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NATO and the Warsaw Pact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

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Extract

Can security in the NATO/Warsaw Pact area be achieved without nuclear-weapons, or with significantly reduced reliance on them?" Many religious leaders and other concerned citizens in Europe and America are asking this question while NATO political and military authorities are deliberating about how NATO should improve its nuclear posture in Europe (the so-called theater nuclear posture).

No one can be smug or even satisfied about depending on nuclear weapons for security. One hardly need recount the destructive power of individual nuclear weapons (up to twenty-five or fifty times the explosive power of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or count the thousands of warheads in current nuclear inventories on both sides.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1979

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References

* As we go to press, Leonid Brezhnev has just used the carrot as well as the stick in his speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the East German Democratic Republic. The surprising announcement that "up to" 20,000 Soviet troops and a thousand tanks would be unilaterally removed from East Germany over the next twelve months was clearly aimed at influencing the pending NATO decision