Cold War more dangerous than Ukraine today: Nuclear threat in 1968

Excerpt from autobiography Hermann Simon, Many Worlds, One Life - A Remarkable Journey from Farmhouse to the Global Stage, New York: Springer Nature 2021?

The banality of the bomb

At the height of the Cold War in the late 1960s, I served in the German Air Force with Fighter-Bomber Wing 33. Within the context of “nuclear sharing,” the 33rd had a sensitive mission. Should the Cold War ever become hot, our jets would drop nuclear bombs on pre-defined targets behind the Iron Curtain. Each pilot was assigned two targets and he knew the respective route in detail. In some cases, the targets were so far away that the Starfighter’s range would not permit the pilot to return to base. In such situations, the pilot would drop his bombs, continue by flying back as far as possible, and then eject. This is one reason why survival training was an essential part of all Starfighter pilots’ basic training.

At that time, very few people knew that German fighter jets, flown by German pilots, would be carrying US atomic bombs. These special weapons were under the control of a US Air Force unit stationed right next to us on Buechel air base.

One of the greatest crises of the post World War II period occurred during my service in the 33rd bomber wing. In August 1968, Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia. This triggered numerous NATO alarms for us, and I was the officer in charge during one of them, a “quick train alarm.” Six Starfighters in the alarm zone already carried atomic weapons with pilots ready at the controls. When the sirens went off at 11:30 pm, it meant that we needed to equip all the remaining Starfighters with atomic weapons.

What did we think when we saw an actual atomic bomb up close? To be honest, we didn’t think anything special. The ethics and purpose of our duty, and how we fulfilled it, never crossed our minds as young men. But looking back, this dismissive thoughtlessness frightens me. The bombs rolled by us on trucks as if they were harmless kegs of beer. I immediately thought of the philosopher Hannah Ahrendt, who escaped the Nazis in 1941 and coined the concept “the banality of evil.”

And how do I view these events from today’s perspective? After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the breakup of the Soviet Union, someone found the attack plans of the Warsaw Pact in the defense ministry in Prague. Similar documents turned up in 2006 in a secret archive in Warsaw. As of 1969, the Warsaw Pact had a clear first-strike policy and felt that “the conflict should be comprised of massive nuclear strikes, almost from the start.” The logic behind the nuclear first-strike strategy derived from the Warsaw Pact’s belief in its conventional military superiority. The Soviets believed that they would quickly penetrate the western front, leaving the west with no other alternative than nuclear retaliation. But if nuclear war was thus unavoidable, then the best strategy for the Warsaw Pact would be to strike first.

As I read those words several years ago, I saw the role of our fighter bomber wing in a different light. Perhaps the military deterrence – of which our bomber wing was an integral part – helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a hot one or a nuclear one. At the same time, it seems like a miracle to me today that the decades-long confrontation between the heavily armed superpowers resolved itself without a single shot fired or a single atomic bomb falling from the sky.

?

?