My Journey at the Nuclear Brink by William Perry

Author:William Perry [Perry, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2015-11-11T07:00:00+00:00

16

NATO, Peacekeeping in Bosnia, and the Rise of Security Ties with Russia

I spent most of my career doing detailed planning for a nuclear strike on NATO forces. I never dreamed that I would be standing here at NATO headquarters, talking with NATO officers, and planning a joint peacekeeping exercise!

—A Russian general at NATO headquarters to Perry (paraphrased)

Beyond formal arms control initiatives, new opportunities for cooperation developed between NATO nations and European nations who had constituted the Warsaw Pact. Within a few years the cooperation in joint training exercises evolved into joint peace enforcement operations, of which Bosnia was the prime example. As secretary of defense, I was deeply involved in these activities. They created important opportunities to overturn the hostility during the Cold War; but I understood that management of the new relationships would carry not only great opportunities but also great risks.

During the Cold War, NATO was key to deterring the Soviet Union in its territorial ambitions. One deterrent was NATO’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons against the Red Army should it invade Europe. The grim prospect of exploding nuclear weapons on allied soil was over-ridden by the determination to repel a Soviet attack. To manage these conflicting concerns, NATO created a nuclear planning group called the High Level Group (HLG) to develop tactics and strategy for the use of nuclear weapons. By the time I became defense secretary, the NATO alliance had a very different aspect—so changed that we commonly had Russians attending NATO meetings. NATO continued to maintain the HLG (Ash Carter was its chair when I was secretary), but now its highest priority in the post–Cold War period was the safety and security of nuclear weapons.

That transformation was among the signs of a growing realization, a more realistic view beyond traditional military thinking, of the threatening legacy of the “overkill” buildup in nuclear arms during the Cold War. In short, amassing nuclear arms was now being increasingly seen as a policy not enhancing security but raising the common danger, a danger that must be diminished.

But at the same time there was another key development. Also visible now was a heightening groundswell of interest among the Eastern European nations to join NATO.

NATO had been created to provide a military force that could deter or defeat the Red Army, so it is easy to understand how NATO had long been a “four-letter word” in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. But with the end of the Cold War, we saw NATO as the best vehicle for folding into the European security organization the new republics of the former Soviet Union and the former members of the Warsaw Pact. To achieve this historic broadening of cooperative security we would have to overcome these former antagonists’ traditional view of NATO as their foe. From my experiences as a soldier in the Army of Occupation working with Japanese immediately after World War II through my later interactions as a senior defense official interacting with Russians, Chinese, and other former and present foes, I knew that views could change to allow substantial cooperation.

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