War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War

This essential new volume reviews the threat perceptions, military doctrines, and war plans of both the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, as well as the position of the neutrals, from the post-Cold War perspective.

Based on previously unknown archival evidence from both East and West, the twelve essays in the book focus on the potential European battlefield rather than the strategic competition between the superpowers. They present conclusions about the nature of the Soviet threat that could previously only be speculated about and analyze the interaction between military matters and politics in the alliance management on both sides, with implications for the present crisis of the Western alliance.

This new book will be of much interest for students of the Cold War, strategic history and international relations history, as well as all military colleges.

Vojtech Mastny directs the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, based at the Center for Security Studies in Zurich and the National Security Archive in Washington. He was NATO’s first Manfred Wörner Fellow in 1996. He has been professor of history and international relations at Columbia University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as well as professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. His latest book, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years, was the winner of the American Historical Association’s 1997 George L. Beer Prize.

Sven G. Holtsmark is professor at the Norwegian National Defence Educational Centre/Institute for Defence Studies (NDEC/IDS). He directs the Institute’s international programmes, and is currently Head of Studies at the NDEC. His has written on the history of Norwegian and Soviet foreign policy and of Nordic communism, including Soviet-Norwegian relations 1917-1995 (1995) and The diplomacy of the weak: GDR in Norway, 1949-73 (2000).

Andreas Wenger is professor of international security policy and director of the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. His latest publications include International Relations: From Cold War to the Globalized World (2003) and Living with Peril: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nuclear Weapons (1997).