30 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
expected to fight in the event of military conflict between the USSR
and the US. His temperament was ebullient and unrestrained, but his
reasons were very clinical. He felt nothing but horror when he pon-
dered the fact that, whatever happened in such a conflict, Poland
would inevitably attract a blitz of American nuclear missiles. As a
commander of high rank, he was privy to the Warsaw Pact’s strategic
assumptions. He knew and resented the fact that Poland could not
even affect the original decision to go to war. The USSR monopolized
all the big decisions. Kukliński soberly concluded that he could best
help his country by keeping the Americans informed about what he
learned about Soviet offensive plans. He reasoned that by enabling the
American leadership to anticipate the USSR’s actions, it could adopt
preventive measures which would avert the outbreak of war – and
Poland would be saved from nuclear holocaust.
The Soviet high command was divided about whether troops
could really advance through irradiated territory to any practical
advantage. According to Vitali Tsygichko, only a few hotheads thought
this to be at all realistic.^25 Nevertheless, the basic assumption in the
Warsaw Pact was that its land forces could move forward as many as
sixty kilometres a day. Apparently a plan existed for the first thirty
days – and a second one for the next thirty days.^26
Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO had to think the unthinkable in
anticipation of war. The West German commanders learned from
General Nigel Bagnall, commander-in-chief of the British Army of the
Rhine and commander of NATO’s Northern Army Group, about a
plan for the preventive destruction of a border town in West Germany
that was a communications centre. Chalupa, commander-in-chief of
Allied Forces Central Europe at the time, tackled Bagnall with a ques-
tion about how he would have felt if he was fighting on this basis in an
area between Newcastle and Carlisle.^27 The West Germans had an
understandable preference for saving all their country from annihila-
tion. Agreement was reached that there should be ‘forward defence
planning’. Supplies for NATO forces were warehoused close to fron-
tiers with Warsaw Pact states to give West Germany the assurance that
its allies did not regard it as an expendable asset.^28 The Americans and
West Europeans, except for the French, held firmly to NATO’s disposi-
tions. Of course, there were national oddities. The Dutch had a
tendency to expect war on five working days each week and allowed a
lot of their troops home at weekends. The rest of NATO prayed that
the Warsaw Pact was not keeping an eye on the calendar.^29