On the day the partial test ban treaty was signed in Moscow, a two-way exchange in sound and vision was arranged between London and Moscow on the initiative of the BBC. There was an unfortunate interruption when Mr Boris Belitsky, the well-known Moscow Radio commentator, was in the midst of the disclosure that the Soviet Government would be willing to accept the presence of western representatives with their forces in East Germany in return for a similar gesture by the West in respect of their forces in West Germany. This proposal had not figured among those Mr Khrushchev had earlier outlined as safeguards against a surprise attack by either side.
Conditioned by the cold war, many automatically interpreted the interruption as a deliberate act of censorship. Now it is possible to say with certainty that it was not so because the same proposal about stationing representatives of each side with the forces of the other in the two parts of Germany is being put across almost daily by Berlin Radio, mouthpiece of the Ulbricht regime in East Germany. I heard the first Berlin Radio broadcast last weekend, by sheer accident.
Sensational
One of the interviewers on the British side in that friendly encounter with Soviet commentators was the defence correspondent of The Times. He showed what was truly an enormous interest in Mr Boris Belitsky’s disclosure and attached great significance to it. In spite of the novelty of the proposal it was not quite clear why he was so excited about it – his face was truly flushed. Now we know. He had just returned from America armed with the sensational information that on the strength of fresh intelligence the Pentagon had sharply revised its estimates of Russia’s overall military strength which suggested that even in terms of conventional forces she was not the monster that she had been believed to be all these years. Mr Boris Belitsky’s disclosure about the lengths to which Russia was willing to go to ease tension in Central Europe fitted in well in the new framework.
Usually most western estimates placed the strength of the Red Army at about two and a half million men organised into 175 divisions. In its latest publication the Institute of Strategic Studies in London estimated the strength of the Red Army at 160 divisions, the figure of men being the same at two and half million. The Times correspondent has now quoted experts in the Pentagon who believe that there might be only two million men in the Red Army and that allowing for even a rudimentary system of support, and a small number of lines of communication troops, this figure was unlikely to support more than about 60 fully manned active line divisions.
If this new assessment comes to be accepted, the whole political and military outlook must undergo a radical change. Personally since the publication of this report I have been constantly reminded of the discussions I had with the members, some of them Russian émigrés, of the Institute of Soviet Studies in Munich in November 1960. The proposed reductions in the Soviet forces by one-third from 3.6 million to 2.4 million were engaging the attention of Sovietologists at that time. The men in Munich reeled off a lot of figures to show that the reduction was theoretical in that the low birth rate during the war and the immediate post-war years would itself reduce the strength of the Soviet forces to the quoted figure and no demobilisation was in fact necessary. The argument was not easy to controvert.
Submarines
In spite of the large Soviet fleet of submarines – the Institute of Strategic Studies estimates the number of Soviet conventional and nuclear submarines at 495 and 12 respectively, against 260 and 32 of the western alliance – the West has taken its naval superiority for granted. To quote the Institute’s figures once again, the western alliance possesses 76 battleships and carriers against none for the Soviet bloc, 60 cruisers against 30 on the other side and 1,107 escort vessels against 489.
Similarly there has been little doubt about the West’s superiority in the air. It, for instance, possesses, according to the Institute of Strategic Studies, 630 long-range bombers (over 5,000 mile range) against 200 of the Soviet bloc and 1,630 medium range bombers (over 2,000 miles) against 1,400 of the Communist countries. The figure for intercontinental and medium range ballistic missiles are irrelevant in this assessment of the conventional strength of the two sides. All the same the Institute puts them at between 450 and 500 and 250 respectively for the western alliance and 750 for the Soviet Union.
In military terms the whole theory of Soviet expansionism in Europe has rested on the Red Army’s mythical overwhelming preponderance which the West believed it had no reasonable chance to match. The myth suited Russia because it needed time first to produce the nuclear weapons and then to narrow the gap with America sufficiently to put the temptation of first strike out of the way of the hot-heads in the Pentagon. This is not to imply by any means that there was even a distant possibility of a first strike by America. It is only to note that the Soviet leadership feared such a possibility and was naturally anxious to meet it. The myth on the other hand helped the western intelligence organisations to build up pressure on behalf of their military establishments to get the desired appropriations. In the West, particularly America, soaring military budgets have never been questioned by the legislatures. Last year the Congress requested the administration to spend more than the amount it asked for.
In spite of the absence of evidence, it would appear to be a reasonable inference that it was some time ago that the Americans revised their estimates of the Soviet strength. Their insistence that it was possible to meet a conventional invasion in Europe, highly unlikely in any case, with conventional forces without the use even of tactical nuclear weapons could be the result of such a reassessment. The American Defence Secretary, Mr McNamara’s concept of graduated deterrence makes much better sense in the context of the new evaluation of Soviet strength than it does otherwise, and so does Washington’s dogged perseverance in search for a modus vivendi with Moscow.
If the Soviet aim is now seen to be what it has been for the past 15 years, which is containment and not expansion, it would be difficult to avoid revision of a number of policy formulations. The Western objections to greater emphasis on conventional forces, the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe and even disengagement lose a great deal of their force. According to The Times report, the prevalent European reaction is that the American estimate of Soviet strength has been tailored to fit the latest fashions in their strategy and the latest trends in their foreign policy. It remains to be seen how long cold war reflexes will continue to condition the thinking and behaviour of the European policy makers.
Berlin
The holding out and withdrawals of threats by the Soviet Prime Minister regarding Berlin and a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic and the construction of the Berlin Wall have been part of the Soviet plan to stabilise the status quo in Central Europe. One has not the vaguest idea how these problems will be solved, if at all. At the moment both the White House and the Kremlin appear to be prisoners of their past commitments.
On the sidelines, the new evaluation of Soviet strength throws some light on the development of the Sino-Soviet dispute. When the Russians sent the first sputnik into space Mr Mao Tse-tung was so excited that he coined a poetic phrase, “The east wind prevails over the west wind”. He was probably genuinely convinced that with Soviet progress cancelling what he called American nuclear blackmail of the Communist bloc, the Soviet Union with its superiority in conventional forces was free to stir up troubles wherever and whenever it chose. The Russians naturally could not oblige him either by following the strategy prescribed by him or by putting him wise on the facts of the situation.
The Times of India, 17 August 1963