as "Anh Ba." With the knowledge that Anh Ba is another name for Le Duan, comrade B, by extension, is Le Duan. From the events described in the text, this is certain and Tran Quyen, Souvenirs of Le Duan (Excerpts), confirms it. 50 This may be a reference to Hoang Van Hoan. For a contending view, one must consult A Drop in the Ocean (Memoirs of Revolution) (Beijing: NXB Tin Viet Nam, 1986).

51 See also Tran Quyen, Souvenirs of Le Duan (Excerpts).

52 Perhaps an allusion to the Soviet Union.

53 This type of warfare had existed in China as well. And elsewhere in the world of guerilla warfare.

54 This took place in June 1960. For more on Le Duan's position on this matter, see Tran Quyen, Souvenirs of Le Duan (Excerpts). After the Party Congress of the

Romanian Communist Party in June 1960, the Soviets organized an on-the-spot meeting with the leaders of the foreign delegations present, during which Khrushchev severely criticized the Chinese, especially Mao whom he denounced as a "dogmatist" for his views on the question of peaceful co-existence. See Adam B. Ulam, The Communists. The Story of Power and Lost Illusions 19481991 (New York: Macmillan, 1992), p. 211.

55 This seems to be a stab at Hoang Van Hoan and no doubt others.

56 This is probably a reference to the group of leaders listening to Le Duan's talk, and can be taken as an indication that the pro-Chinese comrades referred to above, were not part of the group listening. See also Tran Quyen, Souvenirs of Le Duan (Excerpts).

which occurred after Stalin's death, is connected with a reevaluation of the role of nuclear arms. While Stalin himself did not overlook the importance of nuclear weapons and made a tremendous effort to obtain them in the second half of the 1940s, he did not consider them to be an important strategic element due to their small number in the Soviet arsenal.' As a consequence, his so-called "permanent operating factors" (stability of the rear, morale of the army, quantity and quality of divisions, armament of the army and the organizational ability of army commanders), which were, in his view, to decide the next war (if not any war), remained the official dogma until his death. This rather simple concept ignored other factors. First and foremost, it did not take into account the element of surprise and the importance of taking the initiative.

Only after the dictator died was there room for discussion among Soviet strategists on the implications of nuclear weapons which, in the meantime, had become the cornerstone of the US massive retaliation doctrine. Nuclear weapons were gradually included in the plans of the Soviet army and its satellite countries. In the 1952 combat directives of the Soviet Army, for instance, nuclear weapons had still been almost entirely left out. When these directives were adopted by ČSLA in 1954 and translated word for word, a special supplement on the effects of nuclear weapons had to be quickly created and added.'

The extent to which the Czechoslovak leadership was informed of Soviet operational plans remains an open question. In any case, its members were in no way deterred by the prospect of massive retaliation by the West. Alexej Čepička, the Czechoslovak Minister of National Defense and later one of the few "victims" of Czechoslovak deStalinization, viewed nuclear weapons like any others, only having greater destructive powers. In 1954, he stated that "nuclear weapons alone will not be the deciding factor in achieving victory. Although the use of atomic weapons will strongly affect the way in which battles and operations are conducted as well as life in the depths of combat, the significance of all types of armies [...] remains valid. On the contrary, their importance is gaining significance."8

Given the nuclear inferiority of the East, such casual thinking about the importance of nuclear weapons was tantamount to making a virtue out of necessity. However, it should be noted, that although Western leaders frequently stressed the radical difference between nuclear and conventional weapons, military planners in both the East and West did their job in preparing for the same scenarioa massive conflict that included the use of all means at their disposal.

There were, however, fundamental differences in the understanding of nuclear conflict and its potential consequences. In the thinking of the Czechoslovak and probably the Soviet military leadership of the time, nuclear weapons would determine the pace of war (forcing a more offensive strategy), but not its essential character. Since nuclear weapons considerably shortened the stages of war, according to the prevailing logic, it became necessary to

try to gain the decisive initiative with a powerful surprise strike against enemy forces. Contrary to the US doctrine of massive retaliation, the Soviet bloc's response would have made use not only of nuclear weapons but, in view of Soviet conventional superiority, also of conventional weapons. Massive retaliation did not make planning beyond it irrelevant. Contrary to many Western thinkers, 10 Soviet strategists assumed that a massive strike would only create the conditions for winning the war by the classic method of seizing enemy territory.

The idea that in the nuclear era offense is the best defense quickly found its way into Czechoslovak plans for building and training the country's armed forces. From 1954-55 on, the "use of offensive operations [...] with the use of nuclear and chemical weapons" became one of the main training principles, and the ČSLA prepared itself almost exclusively for offensive operations.10 Defensive operations were now supposed to change quickly to surprise counter-offensive operations at any price."1 Not surprisingly, from 1955 on, military mapping now included southeastern Germany all the way to the Franco-German border, on a scale of 1:100,000-a scale that was considered adequate for this kind of operation.

It should be noted that the Czechoslovak military staff proved reluctant to engage in the risky planning of operations involving the use of nuclear weapons on the first day of conflict. But complaints along these lines to the highest representatives of the Ministry of National Defense were irrelevant since in the 1950s Czechoslovakia neither had access to nuclear weapons nor nuclear weapons placed on its territory.12

Deep into enemy territory

The introduction of nuclear weapons into East bloc military plans and the resulting emphasis on achieving an element of surprise had a tremendous effect on the role of ground operations. Now the main task of ground forces was to quickly penetrate enemy territory and to destroy the enemy's nuclear and conventional forces on his soil. Thus the idea of advancing towards Lyons by the 9th day of the conflict, as outlined in the 1964 plan, did not develop overnight. Until the late 1950s, exercises of ČSLA offensive operations ended around the 10th day, fighting no further west than the Nuremberg-Ingolstadt line.13 These exercise designs show that the so-called Prague-Saarland line (Prague-Nuremberg-Saarbrücken) was clearly preferred to the Alpine line Brno-Vienna-Munich-Basel.14

With the aim of enhancing the mobility of the army, the Czechoslovak military staff, upon orders from the Soviet military headquarters, began a relocation of military forces in 1958, which concentrated the maximum number of highly mobile tank divisions in the western part of the country.15 As a result of the 1958-62 Berlin Crisis, the military institutionalization of the Warsaw Pact led to the creation of individual fronts. Within this new framework, the ČSLA was responsible for one entire front with its own command and tasks as set forth by the Soviet military headquarters.16

Even before these organizational changes were officially implemented, they had been applied in military exercises, during which the newly created fronts were to be synchronized. While the plans of the exercises and the tasks set for the participants cannot be considered an exact reflection of operational planning, they show that the time periods by which certain lines on the western battlefield were to be reached had gradually been reduced and the depth reached by Czechoslovak troops had been enlarged. In one of the first front exercises in 1960, the ČSLA was supposed to operate on the Stuttgart-Dachau line by the 4th day of conflict. The operational front exercise of March 1961 went even further in assuming that the Dijon-Lyon line would be reached on the 6th-7th day of the conflict. During the operational front exercise in September 1961, the Czechoslovak front practiced supporting an offensive by Soviet and East German forces. The line Bonn-MetzStrasbourg was to be reached on the 7th and 8th day. An exercise conducted in December 1961 gave the Czechoslovak front the task of reaching the BesanconBelfort line on the 7th day of operations.17 From the early 1960s onward, massive war games with similar designs took place in Legnica, Poland, in the presence of the commands of the individual fronts. The assumed schedule and territory covered in these exercises already reflected the vision of the 1964 plan.

In Warsaw Pact plans, Czechoslovakia did not play the main strategic role in the Central European battlefield-that fell to the Warsaw-Berlin axis. For instance, during the joint front exercise VÍTR (Wind), the Czechoslovak front, besides taking Nancy (France), was "to be prepared to secure the left wing of the Eastern forces [the Warsaw Pact-P.L.] against the neutral state [Austria-P.L.] in case its neutrality was broken."18

With a greater number of nuclear weapons in their possession by the late 1950s, the Soviets began to appreciate nuclear weapons not merely as "normal" weapons. For Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, nuclear weapons were both a tool to exert political pressure and a measure of military deterrent. To him, further demilitarization of the Cold War could be achieved through cuts in ground forces. 19 Nuclear weapons in turn acquired an even more prominent role in planning for massive retaliation.20 The Czechoslovak military leadership hinted at this as follows: "For the countries of the Warsaw Treaty and specifically of ČSSR, it is important not to allow the enemy to make a joint attack and not to allow him to gain advantageous conditions or the development of ground force operations, and thus gain strategic dominance. Basically, this means that our means for an atomic strike must be in such a state of military readiness that they would be able to deal with the task of carrying out a nuclear counter-strike with a time lag of only seconds or tenths of seconds."21

Flexible response à la Warsaw Pact

The US move from massive retaliation to flexible response during the early 1960s did not go unnoticed by the Warsaw Pact. According to its 1964 training directives, the ČSLA was supposed to carry out training for the early stages of war not only with the use of nuclear weapons but, for the first time since mid-1950s, also without them. At a major joint exercise of the Warsaw Pact in the summer of 1964, the early phase of war was envisaged without nuclear weapons.22

However, flexible response as conceived by the Warsaw Pact was not a mere mirror image of the Western version. The US attempt to enhance the credibility of its deterrent by acquiring the capacity to limit conflict to a manageable level by introducing "thresholds" and "pauses" resulted from an agreement between political leaders and the military, who assumed to know how to prevent war from escalating into a nuclear nightmare. In the East, by contrast, the concept was based only on a military and perhaps more realistic-assessment that a conflict was, sooner or later, going to expand into a global nuclear war. In the words of the ČSSR Minister of National Defense Bohumír Lomský:

All of these speculative theories of Western strategists about limiting the use of nuclear arms and about the spiral effect of the increase of their power have one goal: in any given situation to stay in the advantageous position for the best timing of a massive nuclear strike in order to start a global nuclear war. We reject these false speculative theories, and every use of nuclear arms by an aggressor will be answered with a massive nuclear offensive using all the means of the Warsaw Treaty countries, on the whole depth and aiming at all targets of the enemy coalition. We have no intention to be the first to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Although we do not believe in the truthfulness and the reality of these Western theories, we cannot disregard the fact that the imperialists could try to start a war without the immediate use of nuclear arms... That is why we must also be prepared for this possibility.23

In line with this crude thinking, the Czechoslovak, and most probably the Soviet military conceived of only one threshold, i.e. that between conventional and nuclear war. The Warsaw Pact hence stood somewhere between massive retaliation and flexible response.

According to some contemporary accounts, it was in this period that the term "preemptive nuclear strike" appeared in Warsaw Pact deliberations. A massive nuclear strike was supposed to be used only if three sources had confirmed that the enemy was about to employ nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, all exercises carried out in the following years made it clear that the use of nuclear weapons was expected no later than the third day of operations. Exercises that counted on the use of nuclear arms from the very beginning of the fighting were common.24

The 1964 Czechoslovak war plan is therefore especially important. It shows how little the East-bloc planners believed in the relevance of Western-style flexible response. Not only did the plan not consider the possibility of a non-nuclear war in Europe, but it assumed that the war would start with a massive nuclear strike by the West.

The Czechoslovak war plan of 1964

Considering the high degree of secrecy surrounding these documents, only a few people in the 1960s had direct knowledge of the 1964 Czechoslovak war plan. However, several sporadic accounts make at least some conclusions possible. The plan was the first to have been drawn up by the ČSLA in the aftermath of the 1958-62 Berlin Crisis. According to the late Václav Vitanovský, then ČSLA Chief of Operations, the plan came about as a result of directives from Moscow.25 These directives were then worked into operational plans by the individual armies. As Vitanovský explained, "When we had finished, we took it back to Moscow, where they looked it over, endorsed it, and said yes, we agree. Or they changed it. Changes were made right there on the spot.' .”26 The orders for the Czechoslovak Front stated that the valleys in the Vosges mountains were to be reached by the end of the operation. Undoubtedly, this was meant to prepare the way for troops of the second echelon made up of Soviet forces.

The 1964 plan remained valid until at least 1968 and probably for quite some time after.27 As early as the mid1960s, however, a number of revisions were made. According to contemporary accounts, the Soviet leadership feared that the Czechoslovak Front would not be capable of fulfilling its tasks and, accordingly, reduced the territory assigned to the ČSLA. To support the objectives of the 1964 plan, Moscow tried to impose the stationing of a number of Soviet divisions on Czechoslovak territory in 1965-66. In December 1965, the Soviets forced the Czechoslovak government to sign an agreement on the storage of nuclear warheads on Czechoslovak soil. Implementation of both measures only became feasible after the Soviet invasion in 1968.28

DOCUMENT

Plan of Actions of the Czechoslovak People's Army for War Period

"Approved"

Single Copy

Supreme Commander

of the Armed Forces of the USSR

Antonín Novotný 1964

1. Conclusions from the assessment of the enemy The enemy could use up to 12 general military units in the Central European military theater for advancing in the area of the Czechoslovak Front from D[ay] 1 to D[ay] 7-8.

-The 2nd Army Corps of the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] including: 4th and 10th mechanized divisions, 12th tank division, 1st airborne division and 1st mountain division, -the 7th Army Corps of the USA including: the 24th mechanized division and 4th armored tank division;

-the 1st Army of France including: 3rd mechanized division, the 1st and 7th tank divisions, and up to two newly deployed units, including 6 launchers of tactical missiles, up to 130 theater launchers and artillery, and up to 2800 tanks. Operations of the ground troops could be supported by part of the 40th Air Force, with up to 900 aircraft, including 250 bombers and up to 40 airborne missile launchers.

Judging by the composition of the group of NATO troops and our assessment of the exercises undertaken by the NATO command, one could anticipate the design of the enemy's actions with the following goals.

To disorganize the leadership of the state and to undermine mobilization of armed forces by surprise nuclear strikes against the main political and economic centers of the country.

To critically change the correlation of forces in its own favor by strikes against the troops, airfields and communication centers.

To destroy the border troops of the Czechoslovak People's Army in border battles, and to destroy the main group of our troops in the Western and Central Czech Lands by building upon the initial attack.

To disrupt the arrival of strategic reserves in the regions of Krkonoše, Jeseníky, and Moravská Brána by nuclear strikes against targets deep in our territory and by sending airborne assault troops; to create conditions for a successful attainment of the goals of the operation.

Judging by the enemy's approximate operative design, the combat actions of both sides in the initial period of the war will have a character of forward contact battles.

The operative group of the enemy in the southern part of the FRG will force the NATO command to gradually engage a number of their units in the battle, which will create an opportunity for the Czechoslovak Front to defeat NATO forces unit by unit. At the same time, that would require building a powerful first echelon in the operative structure of the Front; and to achieve success it would require building up reserves that would be capable of mobilizing very quickly and move into the area of military action in a very short time.