TNW - Mature Soviet Views
By the early 1970s, Soviet leaders had lost their faith in the utility of nuclear weapons. According to Vitaly Tsygichko, a scientific analyst working in the Ministry of Defense, top Soviet generals understood and believed that the use of tactical nuclear weapons by either side would be catastrophic. By 1975, and probably earlier, the Soviet General Staff had already received instructions from the leadership that Soviet forces were never to be the first to use nuclear weapons. There was now even greater pressure on the Soviet military to be able to overwhelm NATO with conventional forces before it could go nuclear. Many in NATO doubted that their political leaders would agree quickly to use nuclear weapons. A key aim, therefore, was to fight the war in such a way as to delay NATO taking the decision to use nuclear weapons until it was too late for them to be able to influence the outcome of the war.
By the 1980s Soviet strategy for war with NATO in Central Europe was keyed to the combined-arms offensive - a carefully-orchestrated, decisive campaign that involved a series of mutually supporting conventional and nuclear operations by tactical as well as strategic forces. Although the Soviets saw the use of nuclear weapons as significantly changing the nature of a battle, nuclear operations were not treated as isolated events but were fully integrated into operaticncl plans.
Nuclear planning originated in the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff. Before 1980 this Directorate would have directly supervised wartime front nuclear planning and operations. It assigned operational objectives to each front and specified the resources (including nuclear weapons) to accomplish them. In the early 1980s,however, the Soviets made formal provision for the establishment in wartime of high commands in the Western and Southwestern Theaters of Military Operations (TVDs), which would serve as intermediate commands between the General Staff in Moscow and the operating forces in the TVDs. Front objectives and resources would still be determined by the General Staff. Although remaining under its overall control, the high commands in TVDs would supervise front nuclear planning and operations and provide their subordinate fronts with detailed operational objectives. This guidance would direct the selection of targets and the timing of the initial strike.
By the 1980s Soviet plans for conducting a war in Central Europe divided responsibility for nuclear operations between strategic forces and front tactical forces. A front is the major Warsaw Pact field command; it comprised some 300,000 to 400,000 men in ground. air and sometimes naval units, If a NATO/Warsaw Pact war were nuclear from the outset, Fronts in East Germany and Czechoslovakia would have nuclear targeting responsibility for about a third of West Germany. Strategic forces in the USSR would attack the rest of Central Europe. Soviet doctrine provided guidelines for the selection of targets and the damage to be levied against them during nuclear operations.
The General Staff coordinates front and strategic targetting by means of a specific nuclear targeting demarcation line. The fronts' initial targeting zones-prior to-and at the start of conflict lay between this line and the border between East and West Germany. After conflict had begun, exercises and classified writings showed thai the line would be redrawn as the course of the war produced significant change in the geography of operations. In the 1960s the initial demarcation line lay 300 to 400 km west of the inner-German border. By the mid-1970s. it had been moved back to 250 km from the border. Limited data since 1977 showed that the initial line was about 100 km from the border. Once the Soviets decided that large-scale use of nuclear weapons was inevitable, they would prepare initial tactical nuclear strikes that would be massive, coordinated with strategic strikes. and delivered by fighter bombers, short-range surface-to-surface missiles and rockets, and nuclear artillery. Soviet writings from the late 1970s indicated that 40 percent of a typical initial nuclear strike would be delivered by aircraft, 35 percent by missiles, and 25 percent by artillery.
Classified writings and exercises clearly showed that the Soviets would attempt to preempt NATO's ·use of nuclear weapons to preclude a large strike on their forces. Soviet planners expected that nuclear strikes probably would occur almost simultaneously with NATO strikes because of difficulties in timing a preemptive attack.
The most important front targeting objective during both conventional and nuclear operations, as identified in classified military writings, was the complete destruction of NATO's land-based nuclear delivery capability immediately opposite Soviet forces. Other high-priority tasks included the selective destruction of NATO's command, control, and communications facilities, major porricns of its air defense network. and its main groups of forces.
A typical initial strike by a single front in Central Europe would comprise about 300 to 400 weapons delivered to under 100 targets and would total about 50 megatons (Mt) in an area 250 to 400 kilometers wide by 100 kilometers deep - an area about the size of Belgium. Virtually all of these weapons would be detonated in the air rather than on the ground, probably to limit the effects of radioactive fallout on Warsaw Pact troops, despite the greater effectiveness of ground bursts against some small, fixed targets like permanent warhead deoots.
Such large attacks against unhardened targets were excessive by US standards. Large strikes probably were necessary, in the Soviet View, to achieve damage goals given the accuracies of current front ballistic missiles and the uncertainties associated with front capabilities to locate and track all potential targets.
The Soviets believed that locating targets is the most difficult problem they would face in executing front nuclear strikes. Warsaw Pact writings indicated that most front targets would move frequently, making target location data highly perishable. Unless reconnaissance assets are able to track all front targets and report their coordinates in a timely manner, the Soviets saw risk that some targets would receive insufficient damage or escape targeting entirely. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the front strike could make many reconnaissance questions academic. Even if NATO units escaped direct strikes, collateral damage to troops and equipment could be severe enough to limit seriously their combat effectiveness.
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