Berlin полностью

The Western powers, including the United States, had little inclination to fight over Berlin. No doubt it was a great place from which to spy on the East, but it was not, in the eyes of the Pentagon, of supreme strategic importance to the U.S. defense posture. Nor did the Pentagon have any illusions about being able to defend West Berlin if the Soviets decided to rub it out. On the other hand, the city had taken on great meaning as a political symbol, as a living monument to the West’s determination not to give up any more ground to the Communists. Moreover, Washington was under heavy pressure from Bonn to hold the door open in Berlin so that the West Germans would not be shut out of the former German capital. As President Eisenhower grudgingly admitted, Berlin constituted another “instance in which our political posture requires us to assume military postures that are wholly illogical.” He might have added the word “ironical,” for it would certainly have been perversely ironic if Washington had gone to war against a former ally to “save” a city that, just a few years before, both contenders had been trying to destroy.

Yet it was beginning to look as if Berlin might indeed be the cause of a new war. In his misguided assumption that Washington would abandon Berlin if Russia stepped up the pressure, Khrushchev harangued Ambassador W. Averell Harriman in June 1959:

We are determined to liquidate your rights in West Berlin. What good does it do for you to have eleven thousand troops in Berlin? If it came to war, we would swallow them in one gulp. . . . You can start a war if you like, but remember, it will be you who are starting it, not we. . . . West Germany knows that we could destroy it in ten minutes. . . . If you start a war, we may die but the rockets will fly automatically.

As a way of removing Germany and Berlin as potential Cold War flash points, Khrushchev proposed to Harriman the withdrawal of all foreign troops from German soil and the reunification of that country as a demilitarized, neutral state. To illustrate his point, the Soviet leader, who was famous for his earthy humor, passed along a “current joke in Russia,” which said “that if you look at Adenauer naked from behind, he shows Germany divided, but if you look at him from the front, he demonstrates that Germany cannot stand.”

Harriman relayed this cheerful conversation to Eisenhower, who, for all his doubts about Berlin’s strategic worth, was not about to back down there. As if to convince himself that Berlin really was worth a fight, he envisaged it as the top of a slippery political slope down which the West would surely slide if it abandoned that city, even at the threat of nuclear war. “I’d rather be atomized than communized,” he said. The Pentagon, meanwhile, readied a plan of action in case the Russians followed through on their threat to allow the East Germans to curtail Western access in and out of West Berlin. First, America would send a platoon-sized armed convoy across the GDR to Berlin (shades of Clay’s plan in 1948); if the East Germans (or Soviets) fired upon this outfit, a division-sized convoy would follow. Should even this force run into trouble, an all-out attack would result in which, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Adenauer, “we obviously would not forego the use of nuclear weapons.”

In fact, Pentagon strategy at this juncture called for the U.S. to use its nukes first, to get in its best licks before the Russian rockets flew. The plan also envisaged extensive use of tactical atomic weapons against enemy targets in Germany. This would undoubtedly cause some “collateral damage.” Dulles admitted to the German chancellor that NATO estimates (based on earlier war games) projected 1.7 million Germans killed and another 3.5 million incapacitated. This grim scenario reduced considerably the chancellor’s enthusiasm for a fight to save Berlin, a city which he had never liked anyway. “For God’s sake, not for Berlin!” he cried.