Word: pacts
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Though only half a mile away Warsaw Pact ships were firing at targets, the crew on the 300-ft. West German navy tender Neckar exhibited no alarm. Nothing ever happened during routine surveillance missions. So, midmorning in the Baltic Sea, the NATO craft sat passively while two 600-ton Soviet-made corvettes of the Polish navy blasted practice shots at unmanned drones...
...newly deployed missiles. But despite official NATO support for an INF deal, many Western leaders fear that double-zero could turn into double jeopardy for the alliance. According to the proposal's opponents, pulling those missiles out of Europe would put NATO at the mercy of superior Warsaw Pact conventional forces...
...nearly 40 years, standard military wisdom in the West has held that Warsaw Pact armies so outnumber and outgun NATO that only nuclear arms could redress the balance. This conventional forces "gap" has legitimized NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons, which in turn has allowed the alliance to hold down its spending on nonnuclear forces. Now, however, with NATO's nuclear inventory likely to shrink, fears are surfacing that decades of nuclear dependence may have left the alliance with insufficient conventional clout to keep the peace...
Alliance military commanders claim that the conventional balance is tilted heavily against them. "Every year," says NATO Supreme Commander General Bernard Rogers, "we find the gap continues to widen." Rogers warns that "within days" of a Warsaw Pact invasion, he would be forced to seek permission to use tactical nuclear weapons to halt an otherwise unstoppable advance. Once NATO crossed that threshold, however, escalation to full-scale nuclear war might be impossible to stop. The grim joke in NATO military circles is that its defense strategy consists of "fighting like hell for three days and then blowing up the world...
General of the Army Dmitri Yazov, 63, who leapfrogged over twelve more senior members of the Soviet high command to become the new Defense Minister, made his debut at a two-day conference in Moscow of high-ranking Warsaw Pact officers. A career soldier with combat experience in World War II, Yazov is believed to have made a favorable impression on Gorbachev during the Soviet leader's visit last summer to Vladivostok, where the general was based as commander of the U.S.S.R.'s far eastern military district. Yazov was summoned to Moscow last February and given the Defense Ministry...