Severely wounded, he escaped capture. He had immense credibility and integrity that others could not muster, particularly the Americans who were still severely tainted by Vietnam. We still need a history of how the United States got from the hollow force of the post-Vietnam army of the 1970s to the incredibly well-equipped force that was deployed in West Germany by the mid-1980s. If somebody writes it, I hope they don’t forget a pair of techno-thrillers that captivated millions in those dangerous years and reminded people that there were alternatives to the ‘suicide or surrender’ arguments constantly deployed by the so-called ‘peace movement’ (more on that in a future post).

As for my project, I asked him to write the foreword to my book, which he gladly did and I remain eternally grateful for the opportunity to spend an afternoon with him. Sir John Hackett passed away from injuries incurred in a car accident during anniversary events in Arnhem in September 1997.

I note US Secetary of Defense Leon Panetta has announced the disbandment of the last serving ‘heavy’ brigades of the US Army in Europe serving in Germany. This leaves an armoured cavalry regiment (essentially a brigade) and the 173^rd Airborne Brigade in Italy. This is a far cry from the heady days of the Cold War when US Army Europe/Seventh Army boasted two full corps in West Germany of five divisions and two armoured cav regiments plus an airborne brigade in Italy and the Berlin Brigade, all backed up with a few thousand tactical nuclear weapons.

Trying to convey the magnitude of NATO’s deterrent forces in West Germany during the Cold War is extremely difficult today. Canadian, American, British, Belgian, and French troops were stationed on West German soil for forty years. This not only involved the combatant forces but their civilian dependents as well. And, because dispersion was the name of the game in the atomic age, these military communities were spread out all over West Germany.

I found some period documentaries that give us an idea of what was going on. “The Big Picture” was a regular US Army TV documentary feature narrated by Master Sergeant Stuart Queen, with obvious propaganda embedded.

There’s “Why NATO?” Now, I know we could ask that question today [!] but when this documentary was made, NATO was two or three years old. Of course, this was the NATO where France was a member and the headquarters was based in Paris, so it’s kinda weird to see Lester B. Pearson at the beautiful Pallais de Chaillot instead of that horrible 1970s cubist building in Brussels.

“The Seventh Army”: Best scene once you get beyond the hokey 1950s documentary music: a US Army sergeant hopping into his Studebaker from his German apartment with his helmet and rifle at night during an recall exercise. It is also interesting to see how integrated the 1950s US Army is portrated: white and black troops, men and women, Americans and de-Nazified Germans and French all working alongside each other “Guarding the frontiers of the Free World.” 

Here is “Missile Man”, which is outright Army propaganda on its 1950s guided missile systems. Hmmm…who was the target audience for deterrence purposes? The Soviets, the US Navy, or the US Air Force? Great footage of Corporal, Honest John, Nike, Redstone, Jupitar missiles…and the DART anti-tank guided missile.

And “Operaton SAGEBRUSH”: A land force exercise casually incorporating nuclear weapons into the exercise “play.”  “Simulated atomic weapons are a major feature of the manouvre,” the announcer intones as they show an 280mm “Atomic Annie” cannon (repeatedly). Airmobile action, nucs, nerve gas, APCs, assault river crossings,….SAGEBRUSH had it all. Large-scale exercises like this took place regularly during the Cold War. (In West Germany, the annual exercises were called FALLEX). Check out the atomic weapons simulators. And the “Fantasian” agressor forces’ helmets. Again, I love the casual mention of the use of atomic weapons on the battle field throughout.

Another interesting point: all of these documentaries make contextual reference to the previous wars, specifically, Korea and the Second World War. For example, in “SAGEBRUSH” they point out, as the squadron of huge Globemaster transports thunder down the runway loaded with troops, that “these aircraft would have seen fantastic to us during the last war.”“ The producers understood that the average American family and its members had some level of understanding and did not treat them as idiots.

And my favourite: “Atomic Battlefield.” Briging it all together at Camp Desert Rock for live troop trials with nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas. This will blow you away….and this was the sort of thing on TV or in the theatres as newsreels in the 1950s???? Wow. Here is footage of the “Smoky” tests. Chilling, given what we know today.