Imagining the Third World War: Discussions about NATO´s conventional defence in the 1970s

Abstract

During the 1970s, military planners east and west of the “Iron Curtain” continued to prepare for a potential “hot” conflict between the two opposing military alliances, the Warsaw Treaty Organization and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Then-divided Germany – called the Central Region by NATO – would have been the main battleground of such a conflict. But how would that Third World War, and especially its conventional side, be fought? In NATO’s realm, this question not only occupied the thinking of military headquarters and national defence ministries, but also that of other military “experts.” The resulting often international textual discourse ranged from military doctrine to newspaper articles to future histories, that mirrored not only the change of strategy from “massive retaliation” to “flexible response” but also intraalliance issues such as equitable sharing of the military burden and the influence of latest weapons technology on strategy and tactics. And while World War III between the Warsaw Pact and the Atlantic Alliance never materialized, both sides spent billions on materiel and stationed millions of soldiers in preparations for a war that never happened and that continues to stimulate imaginations of war up to this day.