Paperkrieg in an Era of Peace

ON the walls of SHAPE headquarters near Brussels, battle maps pinpoint the location of the 1,000,000 troops of the seven-nation Warsaw Pact, as well as the 4,200 Soviet tactical and medium-range nuclear weapons pointed at the heart of Western Europe. On the walls of the Warsaw Pact Command Headquarters in Moscow, other maps pinpoint the location of NATO'S 580,000 troops, as well as its 7,000 nuclear weapons.

No one, except perhaps a few of the rival generals, seriously expects that those weapons will ever be fired or those troops committed to battle. In fact, most Europeans regard the paperkrieg as a bit of a charade.

That situation has created what may well be NATO'S chief problem: how to maintain its strength and raison d'etre in an age of detente. Inevitably, the quality of NATO's components has begun to waver more erratically than ever. The Italian army is moderately well trained, and could probably defend its own country against attack as long as the U.S. Sixth Fleet controls the Mediterranean. The French army, in contrast, may be the weakest of NATO's major links.

West Germany's Bundeswehr, descendant of the once mighty Wehrmacht, is filled with slovenly, long-haired draftees on 15-month hitches. As for the U.S. Seventh Army, it has been more conspicuous during the past two years for its racial battles in Frankfurt than its prowess in maneuvers. Britain's volunteer Army of the Rhine, on the other hand, is the best field force in Western Europe. But with only 50,000 men it is too small to defend Germany's vast northern plain on its own.

From Moscow, however, the forces of NATO appear somewhat more formidable. The Russians are aware that their own army is composed of conscripts who spend only 18 months of their two-year service on active duty. They also have good reason to be skeptical about the strength and dependability of Eastern Europe's armies. Part of Hungary's 100,000-man army fought the Russians in 1956. On the other hand, not a shot was fired by Czechoslovakia's 225,000-man armed forces when the Soviets invaded in 1968. Would the Czechoslovaks fire at anybody else? The Bulgarian army (150,000 troops) and the 125,000 East Germans under arms are more dependable, but Poland's 275,000 troops probably could not be counted upon to do anything except defend their own borders.

Thus detente may be a blessing for the people of Europe, but it has hardly made the life of a military commander in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact any easier. How, for example, can a Soviet field marshal argue convincingly about the threat of war with Western Europe when the Trade Ministry down the street is selling oil, magnesium and titanium to the West?

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