The theatre

The instrument has been reading strategic policy as though it could be read alone, and it cannot. NATO's answer to Soviet conventional superiority was to promise nuclear use early, and every strategic argument of the Cold War follows from that promise: flexible response only deterred if theatre use led somewhere, which is what coupling meant; the Euromissile crisis of 1979 to 1983 was a four-year argument about whether it did; and the reason Able Archer 83 frightened people, in the study this atlas already carries, is that a theatre exercise looked like the beginning of a general war. The theatre is where the strategic forces were supposed to become relevant, and where the doctrine is least able to say what happens next.

It is also where the weapons stop being abstract. A strategic warhead is aimed at a foreign city by a machine in a silo. A theatre warhead is a shell fired by a battery in a wood in Hesse, or a mine buried in the North German Plain by engineers who expect to be overrun, and the ground it destroys is the ground it is defending.

1. Massive retaliation, and the arithmetic that killed it. MC 14/2 of 1957 made general nuclear response NATO's doctrine. Two years earlier the alliance had already run the experiment: Exercise Carte Blanche, June 1955, simulated 335 nuclear weapons on German soil and produced an estimate of about 1.7 million dead and 3.5 million injured, before Soviet weapons were counted at all. It leaked to the German press and did more damage to the doctrine than any argument. The defence of Germany, on the record, meant the destruction of Germany.
2. Flexible response. MC 14/3 of 1967 replaced the tripwire with a ladder nobody could describe: direct defence, deliberate escalation, general nuclear response. The interesting part is the middle rung, which was never specified because specifying it would have shown that it had no floor.
3. The weapons themselves, and their strangeness. Nuclear artillery at 155 and 203 mm; Honest John, Corporal, Lance, Pershing; the Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle with a sub-kiloton warhead and a range shorter than its own lethal radius at the high setting. Atomic demolition munitions: the American SADM, a W54 in a rucksack for a two-man team, and the British Blue Peacock, a ten-kiloton buried mine for the North German Plain, cancelled in 1958, whose file, released to the National Archives in 2004, includes the proposal to keep the electronics warm through a German winter with live chickens sealed inside the casing. The Atomic Weapons Establishment confirmed it was not a joke. It is the perfect object for this atlas: a weapon designed to be left behind on the ground you are defending, kept alive by poultry.
4. The neutron bomb and the crisis of coupling. Built as a lab at #/lab/neutron. The enhanced-radiation W79 of 1977 and the political convulsion that followed; then Schmidt's 1977 speech, the double-track decision of December 1979, the SS-20s, the Pershing IIs and the cruise missiles at Greenham Common and Comiso from November 1983, arriving in the same weeks as Able Archer.
5. The plan from the other side. Seven Days to the River Rhine, the Warsaw Pact exercise plan of 1979 declassified by Poland in 2005. It assumes NATO strikes first with nuclear weapons, and answers with strikes on West Germany, Denmark, the Low Countries and northern Italy, with named cities. It is the rarest thing in this whole field: a theatre nuclear plan with a target list on the record.

The lab draws the rings to scale and the arithmetic does not support the argument as it was popularly made, though it does support a narrower one. A one-kiloton enhanced-radiation warhead incapacitates a tank crew out to about 600 metres and wrecks ordinary houses out to 710: it does not spare the town it is used over. What it does is reach those crews with a sixth of the wrecked ground a fission weapon would need, because the fission weapon would have to be about sixteen kilotons to match the radiation radius, and would then flatten everything out to 1.8 km. So the honest statement of the doctrine is not that the weapon is clean but that it is small for the military effect, and it was that smallness, not any cleanliness, that made it seem usable. The lab says so on the readout, and adds what it does not model: the neutron activation of the ground and of the armour, which made the weapon dirty exactly where it was used.

In the order I would build them.

• Seven Days to the River Rhine, 1979. Built. The study runs the plan in the plan's own order. It opens on its premise, which is that NATO has already decided to use nuclear weapons first, on the Vistula; sixteen weapons leave England and Poland is struck at H+73. Twenty minutes after the last of them the counter-offensive is released, thirty-six warheads of the hundred and sixty in the theatre, the missiles on the deep targets and the strike aviation low against the near ones, and the twelve cities the release names are struck, Vienna among them, in a country that was neutral by treaty and by its own constitutional law. The last event says what the plan does not: that it has nothing to say about what the strategic forces do next, and that this is the point of it. The primary document is public in Poland and is not transcribed here; the western cities are the ones named in the reporting of the release, the Polish half is a premise standing in for a list nobody has published, and every readout says which is which.
• Carte Blanche, 1955. Built at #/study/carte-blanche. 335 weapons fall over an hour of study time: two on each of forty airfields of 1955, west and east, and the remaining 255 on the most populous cells of the 1951 grid, largest first. The exercise's own ground zeros are not published and every mark says so in the withheld tier. The readout sets the engine's figure against the exercise's own estimate of 1.7 million West German dead, which counted immediate effects only, in West Germany only, and did not count East Germany at all. The finding is the one the exercise produced and the German press printed that autumn: the defence of Germany meant the destruction of Germany.
• The demolition belt. Built at #/study/demolition-belt. Fifteen emplacements, 87 kilotons, from the Fulda Gap and the Hof Corridor across the North German Plain to the Gorizia and Ljubljana gaps: the defiles an armoured advance has to use, since the barrier plans themselves are not published. The belt is emplaced six hours before the war and fires from east to west as the advance arrives, every weapon a surface burst because the weapon exists to throw the ground, and every plume running north-east on the prevailing wind across the country the barrier defends. Blue Peacock is in the omissions, chickens and all. The study's last line is that the obstacle is the fallout, and it does not distinguish between the army it stops and the country it is in.
• A Tornado strike package, 1985. Built at #/study/tornado. Seven squadrons at Brüggen and Laarbruch, the WE.177 at 200 kt, two aircraft to each of fourteen Warsaw Pact airfields and Oder and Elbe crossings, transiting at height and going down to two hundred feet on terrain-following radar for the run in: the V-force profile of 1963 flown by an aircraft designed for it. The finding is the attrition. About two fifths of the weapons do not arrive, RAF Germany's own estimates are not published, and the study's last line is that the survivors turn for stations that have themselves been struck, to be turned round and sent again. That is what sub-strategic meant.

Most of it already exists. The strike machinery, the flight profiles built for the V-force, the population grids for 1955, 1979 and 1985, and the standoff and low-level work all carry over. What is missing:

• Theatre orders of battle: NATO and Warsaw Pact nuclear delivery units by corps sector, which are documented in the Nuclear Notebook's historical series and in the Databook.
• Small yields: the models are built around kilotons to megatons and want checking below one kiloton, where the Davy Crockett and SADM live.
• A ladder: some way to show a scenario crossing from theatre to general war, which is the whole point and is a study structure this atlas has not yet needed.

That the theatre was never a separate compartment; it was the mechanism by which a European war became a global one, and everyone involved knew it. The documents do not describe a firebreak. They describe a slope.