Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...warning was echoed two days later, when the West German government issued a White Paper on European defense. It argued that the strength of the Warsaw Pact's conventional forces, compared with NATO'S, is continuing to expand, and that there is a "growing disparity" between the Soviet deployment of intermediate-range nuclear weapons not covered by the proposed SALT II treaty and the laggard Western development of comparable arms. The White Paper declared further that the Warsaw Pact armies appear to be geared primarily for attack rather than defense...
Kissinger's warning, which he later conceded might have been more floridly gloomy than he intended it to be, also contained a surprising personal admission: America's longstanding deterrent strategy based on all-out nuclear strike capability against Soviet population centers may have been ill-conceived in the first place. It was, he conceded, an overly limited, one-sided strategy "to which I myself contributed." Implicitly, he almost seemed to endorse Charles de Gaulle's skeptical rationale for building the French force de frappe in 1959; that is, in the final analysis, no U.S. President could...
...case, Kissinger said, the American strategic deterrent is now obsolescent because it has been neutralized by the Soviets' own first-strike capability, and it will soon be obsolete altogether as they improve the pinpoint accuracy with which they could knock out Minuteman ICBM silos in the U.S. Consequently, in the very next three or four years, he warned, Western Europe must make a greater commitment to its safety on its own ground, with stronger conventional forces and improved "theater" nuclear weapons. For its part, the U.S. had better develop a new "counterforce capability" aimed at Soviet military targets...
...tactless, the secret dream of every European was, one, to avoid a nuclear war but, secondly, if there had to be a nuclear war, to have it conducted over their heads by the strategic forces of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...strategic doctrine has relied extraordinarily, perhaps excessively, on our superior strategic [nuclear] power. The Soviet Union has [instead] always depended more on its local and regional superiority. Therefore, even an equivalence in destructive power, even assured destruction for both sides, is a revolution in NATO doctrine as we have known...