Documentary supplement to the article “Did NATO Win the Cold War? Looking over the Wall,” by Vojtech Mastny, Foreign Affairs 78, no. 3 (May-June 1999): 176-89
April 23, 1999
This documentary supplement to the article, “Did NATO Win the Cold War? Looking over the Wall,” has been prepared on the occasion of the Washington summit marking the 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is intended to provide the reader with the most important sources referred to in the text of the article that are relevant to the view of NATO “from the other side.”
Some of the sources have been obtained as a result of the project on the “Parallel History of the Cold War Alliances,” conducted by the National Security Archive in cooperation with the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. More information about the project can be found on the websites of the two institutions.
Other sources were made available through the National Security Archive’s partner organization, the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, and have been published in its Bulletin. More information about the Project can be found on its website.
The documents refer to the text of the article according to the numbers that appear on its margins. They are published in full or in part, as indicated, and are preceded by brief introductions explaining their origins. In some cases, reproductions of the original documents are included as samples.
Catherine Nielsen and John Martinez, both of the National Security Archive, assisted in the preparation of the texts for online publication.
Vojtech Mastny
George F. Kennan, the architect of America’s policy of containment and a frequent critic of its execution, was U.S. ambassador to Moscow in one of the darkest years of the Cold War, 1952. On September 8, 1952, shortly before he was expelled from the Soviet Union as a persona non grata, he sent a dispatch to Washington in which he tried to assess NATO from the Soviet point of view. In retrospect, he regarded this assessment so important that he included it as the only appendix to his volume of memoirs published in 1971. While some of Kennan’s conclusions may not have withstood the test of time, his warning against being “fascinated and enmeshed by the relentless and deceptive logic of the military equation” remained topical throughout the Cold War.
[George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971, pp. 327-51]
Document 2.
A confidential information bulletin provided by Soviet intelligence to top eastern European party leaders has been preserved in the files of the Czechoslovak communist party central committee in Prague. As shown on the sample, the reports sometimes quoted verbatim statements made by high Western officials at top secret meetings.
The bulletin included the following passage referring to the alleged American disclosure at a secret NATO meeting in December 1950:
“In connection with their failures in Korea the Americans apparently intend to provoke in the summer of 1951 a military conflict in eastern Europe with the goal of seizing the eastern zone of Austria. To realize this goal, the Americans intend to utilize Yugoslavia.”
[“O deiatelnosti organov Severo-atlanticheskogo Soiuza v sviazi s sozdaniem atlanticheskoi armii i remilitarizatsiei zapadnoi Germanii,” February 1951, 92/1093, 100/24, Central State Archives, Prague; translated by Svetlana Savranskaya, National Security Archive]
Document 3.
Karel Kaplan, an official researcher who had enjoyed unlimited access to the Czechoslovak communist party archives prior to his defection to the West, learned about a meeting with Stalin on January 9-12, 1951, from one of its participants, the country’s minister of defense Alexej Cepicka. In 1978, Kaplan created a stir by publishing his findings, suggesting that Stalin had told his eastern European followers to prepare for an offensive war against Western Europe: “After a report by representatives of the bloc about the condition of their respective armies, Stalin took the floor to elaborate on the idea of the military occupation of the whole of Wurope, insisting on the necessity of preparing it very well.
Since the Korean War had demonstrated the military weakness of the United States, despite its use of highly advanced technology, it seemed appropriate to Stalin to take advantage of this in Europe. He developed arguments in support of the following thesis: `No European army is in a position to seriously oppose the Soviet army and it can even be anticipated that there will be no resistance at all. The current military power of the United States is not very great. For the time being, the Soviet camp therefore enjoys a distinct superiority. But this is merely temporary, for some three or four years. Afterward, the United States will have at its disposal means for transporting reinforcements to Europe and will also be able to take advantage of its atomic superiority. Consequently, it will be necessary to make use of this brief interval to systematically prepare our armies by mobilizing all our economic, political, and human resources. During the forthcoming three or four years, all of our domestic and international policies will be subordinated to this goal. Only the total mobilization of our resources will allow us to grasp this unique opportunity to extend socialism throughout the whole of Europe.'”
[Karel Kaplan, Dans les Archives du comité central: Trente ans de secrets du bloc soviétique, Paris: Michel, 1978, pp. 165-66; translated by Vojtech Mastny]
Another record of the Moscow meeting, written shortly afterward by its Romanian participant, Minister of the Armed Forces Emil Bodnaras, has been preserved in Bucharest and was published there in 1995. According to this document, Stalin urged a buildup of the eastern European armies to deter an American attack rather than to prepare them for an attack on western Europe. But his insistence on exploiting what he regarded as current American weakness to achieve combat readiness within three years could be interpreted as a call for offensive action at the right time. The three-year framework he mentioned corresponded to the period of “maximum danger” that also underlay NATO’s contemporary plans for the development of its armed forces –another indication that those secret plans were no secret to Stalin.
[C. Cristescu, “Ianuarie 1951: Stalin decide înarmarea Romanei,” Magazin Istoric, 1995, no. 10, pp. 15-23; translated by Vladimir Socor]
Document 4.
This description of presumed Soviet military capabilities is from one of the annual estimates compiled by NATO from 1950 onward and is preserved in its archives in Brussels.
The excerpt from the record of the 99th meeting of NATO’s Military Representatives Committee shows some of the doubts that spread by 1955 about the accuracy of the alliance’s estimates of Soviet capabilities:
The conclusive answer to the question of who started the Korean War and why could finally be given in 1995, following the release of the Soviet documents proving Kim Il Sung’s initiative and Stalin’s indispensable support. Some of the relevant documents were given by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to South Korean President Kim Young-Sam during his state visit to Moscow, others were subsequently made available from Russian archives. They were translated into English and published with commentaries for the first time by American historian Kathryn Weathersby in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, nos. 5 and 6-7.
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